New Zealand PM on cyclone recovery, rebuild

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has described Cyclone Gabrielle, which caused widespread damage on New Zealand’s North Island and claimed 11 lives, as the country’s most damaging natural disaster in at least a generation.

Hipkins said there had been a nine-fold increase in government spending in the 2021-22 fiscal year on helping farmers cope with floods, storms and drought. The number of weather events that require emergency road work more than doubled from an average of 67 a year between 2018 and 2021 to 140 a year. The cyclone followed another storm two weeks earlier that swamped New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, and killed four people.