the most powerful man in Christchurch, the most oblivious man on twitter

So the most powerful man in Christchurch – at least according to the Press – has taken to twitter to recycle this gem:

He asked people to retweet if they agreed – and while he got around 30, it’s hard to tell how many of them are genuine. Considering he has 83,000 followers, it’s not exactly a high percentage. Key was in the city today, visiting rebuild sites, and announcing the winner of a design competition for a playground. Across on the other side of town, the Phillipstown community was protesting the government’s decision to merge them with Woolston school. There were a number of politicians there – including Port Hills MP Ruth Dyson (Woolston school is in Port Hills), Lianne Dalziel, councillors Yani Johanson and Glenn Livingstone, as well as political studies lecturer Bronwyn Hayward. Notable by her absence was the MP who actually represents the area, Nicky Wagner. She was with the PM, tagging along as though she was John Key’s mullet – slightly behind, decades out of date, completely useless.

It’s this sort of uncaring negligence that is getting on Cantabrian’s nerves. While Key and his entourage go around cutting ribbons on hotel rooms and announcing playground competitions at private primary schools (does it really take the PM, at least two MPs and the mayor to make such a vital decision?), the people his government have left behind are out on the streets, working to save their communities from ideological indifference to their suffering.

You wanna roll out the big R word again? This shows how little you care about our plight. Cheryl Bernstein blogged about how we were sick of hearing that word IN AUGUST 2011. That’s practically 2 years ago. 2 years of empty promises, or patronising platitudes, of 100 day plans for the CBD and endless delays for residents. Compassionate, practical and resilient could describe our people in the immediate aftermath of the quakes, banding together, helping each other out. But if the PM had any idea what it was like to live down here, he would know that being practical doesn’t help when EQC won’t give you information about your own house, being compassionate isn’t easy when your insurer blames EQC, who blames the insurer, and being resilient isn’t much help when your fourth project manager rings to tell you that they need to come and do a 12th assessment of your house.

Resilience has two definitions. The first being the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like. I’m sure that’s what everyone who overuses it means. The second, though, is slightly different. “The power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched.” Christchurch is so far away from being returned to the original form, or even something that looks different but at least functions like it did before. Opening a hotel, a playground design cometition and a hollow tweet show that this government has run out of ideas on how to fix it.

 

do we not even care about conflicts of interest anymore?

This morning, Tim Carter was in the paper talking about asset sales to pay for buildings that have been included in the blueprint. I am not going to get into a debate about the pros and cons of asset sales at this point – I covered that yesterday, and others have done similar – but I wanted to question whether there is a conflict of interest around this. Tim Carter is the son of former councillor, Philip Carter. Philip Carter is a keen supporter of the blueprint, as it has given him somewhat favourable treatment. Carter owns part of the site in Cathedral Square that has been marked down for the convention centre project. It seems as though he will also be given a concession to be able to build two hotels, adjacent to the convention centre, which are taller the central city height limit that other developers will have to abide by.

The Carter Group … owns the condemned former Government Life building west of Cathedral Square and at the southern end of the proposed convention centre site in the central-city recovery blueprint. The project allows for two interconnected hotels that will cater for up to 2000 delegates, and the centre will be able to host three conferences simultaneously.

So Philip Carter will benefit from the convention centre, both by having his land bought for the project, and by being able to build hotels adjacent, which will directly benefit from convention goers. All this considered, should Tim Carter be advocating for the council to sell assets to fund a project that benefits his family? How can the Press report this story without mentioning this quite clear connection, or do we just not care about this sort of cosiness in the rebuild? Or, alternatively, should we believe that Tim and Philip Carter are the only family in Christchurch that don’t inevitably talk about the rebuild over dinner?

Asset sales: stop calling, stop texting, stop turning up at my house late at night

Like a bigoted relative at a family gathering, council asset sales are the unwanted guest that just won’t get the message. Despite wide-spread opposition in Christchurch, including strong declarations from the council and mayor, the government keeps bringing along asset sales to the party, claiming that it’s their “plus one”. John Key again mentioned it is morning, in a TV interview. Once he’s snuck his guest into the room, he then outright lies about why he’s there at all.

How the city funded the rest of the build was a “matter for Cantabrians to consider”, Key told Firstline this morning. “It is for the council to say ‘do you want the nice-to-haves’,” he said. “Then they’ll ask how are you going to pay? That could be through rates or asset sales.”

