Lianne Dalziel
Christchurch East MP

12 September 2011

Speech to Canterbury University Law Students

Recovery 101: Transparency & Accountability

I have called my lecture Recovery 101: Transparency & Accountability. As successfully passing the 101 course is fundamental to progressing to stages 2 & 3 at university, so too are accountability and transparency fundamental to recovery. Without them we cannot progress.

After a disaster people need to know what has happened and what that will mean for them, their family, their community, their city. Unless the powers-that-be see affected communities as central to the recovery effort and are willing to engage with them in an open and meaningful way, then it is hard to see how recovery can be successful.

If I were grading the current arrangements against these basic criteria, they would be struggling to get a C in Recovery 101.

I should highlight that there is an issue about Christchurch being the classic ‘tale of two cities’, meaning it is possible to live in Christchurch and not know the reality of those in the hard hit eastern suburbs. It is also possible to fly into Christchurch, do your business and leave wondering what all the fuss was about. The letters to the editor from people outside the red zone suggest to me that that the focus of the government’s communication strategy is not those who live in the affected communities, but the wider community, and it is being effective.

I believe that this failure to develop a co-ordinated communication strategy that has the affected communities at its heart has been the biggest single contributor to the challenges we now face. I am over blaming the government for this, because I am accused of politicising the disaster every time I suggest they could do better. And I am over blaming the Christchurch City Council for its contribution to this failure, because they have just reappointed as their Chief Executive, the man who thought it was ‘business as usual’ for the council once the first civil defence emergency ended last year.

I am very keen however that we learn the lesson that the sequence of failures teach us, so that we can be better prepared in the future and so that others may learn from our mistakes. When I talk about the sequence of failures I do not include the incredible response effort in the CBD or the infrastructure workforce who have worked night and day to get our services on and then maintain them.

The first lesson to learn is “don’t rush”. In an emergency situation you actually have time to consider your recovery options.

There is a difference between response and recovery. The immediate response is well-rehearsed – people step into pre-assigned roles and take charge. They issue instructions and those designated to respond do so. It is a militaristic command and control model and it works.

While that is happening the recovery planning processes kick into gear, but they are behind the scenes quietly gathering the key players together to lead the recovery effort under the four task-group headings: Economic Environment, the Social Environment, the Built Environment and the Natural Environment – with the community in the centre. In Christchurch it worked like clockwork and the framework was in place within 48 hours of the September earthquake.

You might be surprised to learn that, but we have an international best practice recovery plan already written for Canterbury and the people who were meant to make it work did so. So what went wrong?

Unfortunately, it was the legislation creating the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission (CERC) which was introduced under urgency, 10 days after the first earthquake, and the lack of leadership in the Christchurch City Council. The Commission was independent but had no power – it could only make recommendations to the government. As a result nothing of any substance happened to advance our recovery from the moment it was up and running.

Unfortunately this wasn’t picked up by the media before the end of the year, so it wasn’t until the beginning of this year that questions started to be asked. The Press finally stepped up to the plate and ran a series of articles – the first of which, published on the 5th of February, being entitled “Who’s in Charge?” By the end of the week, the Mayor had called a summit of all of the elected representatives from community board members to MPs and the wider community – this would have been a more worthy enterprise on the Mayor’s part except that it was the first time that we had been called together in the 51/2 months since the earthquake; and the purpose was so that we could all “speak with one voice”. This summit was held on the 19th February – three days before the devastating earthquake that none of us was expecting, but which changed everything.

The February earthquake saw a longer state of emergency of just over two months. And because the consequences were so severe the Prime Minister and the Minister in Charge of Earthquake Recovery reiterated commitments that should have been set to one side. I think one of the things that I have learned is that we must be very careful in these situations about raising expectations. When people are suffering it is a natural instinct to offer all the support that you can. But you have to be really careful when you are a decision-maker because you may be called upon to stand by the offers you make.

On February 22 we should have been told it was a game-changer and that we were going to have to start from scratch.

