When a fishing boat stops answering the radio somewhere off the coast, the first person to notice is often a volunteer sitting in a small room with a set of receivers and a good knowledge of the local water. New Zealand has relied on those people for decades. They are now retiring, and the agencies that coordinate rescues are finding it hard to replace what they knew.
RNZ reported on Monday that police, the Rescue Coordination Centre and other search and rescue agencies have been trying to get a telecommunications review underway to close what internal documents call longstanding gaps in the way rescuers talk to each other and to people in trouble. The review has not started, largely because police say they do not have the staff to take part.
The Rescue Coordination Centre, which sits inside Maritime New Zealand, told RNZ that volunteers who have helped track vessels in trouble for national agencies for years were now retiring. Coastguard New Zealand put the same point more bluntly, saying “there is increasing pressure on national organisations”.
Coastguard said New Zealand’s coastline and terrain “can create coverage challenges, and local operators have historically played an important role in helping bridge communication gaps in some areas”, but that this was changing. Police acknowledged some of the technology in use was old and not as good for quality or coverage as newer equipment. “Police understands that these limitations are more significant in the maritime environment,” the organisation told RNZ.
The problem is not new. A report released under the Official Information Act described the situation as a set of legacy issues that were “increasingly impacting the coordinating agencies”, meaning police and the Rescue Coordination Centre. The same report recorded that “Maritime NZ and Coastguard are keen to address long-standing telecommunication gaps, with NZ Police having no capacity to contribute to the review at present”. The agencies had expected the review to begin in the first half of this year.
Rescue Coordination Centre general manager Justin Allan said the centre and police still aimed to start work on the review soon, “subject to agencies having the necessary resources to support it”. Police told RNZ that its limited capacity to help had been raised verbally at a search and rescue meeting as an advisory that it had significant prioritised work at the time. It could not produce any written record of that exchange.
What makes the delay awkward is that the number of ways a person can call for help keeps growing. Allan said the centre was seeing an increasing range of technologies used by people in distress, including internet-enabled devices, Starlink, secure messaging platforms and satellite-linked mobile phones. Some mariners use local channels that are not visible to the Maritime Operations Centre, or carry devices that are not well integrated into the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, the international framework that is supposed to make sure a distress call is heard by someone.
That is a familiar problem in countries with difficult geography, and New Zealand has plenty of it. Mountains, deep valleys, long stretches of empty coast and dense bush all break line of sight, which is exactly what radio depends on. For years the answer was local knowledge. A volunteer operator in a coastal town knew which hill blocked which channel, knew the regular boats by name, and knew when a skipper who always logged a trip report had gone quiet. That is the layer now thinning out.
The scale of what sits on top of that layer is easy to underestimate. The New Zealand Search and Rescue Council’s most recent annual report, covering the year to June 2024, recorded 3,535 search and rescue incidents, 152 lives saved, 794 people rescued and 921 people assisted. More than 11,000 people were involved in the sector, most of them volunteers fitting call-outs around jobs and families. The search and rescue region New Zealand is responsible for covers about 30 million square kilometres of land and ocean, one of the largest in the world.
Some money has gone into the hardware. In January 2025 the government announced funding to replace Coastguard New Zealand’s ageing very high frequency radio network and to modernise the National Maritime Distress and Safety Communications Service. Then transport minister Simeon Brown said at the time that the VHF network “plays a crucial role in facilitating communication between vessels in need and rescue teams” but that “the current system is outdated and in need of an upgrade to meet the increasing demands of our recreational and commercial maritime sectors”. Coastguard and Maritime New Zealand carried out that radio upgrade last year, which Allan described as a significant step, while saying more needed to be done.
A few months earlier, in October 2024, the government put $23.1 million into four frontline volunteer organisations, with $14.6 million for Surf Life Saving New Zealand, $3.1 million each for Coastguard New Zealand and New Zealand Land Search and Rescue, and $2.3 million for Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, the volunteer body that supplies radio operators when normal networks fail.
Coastguard said the review, when it happens, would work out how legacy systems, coverage limits, the ability of different systems to talk to each other and future technology should be managed, so that dispatch and communications arrangements stayed fit for purpose. Any significant change would need approval from the Search and Rescue Council. Separately, the agencies are reworking how rescue aviation is coordinated, with the aim of shifting more of that job, especially helicopters, from police to the Rescue Coordination Centre over the next few years.
None of this is visible from a boat ramp on a fine Saturday. It becomes visible on the night a signal does not reach anyone, and the people who once would have picked it up have hung up their headsets.
Have you volunteered on a Coastguard radio watch, or been the one calling for help offshore? Tell us what worked and what did not 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 🙂
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