One of Aotearoa’s oldest Māori organisations is being forced to fundamentally reset its operations, with Te Arawa Lakes Trust warning that almost two decades of systemic underfunding have made its current responsibilities increasingly unsustainable.
Chair Wallace Haumaha says the Trust is confronting difficult decisions about its future, including the prospect of job losses, despite carrying significant responsibilities for some of the country’s most important freshwater taonga.
The situation raises a much bigger question about the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement itself: whether the Crown has adequately resourced the organisation expected to help protect and restore the lakes nearly 20 years after the settlement was enacted.
The financial pressure comes as the Te Arawa rohe continues to confront major environmental challenges, including invasive species such as gold clams, declining water quality, biosecurity threats and the long-term restoration of its freshwater ecosystems.
For Te Arawa, these are not simply environmental assets.
The lakes are bound to whakapapa, identity, mātauranga Māori, mahinga kai, recreation and the exercise of kaitiakitanga.
Nearly 20 years after settlement, funding is at the heart of the problem
The current Te Arawa Lakes Trust emerged from the settlement of Te Arawa’s historical claims relating to the Rotorua lakes.
The Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Act 2006 represented a significant milestone, recognising the relationship between Te Arawa and its lakes and establishing the modern framework within which the Trust operates.
But the organisation now says nearly two decades of systemic underfunding have left it unable to sustainably fulfil the responsibilities established through that settlement.
That is a significant warning.
Settlement legislation may recognise rights, relationships and responsibilities, but meaningful kaitiakitanga requires people, scientific expertise, monitoring, administration, environmental programmes and long-term investment.
If those responsibilities grow while the resources available to fulfil them do not, eventually something has to give.
Te Arawa Lakes Trust says it has now reached that point.
Jobs potentially on the line
The reset could have real consequences for the organisation and its workforce, with potential job cuts looming as the Trust examines how it operates.
That creates an uncomfortable contradiction.
At precisely the time environmental pressures across the rohe demand more attention, the organisation responsible for advocating for and exercising Te Arawa interests in the lakes could be forced to reduce its capacity.
The question will be whether restructuring merely allows the Trust to operate within its available resources or whether it ultimately means less capability to undertake the environmental, cultural and advocacy mahi expected of it.
For whānau employed by the organisation, there is also the immediate uncertainty surrounding jobs and livelihoods.
Gold clams highlight the scale of the challenge
The funding crisis is occurring against a backdrop of growing environmental threats.
The arrival and spread of invasive gold clams has become another biosecurity challenge for freshwater environments, demonstrating how quickly ecological risks can emerge and how expensive they can become to manage.
For Te Arawa, protecting the lakes requires much more than responding to a single pest.
It involves water quality, biodiversity, restoration, invasive species, climate impacts, recreational pressures and maintaining the cultural health of waterways central to generations of Te Arawa whānau.
Those responsibilities require sustained investment rather than short-term responses whenever another environmental crisis emerges.
A century of Te Arawa leadership
The financial crisis is particularly significant given the history of the organisation.
Te Arawa Lakes Trust traces its origins to the Arawa Māori Trust Board, established in 1924, making it the oldest Māori trust board in Aotearoa.
Its establishment followed the longstanding relationship and negotiations between Te Arawa and the Crown over the Rotorua lakes.
The organisation reached another milestone in 1995 when Dr Cathy Dewes became the first woman elected to the Trust Board.
Following ratification of the historical lakes claims and the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Act, the organisation transitioned into a private trust and became Te Arawa Lakes Trust in 2005–2006.
In 2024 it celebrated its centenary, marking 100 years of guardianship and advocacy associated with the 14 lakes within the Te Arawa rohe.
Now, just two years after celebrating that milestone, the organisation is being forced to reconsider what it can sustainably deliver.
Settlement responsibilities need settlement resources
The situation also raises broader questions about the durability of Treaty settlements.
Settlements are often described as creating foundations for a new relationship between iwi and the Crown.
But transferring or recognising responsibility without ensuring organisations have the long-term resources necessary to exercise that responsibility can create another form of inequity.
Environmental management has also become considerably more complex.
Climate change, freshwater degradation, invasive species and biosecurity threats require increasingly specialised expertise and sustained intervention.
The cost of kaitiakitanga has not stood still.
Neither have community expectations.
Yet Te Arawa Lakes Trust says the funding available to carry out its responsibilities has failed to keep pace.
If that assessment is correct, the current restructure should not simply be viewed as an internal financial problem for Te Arawa.
It becomes a question for the Crown about whether the framework created following settlement has been adequately funded to succeed.
Haumaha faces difficult reset
For Wallace Haumaha and the Trust leadership, the immediate challenge will be balancing financial sustainability against responsibilities that cannot simply disappear because funding is tight.
Reducing expenditure may strengthen the organisation’s balance sheet, but reducing capability carries its own risks when the lakes themselves remain under pressure.
There will also inevitably be difficult conversations with staff, beneficiaries, iwi and hapū about priorities and what work can realistically continue.
The Trust will need to demonstrate that its reset protects the organisation’s long-term viability while retaining the expertise required to fulfil its core kaupapa.
But the Crown should also expect questions.
If Te Arawa was given responsibilities through settlement, were sufficient resources ever provided to carry them out?
And if almost 20 years later the answer is no, then restructuring the Trust may treat the financial symptom without addressing the underlying problem.
Kaitiakitanga cannot run on goodwill
For generations Te Arawa has fought to protect its relationship with its lakes.
That relationship existed long before Crown legislation, trust boards or settlement deeds.
What has changed is the complexity and cost of protecting those taonga in the modern environment.
The current reset therefore represents more than an organisational restructure.
It is a test of whether the promise embedded within Treaty settlements is matched by the practical resources necessary to make those settlements work.
Kaitiakitanga carries responsibilities — but it also carries costs.
After almost two decades, Te Arawa Lakes Trust is signalling that those costs can no longer simply be absorbed.
And with environmental threats continuing to mount across the rohe, the question is no longer whether Te Arawa can keep doing more with less.
It is whether the Crown is prepared to ensure one of Aotearoa’s oldest Māori institutions has the resources required to protect its lakes for the next 100 years.
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