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 She was with the PM, tagging along as though she was John Key’s mullet – slightly behind, decades out of date, completely useless.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.

 

Straight from the horse’s mouth

I’m not sure quite why it chose a Sunday, but this morning, John Key’s twitter account belched out three infographics about the Christchurch rebuild. They contain figures, numbers and some ticks, and are all in a soothing blue palate. But they aren’t very useful.

This one was about building consents. It shows a steady increase – although under the new CBD plan, the towers to denote Dec 2011, Mar 2012 and June 2012 would be prohibited from being built in the city, as they breach the 7-storey height limit outlined in the City Plan.

At the top of the graphic, it mentions the $3.9 billion spend up to the December 2012 quarter*. So why aren’t the Sep 2012 and Dec 2012 consent numbers included on the graph? Well, it’s because the December 2012 numbers are about 150 down on the September ones, so it wouldn’t much such a happy graph. So they just ignored it.

Update: I made the graph with the Sep and Dec quarters. Wasn’t hard to do – I even did the bars in a nice soft blue. You can see why they didn’t include the Dec quarter.

Another problem here is the scale – it looks impressive, as it comes off of a very low base. This base has been set low by the September and February quakes. I can’t imagine many people lining up to build after those events – and that’s what the numbers show. So this doesn’t really say much, as you’d expect that these numbers would increase. The problem with this info-graphic – and the other two really – is that they don’t place the numbers in any sort of meaningful context. Is 719 earthquake-related building consents in a quarter a lot?

An earthquake-ralted building consent is apparently any building consent (residential, non-residential, non-building) issued since September 2010. I’m not bored enough to go back and tally up all the building consents in Christchurch over the last decade, but I did find the numbers for residential building consents. They go like this:

New residential buildings for Christchurch city for the year to December:

2003 – 2542

2004 – 2492

2005 – 2095

2006 – 2240

2007 – 2375

2008 – 1282

2009 – 1248

2010 – 1492

2011 – 979

As you can see residential building consents have been falling for years. This graphic takes an arbitrary low point and calls it a baseline, without giving us any other context. And even then, the number of ERBCs from Dec 2010 through to Jun 2012 – 2,412 – is lower than the number of residential consents per year from the mid 2000′s. Or number for context – we’ve lost about 10,000 buildings since the quake.

All the consent numbers are on this page at Stats NZ, so if you like your figures hard and truthy, rather than soft and manipulated, that’s the place to go.

* this figure – $3.9 billion – can’t be just the value of earthquake-related building consents, as that is only $793.3 million since Sept 2010. I assume it includes other building work in Canterbury, but don’t know where the number is from. If the bars below show numbers for one thing, then the figure at the top should relate to the same data set. Bad form.

This one is probably the worst of the three. The figures have been cribbed from the Press lift out I mentioned above (which cites their sources as CERA, EQC, Stats NZ and SCIRT.) The figures are pretty much the same, though with some generous rounding up (the Press says 104km of wastewater pipe, National rounds up to 111km.) Again, the problem here is context. 21 km of fresh water pipe means nothing if you don’t tell us how much they have to repair. If there is 25km to repair, we’re almost there; if there is 1000km, we’ve barely started. SCIRT estimates that there is 51km of water pipe to repair – so almost half way. Pretty good. Wastewater damage is estimated at 528km, so about a fifth. Less good. Roading damage is listed as 1,021km, but the info graphic has gone for square metres of pavement. My suspicion would be that they have used that unit to make it sound more impressive.

The real red herring is the number at the top – $100m on 181 projects. Again, context. A dollar figure is completely useless unless you give us some context. This article in the Press lists infrastructure costs as up to $4 billion – which would mean that only about 1/40th of the job (by monetary value) have been completed in two and half years. Less impressive when you put it that way.

This last one is really ugly and kind of pointless, though I’m not going to argue with it as an info-graphic really. The cordon went up immediately after the quakes because there was an emergency. Then, a few months on, it was up to keep us safe, while they demolished buildings. As the buildings came down, so did the cordon. Many of the buildings that came down were unsafe, many were heritage buildings that could have been saved by a more enlightened dictator. There was another group of buildings that fell into a strange grey area, where they could have probably been fixed if the money (read: the insurance companies) had been right. Whatever happened, they’re gone now. Another way of saying this would be that they’ve demolished 9/10th of a city. Only 1/10th to go!

Final word has to go to Guy Williams, for this fantastic tweet in response to the PM.

We're getting the work done in the rebuild of Christchurch http://t.co/XfABDrgwFl—
John Key (@johnkeypm) February 23, 2013

C Newman from Strowan can suck a big one

There are two far-right people writing letters to the this morning’s Press, claiming the Government package is too generous, and that they have no obligation to buy land (the letters editor has given them the titles “Government Generous” and “Too Generous”). The two letter writers listed their suburbs as “Upper Riccarton” (the unaffected west) and “Strowan” (the word prats from Merivale use to make themselves feel even more elitist). C Newman of Strowan said:

“The Government has been over generous with taxpayers’ money towards the householders of Christchurch, maintaining the myth that the state is there to protect the citizen from nature.”

