Buller, West Coast, New Zealand
A place worth keeping
We live here on purpose. This page is about why, how the place holds together, what is at stake, and where to find the facts.
Buller, West Coast, New Zealand
We live here on purpose. This page is about why, how the place holds together, what is at stake, and where to find the facts.
Why we're here
Buller runs from Kahurangi point north of Karamea to Punakaiki, and inland to Reefton, Maruia, Inangahua. Rainforest to the water's edge, rivers you can drink from, a main street where the person behind the counter went to school with your kids.
People come for the landscape and stay for the way the place works. You can build a business here. You can raise a family here. You can be on a ridge above the cloud before breakfast and at the school gate by nine. Nobody is pretending it is easy. Winters are wet, the drive to Christchurch is long, and the district has been knocked around more than once. But ask anyone who has stayed and you will hear the same thing: we are not going anywhere if we can help it.
That is the point of this page. Buller is not a problem to be managed. It is a place worth investing in, and a decision is about to be made that shapes whether the people who love it can keep living here.
Photographs from around Buller and the West Coast. Credits at the foot of the page.
One economy, not four
Buller is small enough that every industry leans on the others. The same families, the same tradies, the same school rolls, the same rail line.
Dairy and beef on the flats and up the valleys, from Karamea to Inangahua. Farms need the vets, the contractors, the engineers and the freight links that only survive with enough people in town to keep them going.
Hundreds of Buller families rely on Stockton directly, and two thirds of its workers live in Westport. Its payroll, its contractors and its rates bill hold up businesses that have nothing to do with coal, and the continuation project includes rehabilitating historic acid mine drainage on the plateau.
Punakaiki, the Old Ghost Road, the Heaphy, Denniston, Reefton, Karamea. Visitors need cafés, accommodation, mechanics and a hospital. Those exist because locals use them all year, and tourism is the growth industry the district is building on.
The fleet at the wharf, the port, the trades, the schools, the clubs, the volunteer fire brigade. A town's services run on scale. Lose a tenth of the working households and the scale goes with them.
The thread that ties it together is rail. The same line that carries Stockton coal from Ngakawau to Lyttelton is the line the TranzAlpine runs on. Development West Coast's Chief Executive says that coal earns KiwiRail around $45 million a year, and losing it "could have implications for the wider rail network, other freight users, rail jobs and potentially the TranzAlpine". Tourism and mining ride the same steel. Source: DWC, 24 August 2026.
Diversification is real and it is happening. DWC again: "There are other significant opportunities emerging across the West Coast and the region is working hard to grow and diversify." Nobody here wants a single-industry town. The question is whether the district gets to diversify from a position of strength, or from a second collapse.
What is at stake
An independent economic assessment by Infometrics, commissioned by Development West Coast in August 2026, modelled what happens if Stockton closes. These are its numbers, with page references so you can check them.
Last time, the unemployment rate was back to normal within five years. It went back to normal because people left. The share of Buller adults not in the workforce at all rose from 35% in 2013 to 42% in 2023 and it has not come back. Infometrics puts it plainly: future job losses "may not drive up unemployment, but are likely to grow the proportion of people otherwise out of work." When someone says people will find other work, that is what it looked like.
What the continuation buys
The Buller Plateaux Continuation Project is not a plan to stay a mining town forever. It is about twenty years of steady work and income while the district builds what comes next.
That means time to finish the flood protection and fix the housing shortage. Time to grow the tourism experiences already drawing people here, and to build the accommodation and transport links they need. Time for the port, for the trades and services a growing town supports, and for the new industries the region is working to bring in. Time for the school leavers of 2030 to find their first job here rather than in Christchurch.
Every one of those things needs people, and people need work now. A town that has just lost nearly 300 working households does not build a tourism industry. It closes a bank branch.
Come and see for yourself
Buller is open. Come for the Pancake Rocks and the Old Ghost Road, stay for a market morning in Westport or a soak in the Maruia. Meet the people who signed this letter. Then decide what you think.
Plan a visit at bullerkawatiri.nz Add your name to the letterResources
Everything we rely on, in one place.
Our rule: every item here carries a source you can open yourself. If we can't link to it, it doesn't go up. If you think something is wrong, tell us and show us the source.
Independent reports, the official application pages, and our own campaign documents. Where we host a copy we also link to where it was first published.
Media releases and coverage, from any outlet and any side of the debate.
Coverage as it appeared in print and online. Click an image to see it full size.
Posts, videos and letters by other people. They speak for themselves, not for Our Buller Future, and linking to something is not endorsing every word of it. Public posts only.
Numbers we have checked against the original source, with the page number where we can give one.
Photographs marked Buller Image Bank are used under Promoting Buller Incorporated's image bank terms, with credit to the photographer, who retains copyright. Others were sourced from the West Coast Image Library unless otherwise stated.