Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Mount Maunganui landslide report couldn't be more damning

Author: Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026, 10:28am

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I'm astonished, can I say, that Marty Grenfell, the boss of Tauranga City Council, thinks no one has to quit over the landslide and the damning report. And frankly, that there are not outright calls for him to quit from the mayor and the local MP.

That report, I don't know if it could have been more damning, because it told us Tauranga City Council was warned multiple times that a landslide might happen in exactly the spot where a landslide happened, as early as 1999 and as most recently as only six or seven months before the landslide.

The most recent warning said that because this might happen, the council should put in place a warning system where if somebody saw something untoward, they could then call in and a series of things would kick into motion that would lead to the evacuation of people to save their lives.

On the day of the landslide, someone saw something untoward and they called it in and nothing happened because there was no system. There was no clear direction on who to call and what to do and whether to evacuate people.

Now, Marty Grenfell's strategy is to blame the person who received the report and the manager who saw it for not passing it on to someone who could then create that system, that warning system. And look, that's fair. We've all worked in organisations where that kind of thing happens, right?

But we also know those organisations only exist like that because the boss thinks it's okay that the organisation is a shambles like that. Because the boss thinks it's okay to spend money on consultants to prepare reports that then just get filed away and not acted on.

Marty Grenfell has been the boss of that organisation in that state of shambles for about eight years. That is more than enough time to tidy it up and he hasn't. So it is ultimately his fault as the boss that the system was that untidy and that people died because of a system failure.

Now, he needs to quit. Either he needs to say that the person who got the report and didn't pass it on needs to quit because they didn't know who to pass it on to, or he needs to quit because he oversaw a system where they didn't know who to pass it on to.

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