That ‘all bets were off’ and that the government would have to review all of the decisions that had been made. Unfortunately the failure to develop a trusted information channel with the affected communities prior to February meant they had no way of communicating with them even if they had wanted to.

The one channel of communication that had been effective were the community meetings that MPs had been able to organise, which involved engineers, officials from EQC, insurers, PMOs…these were freely engaged in the process. But MPs are not the preferred channel for information this year – and besides which we too are struggling to find the answers to the questions our constituents are asking.

It was after the national state of emergency was lifted that we saw the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission morph into the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) – a government department based in Christchurch and controlled from Wellington - meaning we had simply replaced an independent body that had no power with a powerful body that was not independent.

And that along with the failure to develop a communication strategy remains the major weakness of the recovery structure.

Cabinet signed off on a draft recovery strategy for CERA last Monday – one year and one day after the first earthquake.

It has some of the right words, but it completely fails to recognise the need to join things up. Chapter 9 of the 10 Chapter draft refers to the principles of recovery, collaboration and community engagement. It is as if these fundamentals were after-thoughts and yet they lie at the heart of disaster recovery – they should be sitting immediately after the vision and the goals. I have heard the Minister express frustration about community engagement holding things up, but all the literature says that the opposite is true. Communities need to own their recovery; it is not something that can be done for them. They should be at the heart of the recovery; not the penultimate chapter.

And then we have the disconnect with the CBD. The Christchurch City Council has an imaginative plan out for consultation which closes this Friday. But it seems to me that we need to know what the geotechs are saying about the land before we reimagine the city. We don’t know whether we will be able to rebuild in all the same places or what foundations and structures would be required. What about the owners of the buildings; how have they been engaged in this process? In addition there is a disconnect between the CBD and the rest of the city – how can we engage in a CBD plan when our futures are so uncertain in the east and around our cliff-side communities? And how do we integrate the CBD with the rest of the city when there is such a disconnect between the east and the west?

There is a lot of public disagreement about how things are being handled. Those unaffected by the announcements think it’s great; those affected are reeling with the news – good or bad.

Imagine yourself as one affected by the announcement about the future of the land where you live, knowing that decisions about your property were made behind closed doors without any consultation with you, leaked to the media and then announced at a stage managed media conference that you were not allowed to attend. What if you want to stay in your community, but don’t know why it was deemed unsuitable for rebuilding?

And the question is being asked again: Who is in charge? Bob Parker, Roger Sutton & Gerry Brownlee each has their role.

Bob Parker has been consigned to a figurehead leading a Council that can be overruled by CERA with the stroke of a pen. Roger Sutton heads CERA, but is overseen by a minister who controls his every move. That leaves Gerry Brownlee in charge. Allowing a politician to effectively run the show goes against all the international literature on disaster recovery.

All of the examples of recovery structures that the Cabinet papers say CERA is modeled on all involve a layer of governance between the politicians and the management of the recovery body, giving arms length independence from state and federal governments.

This is what impressed me the most when I visited the Queensland Reconstruction Authority, which has been working collaboratively with the affected 73 local authorities and their communities. Looking at their achievements, it is clear that we have paid only lip service to international best practice here in Christchurch.

Grantham faced the reality that they could not rebuild a significant part of their town after the February floods – so the government purchased enough land to create a subdivision, which they developed. They balloted the interested homeowners and presented them with a land swap. They will be moving in before Christmas. I know the scale is different, but what a powerful message that will send through the state.

This is very important, because we need to learn the lessons of our experience. Entrenching recovery planning & resilience building into our nation’s disaster preparedness is extremely important. As I said it is written into our civil defence & emergency management regime, but it is not built into our preparedness training. We prepare for the response effort, but we do not prepare for recovery. This is something I believe we need to learn from this disaster.

I see a very strong link with what has been picked up in the international discourse under the headings of emergence & resilience.