He goes on to spout some deplorable neoliberal drivel that only someone who had undergone a complete empathy lobotomy could think. If C Newman of Strowan weren’t so clearly prejudiced, he might like to do some research before he puts his bucolic pen to paper. Confident that he* wont bother to do so, I’ll refute some of that crap here.

The second part of his statement above – “maintaining the myth that the state is there to protect the citizen from nature” – has he heard of EQC? It was not set up to literally protect the individual from the effects of nature, but it can do the next best thing. From the Earthquake Commission Act of 1993:

The functions of the Commission are—

(a) to administer the insurance against natural disaster damage provided under this Act

EQC, which is a body that is set up and run soley by the Government of New Zealand, for the people of New Zealand, lists it’s primary function as providing insurance against natural disaster damage. That’s not a myth. It’s in legislation. Publicly available legislation that people like C Newman of Strowan could investigate, if they had the innate curiosity that bigots of the far-right clearly lack. Though I do wonder whether C Newman of Strowan might not qualify as far-right - even those on the hard right would generally agree that if the state is to have any role in the lives of it’s citizens, it is to try and protect them.

David Weusten, of Upper Riccarton writes:

“I applaud the Government on its offer to purchase red-zoned preoperties, as it was under no obligation to do so and has helped minimise the equity destruction that those in the zone face.”

This letter, and that of C Newman of Strowan, imply that the Government has been overly generous, that they are just handing out money willy nilly, bundles of notes to all these undeserving, unhoused people. Again, this is about as far from reality as C Newman of Strowan is. I hate to be a bore, and keep citing the same source, but in this case, the legislation does seem like an appropriate thing to take the time to read. Clause 19, Residential Land:

Subject to any regulations made under this Act and to Schedule 3, where a residential building is deemed to be insured under this Act against natural disaster damage, the residential land on which that building is situated shall, while that insurance of the residential building is in force, be deemed to be insured under this Act against natural disaster damage to the amount (exclusive of goods and services tax) which is the sum of, in the case of any particular damage,—

(a) the value, at the site of the damage, of—

(i) if there is a district plan operative in respect of the residential land, an area of land equal to the minimum area allowable under the district plan for land used for the same purpose that the residential land was being used at the time of the damage; or

(ii) an area of land of 4 000 square metres; or

(iii) the area of land that is actually lost or damaged—

whichever is the smallest; and

(b) the indemnity value of any property referred to in paragraphs (d) and (e) of the definition of the term residential land in section 2(1) that is lost or damaged.

Now, I know there are quite a few words there, and that C Newman of Strowan and others of that persuasion might have trouble getting through them all, so I will summarise it: EQC covers the land under a house. You say “generous”, I say “obligation as defined by law”**. So all this shit about the government being generous, or too generous, is some of the most offensive crap I have ever heard. Ever since the 4th of September, we have been waiting for a land package. We knew that the EQC would pay for land. That’s why we were waiting for a land package. Then, somewhere around the time of the June 13th aftershocks, people seem to have forgotten about this. Then, Generous John Key strolls in to town, offers to buy people’s land, doesn’t bother to remind people that the government was always going to buy the land, and people think he’s the most charitable guy since Allan Hubbard. The Government – whether intentionally or not – has used the word “generous” with regards to their clearly flawed land package offer so frequently that it has now become attached. It’s either very smart, or very cynical, to successfully rebrand your obligations as generosity.

I’m not going to go into all the ways that the package is anything but generous right here – I’m getting angry enough to write another blog about that soon. Suffice it to say that contrary to what C Newman of Strowan thinks, this package will see a large number of people – people from some of our poorest and most vulnerable areas – struggling to re-house themselves in Christchurch. The sad fact of the government response is that the good, hardworking people of the East may end up having to move out of Christchurch, leaving us with a city over-represented by detestable cunts like C Newman of Strowan.

* Halfway through writing this, I realised that C Newman could actually be a woman. I guess I just assumed that someone with such misguided, hateful thoughts could only be an aging, spite-filled man who has little to look forward to in life but the thrill he gets from yelling at his neighbour’s yappy novelty dog. I guess that I have encountered fewer female hard-right nutters in my times. I could be wrong on this.

** I guess you could argue that the legislation doesn’t explicitly state that the EQC will “buy” the land, but it clearly states that the EQC will pay for the cost of it.

John Key’s plan for jobs: more earthquakes

Addressing the National Party regional conference at the weekend, John Key did his usual “shucks, nothing to worry about routine” again. Just like his budget predictions, everything will work out fine. He cited EQC as an example of a “growth business”.

“Look at something like EQC, they’ve gone from having 29 people to something like 1500; that is a growth business.”

That is indeed exponential growth – EQC is now 50 times larger than it was a year ago. By my calculations, we would only need 118* more significant earthquakes until EQC employs the 177,000 people that Key predicted would be employed in the budget last week.

* however, if those 118 earthquakes caused as many deaths as the February quake, then those 21,476 deceased people would provide vacancies that could be filled by other people. Therefore, we’d probably only need around 100 quakes to full employment.