Burns Brendon: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Burns Brendon: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:18148] 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson; I will commence this contribution by acknowledging your elevation to the Assistant Speaker’s role. I congratulate you on that. I am sure you will serve this House very well. 
I acknowledge the role played by the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee Chris Auchinvole in difficult circumstances over the last 48 hours in chairing that rapid select committee process truncated as it was. I also acknowledge that the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Gerry Brownlee at least allowed us that truncated process. That was a step forward. 
In his opening comments on the second reading of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill Mr Brownlee asked whether we should go slowly or at some pace. I think that by that he was suggesting that if we had a process for community engagement it would slow the recovery process in Canterbury. I have to say to him that I do not believe that those are mutually exclusive. In the bill at least now the reference to community participation has been moved from the very rear of the bill—at clause 66—to the front of the bill but this is not actually about community consultation; it is about community engagement. It is about letting Cantabrians feel they really have a chance to have a say. 
I need to point out that to date the process for participation has—to use a new word in the Christchurch vernacular—been somewhat munted. If we consider that in the select committee process 12 submitters were invited to offer their views on the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill we know that at least half of those submitters had not received copies of the bill before about 5 p.m. on Tuesday. Indeed we saw the farcical situation where it took my colleague the Hon Clayton Cosgrove’s raising the matter in the House on Tuesday afternoon—after the bill had been tabled in the House but before it was even on the parliamentary website—before members of the Christchurch City Council were able to access copies of the bill. 
The deputy mayor told us in her submission yesterday that she heard about the bill on the radio. That is not satisfactory. The council’s solicitor told us yesterday that he got a draft of the bill 2 weeks ago because he heard about it and put pressure on the Government to ensure that he got a copy which he received late in the afternoon. He had to have it back by 10 o’clock the next morning and he worked overnight on that bill in draft. He had to do that because the chief executive of the Christchurch City Council would allow only him to be the one nominated person who was able to see the draft which raises the question: did the Mayor of Christchurch even see the draft of the bill? This is not consultation. 
The Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery has taken out newspaper advertisements proclaiming that he is engaged in wide consultation on the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. I say to the Minister that his version of wide consultation may involve looking in his mirror; it does not seem to involve actually engaging with the community. I would have thought that given this is the second crack at Canterbury earthquake recovery legislation and at setting up a body to deal with the issues lessons might be learnt that real gains are to be had from taking the community with us and allowing key stakeholders to be consulted rather than having them learn about it on the radio and rely on members of Parliament to raise the issue of getting the bill on to the parliamentary website so that it can be seen then having people work through the night so that they could make submissions on the process. To me that is not what community engagement is about. 
I note that if we are talking about consultation even since the earthquake itself a school in my electorate Linwood College has had a commissioner installed very very rapidly with no process of consultation. That does not auger well for the process we have in front of us at the moment but we will try to do our very best to make sure that community engagement will actually take place under this bill because it is about making sure that our communities are empowered and are able. Our communities can work rapidly—they can work rapidly. 
Nobody—nobody—wants to impede the progress of our city in recovering from our nation’s worst natural disaster. But as Dean Peter Beck of the Christchurch Cathedral said in his submission to the select committee yesterday this recovery needs to be Christchurch-driven. It needs to be Christchurch-driven and not Wellington-driven. That is why we need the community to be involved; we do not need to have assembled a Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority of Wellington bureaucrats. We need to have the community involved because as Dean Peter noted to the committee yesterday there is much anxiety. This is not the first quake; this is the second quake and many people have been living with the consequences now for 7 long hard months. We are heading into what may be a vicious winter given we have had a long hot summer and that is why we need to make sure the community’s voice comes through loud and clear. 
As the dean also noted we need to engage the heart and spirit of the Christchurch community not just to have the recovery process top-down. It needs to be bottom-up otherwise as he noted finally in respect of his comments cynics might say that the community forum encapsulated in the bill could be just something of a sideshow. It would be a tragedy for us all if that were the case. We must make sure Christchurch people are involved. They are strong-willed they are community-focused and they need to be very much at the heart of this bill. 
I will turn to the issues of the central business district of Christchurch which is at the heart of my community and which is the focus of much of the bill—and appropriately so given that it is the commercial heart of our city and our province. Some very big issues are looming in respect of insurance demolition and those who are to pay for that demolition. Just yesterday the controller announced that another 123 buildings need either full or partial demolition and that most of them are in the central business district. That is on top of 184 other buildings so already more than 300 buildings have been earmarked for demolition. Most of them are outside the red zone. As John Hamilton the civil defence controller indicated that list will grow by several hundred. We may be talking about the thick end of a thousand buildings needing demolition so it is absolutely crucial that this bill gets the issues right. 
I note that one of the parties that submitted on the bill the Insurance Council of New Zealand was among those parties that had not seen the bill until it was tabled in the House yesterday. That council is the representative body of the insurance industry and it has very valid concerns about the issues of who will meet the costs of demolition. Of course huge buildings in our central business district may need to be imploded in order to be brought down or we may need some other rapid process to take them down. I am thinking of the Hotel Grand Chancellor and Clarendon Towers. The signals are that to take them down by conventional process will take months and months and that that will impact on the central business district’s ability to recover. The potential for exploding those buildings and bringing them down also raises issues about buildings in their shadow and potentially of damage being brought down on undamaged buildings. 
We have huge issues and that is why this bill is so important in terms of its complex detail. That is why I made the point that we firstly needed to have some genuine participation in and consultation about the bill and then we needed to ensure that the processes for engagement with the community—the business community and the people in affected suburbs—were genuine and that people were able to have real input into the running of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority from there on. 
I note that organisations such as IconiC Interests in Conserving the Identity of Christchurch which was formed after the bill was drafted are standing ready to be involved and they want to be involved. I will give members an example with which those organisations have already been involved. Anthony Gough owns two buildings in Hereford Street both of which were demolished without any consultation with or reference to him. One of those buildings needed to come down and the status of the other was questionable but both buildings happened to be painted the same colour and both came down. That is why we need this bill to be absolutely precise. We need to be clear about the processes and to make sure that people have input into those processes which will ensure that we do not have further unwarranted demolitions like that. 
I will work as the MP for Christchurch Central to do all I can in the next few hours to improve this bill. I will work for my constituents in both the central business district and the affected suburbs of Christchurch Central. I will do my very best to make the best of this Canterbury earthquake recovery legislation but I will do so with some considerable anxiety given the lack of engagement that the Government has had to date with interested parties.