For 71 days, protesters have been locked in a battle with contractors to save 26 native trees in the Auckland suburb of Avondale.

The fight to save 26 100-year-old native trees – what remains of an original 46 – came to a head this morning when more than 200 people showed up to prevent diggers from entering the Canal Road site in the Auckland suburb of Avondale. Police, security and contractors were met with vocal opposition, while protesters dismantled fences and linked arms across the site to prevent entry.

After blanket tree protection in urban areas was removed from the Resource Management Act in 2012 (unless councils specifically identified “notable” trees for protection in a plan), the natives in the cluster were protected only by an informal arrangement with the land’s former owners, the Burgess family (who planted the original plot of native trees), and the current owners, the Raymond family. According to locals, the Raymonds’ children are cutting down the trees as part of the condition of sale to a developer. However, they offered the property to the Auckland Council for purchase nine years ago and again only a year ago.

Activist Steve Abel called the situation a “failure of political leadership”.

“Right now the immediate solution to Canal Road is that mayor Phil Goff and the council need to acquire this site and turn it into a public reserve,” he told The Spinoff.

“[Goff] hasn’t responded to my correspondence with him, hasn’t been to the site. I don’t know if any single city counsellor has been to the site in the last 71 days. Which is very disappointing.”

Abel was involved in a frightening incident in July, when a contractor felled a rewarewa tree that crashed into the puriri he was occupying. That day Abel and four others were arrested and charged with wilful trespass, and another, Mark Lockhard, was arrested in late August. The six appeared in court last week.

The occupation began on July 8, when local man William Lee stood in front of the trucks that were starting to cut down the trees on the property. Today about 10 people are occupying the canopy, using a network of ropes and pulleys to ensure someone can remain up there around the clock. Four people have chained themselves onto felled trees, and another three have locked themselves to two half-tonne barrels blocking the entrance, he said.

“Right now we have someone locked onto the digger on Wairau Ave, so the road is blocked and the digger can’t move,” Abel said. “People are gathered in large numbers at different parts of the site to stop contractors from getting on. There are arborists occupying the canopies of these beautiful big native trees. So we’re currently holding the line thanks to these members of the public. If it’s wasn’t for them it would have been hard for us to stop them from getting on.”

He described the occupation as “intense”.

“People are constantly anxious that the chainsaws are about to arrive. But it’s wonderful to see the huge community turn out; Aucklanders are sick of seeing beautiful, big trees cut down.”

At the beginning of September, Ngāti Whātua ki Kaipara kaumatua Rihari Nahi placed an aukati rāhui on the site, preventing anyone who intended to harm the trees from entering. Nahi, who works as a guide and cultural adviser to Auckland Council’s parks and recreation services, told The Spinoff he doesn’t always support his employer’s actions.

“I’ve been exposing our young people to the environment, to the bush and the rivers here in Tāmaki Makaurau for about 30 years.

“The 2012 legislation that was lifted that protected the trees has contributed to the devastation of the mauri of the rākau.”

He says the council’s failure to act in Avondale and in the Dome Valley in Kaipara, where mana whenua have been fighting to prevent a waste management site that could affect the area’s waterways, are linked.

“Everything that happens in the environment impacts the people. I support the whānau here in trying to preserve and protect native trees in line with mana whenua iwi environmental plans. So I came at 6am on September 6 as a representative of tribal Ngāti Whātua to place an aukati rāhui to prevent anyone from harming the trees.”

Abel said that there are solutions out there, council just needs to come to the table.

“The solution can be found in a combination of a private developer who’s willing to save the trees, and potentially the council and potentially Kāinga Ora could acquire the site. And those are all solutions that could see it become a public reserve that would see these trees protected for ever, as they should have already been. It is a terrible blight on the Auckland Council that they refused an opportunity to purchase this site not only nine years ago but again last year,” he said.

“Auckland city, these are your people! You need to step up and protect these trees.”

Auckland mayor Phil Goff was unavailable for comment, however a statement from John Duguid, Auckland council’s general manager of Plans and Places, said: “A large number of individual trees and groups of trees are protected under the Auckland Unitary Plan, however, changes made to the Resource Management Act by the Government in 2012/13 prevent the council from protecting a much larger number of trees through ‘blanket’ tree protection.