The bolded quote is simply a bald-faced lie. The council has no say at all in whether they want nice-to-haves – it is a decision that has clearly come down from the Beehive, where stadia and convention centres seem to be the only pages in their economic recovery textbook. This was made clear to me last week, when I made a submission in person at the council, on the Three Year Plan, partly in opposition to the stadium plan. Upon giving my submission, Councillor Broughton asked me if I knew that it was a decision made by the government, not the council. I did know that, and that my submission was partly in vain, but I still urged the council to oppose these developments.

What Key and Brownlee are doing is forcing us – via the council – to build these assets, in spite of opposition. Then they will turn around and say that we need to pay our share, and that the rest of New Zealand shouldn’t have to go without so you carpers and moaners can have your flash new stadium. Bloody ingrates. So why don’t we just sell some of these assets you have? If the council opposes selling them off – for some obscure reason like the economics of keeping them far outweighing the prices we’d get for them in a rushed sale, or the social utility of a city owning its infrastructure – then the government can force the council to flog them using their “emergency powers”. Emergency powers that they haven’t seen fit to use to break the insurance deadlock, or to alleviate the suffering of the people worst hit out East, but could be used fund a white elephant monument to Brownlee’s egotistical stubbornness.

This is like selling the company van so the boss can buy a flash motorbike; meanwhile, the boys at the building site have to move their stuff from job to job using a wheelbarrow. It’s economic idiocy, and political expediency, from a government that continues to mismanage the recovery whilst simultaneously relying on it to turn around the government books. Like the fantastically bearded gentlemen in the new tv commercial, it’s time to take John Key’s mate asset sales into a quiet corner of the room and say “yeah, nah”, until he finally gets the message.

Ignoring the warnings in the residential rebuild

Very interesting piece from Christchurch architect John Chaplin on the uncertainties of the residential rebuild program. He warns that we may not have learnt anything from the leaky building saga.

Selwyn councillors “stumped” by water issues, surprised to learn of the existence of cows

Oh dear. Despite it being the seventh water contamination issue in the Selwyn district since November, their councillors are apparently “stumped” as to why that might be. I wonder if these councillors have watched the Campbell Live story on the Selwyn river running dry, or have heard anything about the Government’s subsidised irrigation scheme. Maybe the whole sacking of ECan thing passed them by?
It certainly feels like there have been more water contamination incidents since the government scrapped the regional council in 2010. Of course, that was meant to be all about “better resource management”, but was clearly a move to ensure industrial farmers had all the water they needed, environment be damned. Council officials want to pretend that there is no link between the increase in dairy cows, the reduction in river flows, and the increase in boil water notices, but they can’t honestly think the public is stupid enough to buy it. The boil water notices are becoming more frequent, affecting more people, and most worryingly, are getting closer to Christchurch.
This incident hits the 9000 residents of Rolleston, the “town of the future” to Christchurch’s west that has seen massive growth in the last two decades.
After the quakes, a large number of people have moved out there; the expansion of subdivisions is frankly alarming. One of the things this incident shows, apart from the worrying bovine-led march of Escherechia coli, is the inability of the Selwyn council to provide for the rapid expansion which it has been encouraging. Both Selwyn and Waimakariri councils have encouraged rapid expansion if their satellite towns, which have been seen as desirable due to bare land, low rates, and a reasonably easy commute into Christchurch for school or work. It may be that the discount rates also play out with discount services for their unlucky residents.

More on the office block stadium thing

There is a letter in the press from Geoff Saunders this morning, who came up with the bright idea for the office block stadium thing. He’s a lawyer, not an architect, but he thinks its a good idea. He explains in the letter that he doesn’t want to put his law firm in Victoria St or Lincoln Rd, he wants to be in the city. But he also doesn’t want to pay $400 a square metre, though he “admires those” that have committed to do so. He then says:

The rationale behind the multi-use stadium proposal is to create four wonderful office towers with associated facilities, such as a gym and pool, and to lure us back. The land under the four office towers comes at very little cost to the developer/owner.

Hang on? The land comes at very little cost to the developer/owner? Mr Saunders might want to elaborate on that a bit. He has said that he wants a high spec office block, but that he doesn’t want to pay the market rate for it. So he’s proposing that someone build an office for him, and figures that this will be cheaper because “the land comes as very little cost”. We know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, so if the land comes at very little cost to the developers, it’s costing someone else. That someone else would be the taxpayer and the ratepayer, the ones who are funding the government acquisition of this land. In Saunders’ plan, not only would the average Christchurch resident be subsidising an uneconomic stadium, but we’d be subsidising office space for some of the city’s most high-profile, high-priced law firms, and that is simply unacceptable.

