Dalziel Lianne: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Dalziel Lianne: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
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Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I wish to ask the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery to reflect on the purpose clause of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill. I want him to look at clause 3(b) and I want to make this point to him. I know that the Minister will have to accept that I have tried to engage with him on issues of community participation right from the outset. I tabled a letter that I wrote to him on 28 September last year and his reply on 24 December suggested that we had reached some meeting of the minds about how important community engagement was. Yet I read in the bill that one of its purposes in clause 3(b) is “to enable community participation in the planning of the recovery of affected communities without impeding a focused timely and expedited recovery:”. But therein lies the problem. The problem is that the Minister does not understand what the Waimakariri District Council told us at the Local Government and Environment Committee yesterday which was that community participation in its recovery actually promotes “a focused timely and expedited recovery”. It does not impede it. The use of the negative expression “without impeding” implies that community participation could impede recovery when in fact it could promote it. In fact it will promote it but what will impede progress for our communities’ recovery is the failure to acknowledge the essential critical role that our communities have in their recovery. The purposes of the Act include community participation only in the planning of the recovery which is nonsense. Of course communities have to be involved in the planning but they have to be involved in the delivery as well. Otherwise we will not have meaningful engagement. That is what I want this debate to be about—not just about up and down backwards and forwards batting to and fro. I would like meaningful engagement with the Minister. I have tried to engage in that right from the very outset and I have found on instances that we I thought reached a meeting of the minds particularly on this issue. Yet I read this bill with great disappointment. 
The Minister stated that anyone who disagreed with the proposal that is before us was somehow holding up progress. Well I do not want that to be the implication and I am glad that the Minister is shaking his head because he is suggesting— 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: Where did I say it? 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Well the Minister used the expression earlier on that if we were in any way holding people back we were not thinking about the people who were living in the damaged houses and on the damaged streets. 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: I didn’t say that. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Yes I heard the member say that because I was thinking that he was referring to me. The Minister was talking about my neighbours. But this is the issue and this is the lesson. 
When the Minister put out the statement about what the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority was going to be he talked about the fact that the Government had looked very carefully at what had happened overseas. The Government quoted the particular disasters that this authority was having reference to. It said that it had “looked at international experience of recovery from natural disasters including Cyclone Tracey … Hurricane Katrina … Black Sunday bushfires … and Floods Queensland Australia 2011.” I find it interesting that the Minister’s reference to when he started looking at recovery included something that had happened in 2011 because the need for recovery planning was actually derived from the first earthquake in 2010 and was exacerbated by the second earthquake. 
Nobody disagrees that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Commission was put in place to do the regional coordination that would normally have been done under the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management regime. We understand that the commission would have required additional powers in order to take over the role that is now placed with this Government department the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. This is where I think the Minister has gone wrong. He has not studied any of those examples because all of those examples have arms-length Crown entities which are separate from the Government. They are not Government departments. They are separate from but connected to the Government with a board sitting between the political animal that is the Government and the organisation that has to develop the recovery model. 
People are saying that there is a need for an organisational culture and that is why we on this side of the Chamber are saying that we will make this work—because it has to work. There is no alternative. But the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority is not the structure we would have chosen because the organisational culture we require has to translate the intention into reality—that is there has to be an understanding of and a commitment to shaping the recovery process as a process that engages and empowers local communities. I think that the words “engagement” and “empowerment” are fundamental to understanding any of the lessons that are learnt from any of those natural disasters. So when we take that we have to build an organisational culture that translates that into reality which I believe and the Minister has been advised is a challenge of gargantuan proportions given the tendency to think that minimal consultation can substitute for authentic community engagement. I know that that advice has gone to Government members and they have to think about what it means. A commitment to authentic participatory recovery involves significant resource and timing implications that need to be explicitly recognised. That is why there is an imperative about this engagement process and participation of the community has to be at its heart. This is where I think the Minister again misunderstands the lesson of Hurricane Katrina—and I made this point the day before yesterday—that we need to reconcile the need to marshal the authority of the State and the entrepreneurship of the market to rebuild quickly. They are important and we have to take that into consideration. Yes this organisational structure will do that but there is an organisational structure that would do it better. But that is by the by; we cannot debate that now because the structure was put in place 2 weeks ago. But the balancing requirement with that is the necessity to plan in an inclusive deliberative innovative and transformative manner. 
One of the issues that came out of Hurricane Katrina was the fact that unless we identify what was called the missing story in the Katrina debacle and unless we look at the historic choices that were made and address those—physical development public risk community resilience and sustainability—the lesson we learn is that the recovery process is to see pre-event vulnerability simply re-entrenched and therefore the opportunity to reduce disaster risk is lost. Who knows about what those pre-event vulnerabilities are? It is the community itself that knows the answer to that question and unless communities are at the heart of this process there will be a serious risk that we will not see the benefits of the deliberative innovative and transformative processes we are encouraged to adopt through Hurricane Katrina’s mistakes. We need to lock those into the legislation and I have some amendments that I will be putting forward in the House that I hope the Government will look at. They will bring that to the fore. 
The Government has also talked about the community forum as its representation of the importance of engagement with local community interests through the recovery process referencing international experience. Can I say that a hand-picked group of people does not meet international best practice at all; in fact it runs the serious risk that the Government will re-entrench all of the pre-existing problems we have. If the Minister seriously looks at the experience of Hurricane Katrina he will see that it was discovered that the vulnerable populations in New Orleans had all of their interests superseded by those who already had the power the status and the ability to engage with the Government at every level. That is the problem. Unless the Minister understands that he has to enable and empower the communities that have those pre-existing vulnerabilities then he himself will be responsible for what occurs. 
All of the international literature tells us that recovery is an opportunity for reconciliation restoration and renewal and that it is not just a rebuilding project. The literature tells us that practical political and moral challenges are required to be balanced with deliberation and speed through leadership and collaboration and it must involve local people because it is their recovery. There is one expression that I have learnt from reading the literature: “The wisdom of the community always exceeds the knowledge of the experts.” I think we need to learn that lesson and we need to learn it fast.