I imagine it stopped being news in Oz about the time they realised the central anticyclone is staying put and the cyclone would bounce straight off it. The natural path for one spawned there would be straight to north Q.
The latest predictions for where it's going are on, with 28 possibilities I can count. All but one of them go straight over North Island.
Civil Defence is shitting itself, because the land is still highly unstable after the flooding last week. We went and looked at some of it on the weekend, and some of the slips are enormous - one was at least 100m wide, right under the noses of people living in multi-million dollar homes on a ridge overlooking the Manukau Harbour.
Here's the forecast tracks:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/weathe ... central-nz
You're not wrong about earthquakes, though - all of our worst disasters have been earthquakes, and we don't have a load of crumbly building like they do in Turkey & Syria.
The thought of sending aid to Syria does my head in. Last week we were knocking the buildings down with bombs.