The former head of the ACT Liberals and director of a prominent Australian anti-trans group has been jailed in New Zealand for charges relating to extending his property into a harbour — including the discharge of pig faecal bacteria into the body of water.
Tio Faulkner was sentenced to three months and two weeks’ imprisonment at Tauranga District Court and ordered to pay $5000 towards costs after being found guilty of six charges.
Faulkner was the president of the Liberal Party of the Australia’s ACT Division from 2010 to 2013 and former right-hand man of Zed Seselja until he left ACT Parliament for federal politics. Scott Morrison served as the head of the NSW division of the party at the same time.
Faulkner is also a director of Gender Awareness Australia, an Australian company registered with ASIC that runs anti-transgender group Binary. This group changed its name and focus from the anti-same-sex marriage group Marriage Alliance following the passage of same-sex marriage in Australia.
Faulkner, born in New Zealand, moved back to his home country in the mid-2010s. It’s during this time that Faulkner began to espouse “a radical form of Māori sovereignty, subscribing to a view that as tangata whenua, there was no jurisdiction over himself, or his ancestral land”, according to the NZ Herald.
Aerial surveys by a Bay of Plenty Regional Council officer during 2019 discovered that a property owned by Faulkner had illegal earthworks that extended a platform into Tauranga Harbour.
The platform, which council enforcement officers later discovered during an inspection was a mix of concrete, plastic wrap and rebar, extended 15 metres into the harbour and was about 30 metres wide. It was also found that Faulkner had created a piggery that was releasing effluent into the harbour.
Faulkner was subsequently issued with abatement notices which instructed him to stop building and ensure that no more waste was dumped into the harbour, notices he ignored. Throughout the process, Faulkner cited Māori sovereignty to try and claim his reclamation had been approved and to issue a trespass notice to council officers.
Faulkner was charged with six offences, including reclaiming an area of foreshore and seabed without resource consent, discharging effluent from a piggery where it could enter water, contravening an abatement notice and failing to provide information to an enforcement officer.
Representing himself, Faulkner’s defence was that climate change was threatening his property due to rising sea levels and that his Māori heritage entitled him to do whatever he wanted to his land. Witnesses told the court that Faulkner said he planned to build his own private park.
Judge Prudence Steven found Faulkner guilty, called his legal submissions “bordering on being unintelligible” and criticised his offending as “sustained and unrepentant”.
Faulkner thanked the judge for remanding him between the trial and sentencing and for giving him an experience for his memoirs.
“My few weeks of hunger strike and losing 10kg has helped me sharpen my mind,” he said.
Binary has been contacted for comment.