“Prior to 2013, ‘blanket’ tree protection was used by many councils in New Zealand (including Auckland Council) to protect most trees above a certain height or girth (eg a number of the trees at 52-58 Canal Road, Avondale) within their city or district. Recognising the limited ability the council has to protect trees on private property, a number of initiatives are in train to retain and enhance trees throughout the city.”

A spokesperson’s for the mayor’s office noted that the council is not in a financial position to be able to purchase the land at Canal Road. They said Goff has written to the environment minister “a number of times” about the need to strengthen tree protections in the RMA, and quoted a Stuff article where the mayor stated: “There are groups of trees like this all over our city that have no protection. We need to reverse the amendments [made] in 2012 and the best way to protect these trees is to get change in the legislation to get group protection.”

This story was updated at 2.25pm to include comments from John Duguid and the mayor’s office.

New research into online crowdfunding for healthcare reveals some worrying trends around which campaigns are deemed ‘worthy’ – and poses wider questions about who we want to be as a nation.

“Charity is a sign of the failure of the state.”

The above statement from Chlöe Swarbrick on Breakfast will be controversial for some – perhaps especially for those who hold “generosity” close to their hearts as an important Kiwi value. Indeed, we are apparently the third-most-generous country in the world – and seem to love to talk about it.

Online crowdfunding platforms are an increasingly common channel for that famous Kiwi generosity. Yet the way these platforms approach need is hyper-individualised, allowing private citizens to advertise their struggles, and other private citizens to view them and decide whether to respond.

Each year, Stuff releases a news story about the ever-growing totals of these crowdfunding donations. But looking at the patterns, in terms of who is fundraising for what, you can diagnose a variety of wider social and systemic issues. Globally, higher rates of crowdfunding are correlated with weaker healthcare and welfare systems… so what is it that is leading New Zealanders to have to turn to “the crowd” for help?

Patterns of successful versus unsuccessful campaigns also say a lot about wider social attitudes towards certain types of need, and certain types of people. What crowdfunding causes capture attention, and who is deemed deserving? Is this a “popularity contest” for survival, as the Guardian called it last year?

“Health” is the biggest category in donation-based crowdfunding globally. In New Zealand, this includes over 400 individuals and families who share their stories of illness, accident or disability online each year.

In 2020, I (a medical anthropologist at the University of Otago) received Marsden funding to research the social aspects of this phenomenon. My research team (Dr Ella Robinson, Laura Starling and Dr Penelope Bilton) are now completing the first phase, focusing on statistical data from 563 active campaigns over two major crowdfunding platforms: Givealittle and GoFundMe.

GoFundMe is the biggest platform internationally, with close to 80% of the global market share. They make a tidy profit by taking a percentage of all donations. But as New Zealand is not officially one of their “supported countries”, more people here use Givealittle, a New Zealand-specific and non-profit platform started in 2008.

Crowdfunding campaigns are often a shared effort; set up by friends, extended family members, parents or colleagues. It is relatively uncommon for people to set up their own campaigns (only 17% of people do this), although young adults are much more likely to do so than other groups.

The recipients of the funding vary. There are notably fewer campaigns for older adults (65+) despite this group having high health needs. The 4% of campaigns for infants make much more money, as a monthly average, than any other group.

Fifty-five percent of the campaigns were for women (including both cis and trans women) and 41% for men (including both cis and trans men), with 2% for people with different gender-diverse identities, and the remaining 2% not clear or for multiple people (eg couples).

Seventy-eight percent of the campaigns we studied were for citizens or residents of New Zealand, who were receiving healthcare in New Zealand at the time of the campaign. New Zealanders overseas made up approximately 11%, and overseas citizens based in New Zealand (or wanting to come here for treatment) around 6%.

Campaigns were created for a range of short-term and long-term health needs.

A huge number of these (244 campaigns in total, nearly 42% of all campaigns) related to cancer. But there are also a high number diseases of the nervous system (motor neuron disease, spinal muscular atrophy, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease and others), as well as strokes and heart conditions.

Better to fall off a ladder

The graph above shows that a whopping 71% of campaigns were for illness, compared to 11% that related to injury. This may reflect one major factor in New Zealand: the wide coverage of our ACC system, including both direct costs and indirect costs for people recovering from accidents.

In New Zealand, if you fall off a ladder and are laid up in bed for a couple of months, ACC will cover both treatment costs and weekly compensation (up to 80% of your normal wage). There is no equivalent tailored support system for someone who has suffered a stroke or been diagnosed with cancer, and is off work for a couple of months receiving treatment or in recovery. At best, they may qualify for the jobseeker benefit.