The Garden City Protectors – protecting us from the Christchurch of the mind

There is a letter to the Press this morning that made me laugh, more than most letters from crackpots do. As letters don’t go online, this slab of crazy is a privilege that only Christchurch people get to see. I’ll share it for you here:

I read in Saturday’s Press that Wellington intends to take more control over Christchurch. Our association, Garden City Protectors, intends to fight to protect the Garden City we have been known for and which is so admired abroad. This means that inner city having a predominance of exotics without Maori structures and native plants.

Yes, our Maori heritage must be protected. After all, Maori stealers, came to our country ahead of European settlers. However, we now have many cultures in our city and very few iwi living among us.

Our Association intends to canvas our citizens and, if the majority agrees with our views, the Government and local authorities will have a fight on their hands.

Peter Blaxhall, Merivale

There are just so many things wrong with this. Even typing it out in full made me a little bit sick. I could critique a number of things, but will limit myself to a couple.

I don’t want to patronise you (who am I kidding, of course I do) but the Maori didn’t bring the Kahikatea or the Kauri with them on the waka; they were here for millions of years before any human, Maori, English or otherwise, landed here. The Maori gave them names – beautiful names, much nicer than most European names for plants – but this is no reason to discard them just because of your inbuilt Merivale bigotry. The English tried to remake this small part of the South Pacific in their image, but it didn’t always work.

Stone buildings are fine when you don’t live anywhere near a plate boundary, but are less smart when you live in an active fault zone. The grid pattern which the early settlers thought looked nice was imposed on top of a series of natural streams that ran through the CBD: a number of the buildings that were most badly affected in the quakes were on or around where these streams used to be. We shouldn’t choose building styles, city plans and landscape gardening solutions based on what was hip in London salon’s of the 1850′s. We’ve learnt stuff since then, including a lot in the last two years.

“However, we now have many cultures in our city” – this is true, yes. So why are you trying to impose the heritage of just one of the many cultures you have just listed as living here?

In a way, I feel sorry for you guys. The earthquake has clearly taken away things that you loved, and you don’t seem to be able to cope with the changes. You want to put things back as they were, and pretend nothing happened. But things did happen. We don’t need bigoted groups like yours trying to pretend that the earthquake and the Waitangi Tribunal didn’t happen. Christchurch has moved on, even if you haven’t.

“Minister’s office have okayed, and intention will be to put this in your name Roger”

As No Right Turn reports, the OIAs for CERAs arbitrary declaration that the Red Zone is a “politics free zone” are back, and the bits that haven’t been redacted are pretty damning. While the juiciest bits have been withheld, there are still some interesting things, such as when they email round one of my tweets, or that “Mojo and Eugenie are Facebooking!” They were obviously doing their very best to stifle first, justify second. 

May favourite bit, however, is this line which somehow escaped the black highlighter: ”Minister’s office have okayed, and intention will be to put this in your name Roger”. This makes it clear that they’ve gone up to Gerry, got the go ahead, and then the press release has come back down for poor Roger Sutton to front. You have to feel sorry for the guy. We had so much hope for him when he came into the job. I doubt that when he left Orion, and took a pay cut to help out Christchurch he could dreamt that 18 months later, he wouldn’t even have any control over the things coming out of his mouth. Such a shame. He should get out now whilst people can still vaguely remember his pre-CERA career.

It also goes to show what a complete farce the Press Power List is. I don’t really think the thing is worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s part of the paper’s endless march to being a bunch of opinion pieces with ads tacked on the sides (the new “Mainland Live” section is meant to be light news, but was really just an excuse to convert a whole page of the front section of the paper to opinion pieces, and bad ones at that. Jane Bowron, take a bow.) Anyway, back to the Power List. It has Sutton in at number 6. This OIA shows just how much “power” he has. Any of the other rankings should be taken with an unhealthy amount of salt, especially the one which has John Key at the top of the list. The man in charge is clearly Gerry, his brutish fingers are said to be all over the CCDU plan; Key’s interest in Christchurch seems to be strictly limited to photoshoots at the openings of buildings, and even the rate of those seems to have slowed down. Maybe he’s finally realised that all these pictures of him on empty building sites might not be the best look when he goes into an election campaign trying to boast of the rebuild.

