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Entertainment | Aotearoa

Marae dealing with the headache of insurance

Marae are struggling to find funding to make their marae earthquake compliant and this follows on from a legislation that was passed earlier this year. Today came a warning around the costs of insurance.

Anthony Paetawa Wilson is CEO of Awataha Marae on Auckland's Northshore, and like most Marae managers he's having to quickly come up to speed on earthquake compliance and what that will cost. And this coming on top of the ever growing insurance costs.

“We are currently paying tens of thousands of dollars now just to cover the basics, public liability is a minimum cover of two million dollars.”

Awataha is one of 1300 marae across the country, Wilson says the real pressure is going to go on the rural marae.

“There is a very high cost of compliance now for Māori for marae. A lot of people are not aware of that. We're fortunate because we've found a lot of that trying to future proof ourselves moving forward. I would say for some of our rural marae it may sort of be a big wake up call for what they're liable for now.”

And it’s not just the buildings, it’s the treasure that they house.

“We’ve tried to insure our whakairo. There is no one who is willing to accept or to give evaluation to value our whakairo so we can’t actually fully protect them. I is a concern for us because it means that all of the taonga that we have here and all of the marae throughout the country are at risk at any one time all of their cultural assets.”

Anthony says that the combine costs of earthquake compliance and insurance costs are going to strongly test the resources of many marae across the motu.