People with long-term disabilities (that made up another 6% of our dataset) can apply for a regular allowance that “helps to cover the extra costs of medical help, equipment, transport and running your home when you have an ongoing disability or illness”. However, it is income tested and the most you can get is $64.29 a week.

It makes sense, then, that people crowdfunding due to illness were much more likely to ask for help with general living costs, alongside specific medical costs, than those fundraising due to accidents or injuries.

A house with broken walls

Just under a quarter of all the New Zealand medical crowdfunding campaigns we studied asked for help with general living costs. Arguably, in many situations these other needs – housing, food, childcare – are just as important to wellbeing as the costs of medical treatment, especially in times of family stress.

Te whare tapa whā is a model for four dimensions of health, created by Sir Mason Durie in the early 80s. It’s widely used by health organisations and government ministries. But while New Zealand’s healthcare system does better than many countries with more privatised systems (in terms of covering or subsidising GP visits, pharmaceuticals and hospital care), Durie’s holistic model clearly hasn’t been taken seriously in the wider structures of state budgets, where poverty, housing, education, employment and mental health (all often mentioned in the campaigns stories we studied) are still enormous points of disparity.

Naming and shaming

Only 1.5% of health campaigns for individuals were related to mental health, despite high overall incidences of mental illness in this country. This low number can be seen in part as evidence of the stigma that lingers around mental illness. Especially since the same crowdfunding platforms host a huge number of fundraisers for mental health organisations, projects and startups. This reflects the historically patchy nature of state funding for mental health services, while also hinting at the social barrier for individual people putting their name and face to the issue as part of seeking help.

Many types of campaign risk having their outcomes skewed by social stigma. The campaigns asking for help with dental care, for example, which is not state funded for adults in New Zealand and is known to have socioeconomic links. In our study, these correlated with low average donations. Campaigns for weight loss surgery also risk stigma, as do many women’s health issues, such as breast reduction or endometriosis. Campaigns for gender-affirming surgeries, usually run by the recipient themselves, also had notably different trends, since lack of expertise and support in New Zealand meant people often had to fundraise the full cost of inpatient services, and/or go overseas for care.

It is noteworthy, too, that campaigns for people with illnesses received significantly more money (on average, per month) than those for people with disabilities. The campaign stories around illness were often able to emphasise the sudden or unexpected nature of the issue. Many could also tell hopeful stories of cure. Chronic or long-term issues are harder to “market”, since many remain stigmatised, and they also can’t give donors the same buzz in contributing to “fixing” them.

Selling your story, selling your self

Crowdfunding donations often come from a mix of family, friends, acquaintances and strangers, with the greatest success belonging to the rare few that go viral online. The reality is that the vast majority of medical crowdfunding campaigns do not meet their financial goals.

Ultimately success relies largely on who can tell a good story – one that fits with cultural values, and evokes the right emotions. This comes down in part to the type of health issue, as mentioned already. It also relies on a combination of education, digital/media literacy and time available to the campaign creator. It takes time to craft the initial story. In addition, having extra photos and regular updates is a predictor of financial success. But since both education and digital access are already known to be unevenly distributed, it is no wonder that crowdfunding turns out not to be the “gap-filler” it is sometimes believed to be, but instead reproduces existing inequalities.

Overseas data shows overwhelmingly that younger, prettier and whiter recipients make more money overall. Our study of New Zealand campaigns similarly showed a striking (and statistically significant) relationship. The campaigns for recipients who presented as white made more money on average, per month, than those for people who presented as Pasifika. Being white-passing also correlated with a higher number of donors.

Generous or fair?

The hardest thing about doing this research was reading through the dozens of campaigns that had nearly no donations. These were all worthy causes, and sometimes life-or-death ones. I am left wondering what will happen to them, but also asking questions about who is responsible for meeting these needs. And who should be?

This is an ideological question, as well as a political one, that extends out to all aspects of welfare; should it come down to the kindness of individuals with means? Or should it be formally embedded into the structures of the state? It is a question relevant to all of us as the election nears.

Generosity may be an important Kiwi value, but so is fairness. It may just be that time spent patting ourselves on the back for individual acts of charity is distracting from the bigger issues of an unfair system.