The thing is, no-one knows who’s in running Christchurch, apart maybe a few of those guys in the Beehive. CERA, CCDU, the council, ECAN – these are all less than transparent organisations, with silent, un-OIA-able actors who are making decisions about the city without fear of scrutiny. The Press Power List suggests that there is an easy to read list of the 50 people running the shop, and that’s the most worrying thing about it. 

Joining the dots

There are two interesting stories in the Press this morning that show the complete shambles that the rebuild of Christchurch has become. The first is about the escalating costs of construction. Worryingly, it suggests that due to rising costs, developers are eschewing fancy designs and pumping for plain old tip slab instead. Central city developers are having to compete with buildings in Addington, Victoria St and out at the airport, where the land is cheaper, and foundations are cheaper to put in. For the developers in the central city, this means that to build a premium office space, they are having to pay more than anywhere else in the country.

Think about that for a moment. Yes, we need to ensure that the buildings here are safe for future seismic events. But the buildings going up in Addington and Victoria St aren’t the most expensive in the country; this is a clear by-product of the CCDU blueprint, which deliberately restricted land supply for a select few developers. So while the plan was to artificially maintain the property prices for the lucky few, if they can’t afford to build on this land, it will soon lose it’s value again. Who is going to want to move their law firm into the most expensive office building in the country, when it is in the centre of a grey, broken wasteland, pockmarked by the occasional tilt-slab barn? The government should never have tried to prop up the property prices of their favourite developers; they should have let their beloved market determine what land was worth in the centre of a devastated city. That said, very little is happening in the middle of town, it wouldn’t be too late to just scrap the plan and start again.

Worryingly, the cost of building is expected to go up when they actually get around to starting it. 

David Wallace, who represents developer Devonia Holdings, expected costs would “ramp up further” once the city’s anchor projects began.

Ah yes, those “anchor projects”, like the stadium. The damned stadium. But wait, the stadium could *make* money, according to a new plan. Geoff Saunders, a lawyer who seems to have the ear of Brownlee, has pitched the idea of building office blocks into the stadium. Ok. He reckons they would make $11 million a year. Ok. This raises more questions than answers for me. First, who is building these office blocks? This relates to the question who is building this stadium, and who is funding it? This is a question that people have been asking ever since the blueprint came out. It seems that the government is going to force the council to build it, and force the ratepayer to pay for it. If that’s the case, and this is the design, then will the ratepayer then be expected to build office blocks too? 

You would have to assume that they were going to be built by the council, as otherwise, the purported $11 million would not be returned to the people. If they were built by another operator, and their value was contingent on their proximity to a publicly-funded asset, then why would we let them take the money?

But probably the biggest question I have on this is contingent on it’s success: if you can generate $11 million a year from 4 office blocks on this site, then how much could you generate if you just built offices, not a stadium? The jury is still out on whether Lancester Park can be salvaged, and no-one has produced a costed economic plan for the stadium. Looking at the picture that accompanies the story, I reckon you could fit 15 of these office blocks on the site; using the same maths as Saunders, this would pull in around $40 million a year. Also, you wouldn’t have to needlessly destroy heritage buildings like the NG Gallery one. You could even include some social housing in there, and bring some people back into the central city.

I realise that this is never going to happen; however, I think it’s important to bring the keep highlighting the idiocy that is the CCDU blueprint and all it’s unintended, yet highly predictable, consequences.

 

Taking my complaints live

On Thursday, I’m participating in a panel discussion about Christchurch and things. It is for a program called “From The Streets”, which is being made by Gerard Smyth, director of “When A City Falls”. He described it to me as a Christchurch Backbenchers, except without politicians. A panel of three of us will be talking about issues in front of a live audience of whoever happens to be at Pomeroy’s pub on Thursday, from about 5:30. Spanky, formerly of RDU Breakfast fame, will be asking all the questions. I think we’ll be covering a range of topics, and it will go out on CTV, and maybe elsewhere. I don’t have all the answers, but it seems like a great idea and I’m keen to be a part of it. 

The panel for Thursday’s shoot is me, Leanne Curtis from CanCern, and Mark Quigley, celebrity seismologist. We’re going to be down at Pomeroy’s, on the corner of Kilmore and Fitzgerald. Pretty sure the pub is just operating as usual, and that if you’re interested you can come along and see what’s going on. I might even wear a nice shirt for it.