The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was warned twice by engineers, in 2018 and again in 2023, that the New Zealand High Commission building in Port Vila needed a full seismic assessment because too little was known about its structure. No assessment was ever commissioned. On 17 December 2024 a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck off the coast of Efate at lunchtime local time, and the building shared by New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and France in central Port Vila had its ground floor collapse. No New Zealand staff were injured, and the building was later demolished.
That sequence of events sits at the heart of an independent review released to RNZ this week under the Official Information Act, conducted by former Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment chief executive David Smol. The 32-page report examines how the ministry manages risk across 300 diplomatic properties in 50 countries, and finds a pattern of identifying serious safety problems and then failing to act on them.
In the case of the Suva chancery in Fiji, the report says staff had worked for more than a decade in a building with “no safe means of egress” in the event of a fire. The risk had been known on paper. Nothing happened, Smol writes, “until a nearby building burned to the ground, the limitations of the local fire service became apparent and a proactive HOM [Head of Mission] was able to make the case to move out of the building.”
Smol describes what he found as “a disjunct between the identification of risks and action on those risks.” The review notes that the ministry had previously vacated diplomatic premises in Tehran and Honiara on seismic grounds. The Port Vila warnings, made by visiting engineers five years apart, were treated differently. Both engineer reports recommended commissioning a full seismic assessment “due to lack of structural information.” Neither recommendation was acted on before the quake.
The review identifies seven critical risks across the diplomatic property portfolio. According to the report, those risks were still in draft form in late 2025, more than a year after MFAT received Smol’s findings in October. The review makes 14 recommendations, all accepted by ministry chief executive Bede Corry. They include finalising the critical-risk list, assigning ownership of each risk to a member of the ministry’s senior leadership team, and overhauling how hazard registers held on spreadsheets at individual posts are shared back with Wellington.
Corry told RNZ the review found no “smoking guns” or “fundamental flaws”, but said there was “quite a bit of room for improvement.” The ministry said in a statement that its focus had been on “ensuring the safety of our staff and informing ministry staff ahead of disseminating the information publicly.” A wider remediation programme is now targeting completion by mid-2027.
The cultural findings in the report are striking. Smol writes that MFAT “is a career ministry for many of its people who see themselves as competing for a limited number of senior and/or prestigious positions.” Staff at overseas posts, the review says, were “reluctant to be slowed down by what they sometimes perceived as overly complex and compliance-driven health and safety processes.” Engaging with head office in Wellington on property issues, the report observes, “has taken a long time.”
The review acknowledges that “everyday life can be more stressful” at some posts, where staff balance representational duties against day-to-day building problems few public servants in Wellington would tolerate. That stress, the report argues, may help explain why warnings about fire risk in Suva or unknown structural integrity in Port Vila were not pushed harder up the chain.
The timing of the release is politically awkward. Foreign Minister Winston Peters successfully fought off proposed MFAT cuts in Budget 2026 earlier this month, with the ministry given a reprieve while other agencies absorbed reductions. The Smol review was sitting inside the ministry at the time those Budget negotiations were under way. It was given to staff in January 2025 but only made public this week, almost 18 months after Corry first received it.
The Vanuatu earthquake itself killed 14 people, injured 265, and displaced more than 2,400 residents. New Zealand sent more than seven tonnes of aid, a USAR team, and Ministry of Health and Red Cross personnel from 20 December 2024. The shared diplomatic building has not been rebuilt. New Zealand staff in Port Vila have since been working out of temporary premises.
What the Smol review documents is something quieter than corruption or political interference. The ministry knew its overseas premises were unsafe in identifiable, specific ways, and took years to act on that knowledge, in some cases only after a building burned down nearby or, in Port Vila, after an earthquake forced the issue.
The full coverage of the review can be read at RNZ. Background on the December 2024 Vanuatu earthquake is on the MFAT Vanuatu page, and a summary of Budget 2026’s MFAT settlement is on RNZ here.
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Has MFAT got the balance right between staff welfare and the cost of maintaining safe diplomatic posts? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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