The concept of emergence describes governments being increasingly called upon to serve in highly complex and uncertain circumstances, where public issues regularly emerge as surprises and require equally emergent responses. This transforms the role of government and the relationship between government and society. It emphasises the need for more agile, innovative and adaptive approaches to governance and public administration.

The concept of resilience acknowledges that notwithstanding our best efforts, unforeseen events will arise and unpredictable shocks will occur. The role of government extends to promoting the resilience of individuals, communities and society.

At its essence these concepts promote the ideal of partnership between government and society in a way that offers a real platform for recovery.

The challenge is for central and local government to stop thinking of their citizens as nothing more than taxpayers and ratepayers and as consumers of the services they provide. These are the descriptors, which define a much better role for central and local government:

• Enablers within a framework of collective responsibility;
• Partners who use their power and that of the State to support the contributions of others; partnership depending as it does on trust, goodwill and mutual respect;
• Facilitators who convene citizens and organisations to build communities of purpose, to identify the areas of risk and greatest potential;
• Collaborative actors who work with others to coordinate decisions and to achieve concerted actions;
• Stewards of the collective interest with the power to intervene and to course-correct when the public interest demands it;
• Leaders to achieve convergence and a common sense of purpose.

Thinking of those roles I ask these questions:

• Why would you put 6-10,000 people into the property market at the same time and not expect the government to have a role?
• Why would you essentially tell the insurance market what its clients’ bottom line was, before they even started the negotiations, by making public the amount the government will offer before the insurers have made their offer?
• Why would you release a recovery strategy that talks about principles, when you are denying people access to information about the geotechnical status of their land, the specific factors that led the government to make the decisions it did, the EQC calculations for land damage and the availability of properties supposedly coming to market?

When we return to the fundamentals, transparency and accountability, these three questions sum up the concerns that I have and they are real. Here are the principles in the Draft Recovery Strategy:

• Kotahitaka/Work together – communities work together through good communication and strong partnerships, and recognise everyone can contribute to the recovery.
• Manaakitaka/Care about each other – the recovery utilises integrated and collaborative approaches that leverage, enhance and promote stronger, more supportive and connected communities.
• Inspire – decisions inspire people to participate in recovery and contribute to the future of the region.
• Innovate – encouraging new ideas and creative, cultural and resourceful approaches to solve problems.
• Kaitiakitaka/Look to the future – development and recovery initiatives are undertaken in a sustainable manner and take account of climate change, to meet the needs of future generations.
• Enhance – opportunities are embraced to enrich people’s quality of life, and recovery builds on established knowledge and aspirations set out in existing strategic planning documents.
• Balance – decisions must balance the need for positive action, speedy responses and providing certainty, against the risk of short-term economic, environmental and social hardship, and compromising long-term objectives.
• Prepare – building more resilient communities and infrastructure to better prepare for future disasters, and ensure community safety and wellbeing now and in the future.
• Efficiency – resources are used wisely to ensure the recovery is affordable, happens in a timely manner and delivers value for money.
• Holistic – all aspects of people’s needs, psychological, physical and social are taken into account and seen as a whole; and decisions consider connections and dependencies to ensure recovery happens in an integrated manner.
• Keep it simple – the issues are complex, therefore communication must be clear and stick to the facts and give landowners, residents, and businesses the information they need.
• Best available information – information, including spatial information, is shared and reused, to support better decision-making, allow more transparent processes, and enable greater public participation.
• Best practice – use leading national and international evidence and guidance.

No wonder these are at the back of the document. Chapter Ten, the last chapter, is Monitoring, Reporting & Review.

Before you think I have nothing positive to say, let me conclude with this. We actually have here in New Zealand world-class experts on disaster recovery and building resilience in organisations and communities.

This says to me that we could turn this around.

If we were to adopt the principles I have just read from the draft recovery strategy and give them expression at every decision-making layer, then we would equip the affected communities with the skills they need to own their own recovery, leaving them with the legacy of confidence and self-reliance. And that to me would give meaning to the disaster that has cost us all so much.

ENDS

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