Mathers Mojo: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMathers Mojo: Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9892. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOJO MATHERS (Green): It is my pleasure to take a call on the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Bill. You know it has been 5 long years since the Christchurch earthquakes and the city is still very much in many areas in a bit of a limbo. It feels like time is going past and it is going to be fantastic to actually see the rebuild and things moving forward.I want to acknowledge the hard work of my colleague Eugenie Sage and other MPs who have helped to make this bill a better bill with the Supplementary Order Paper coming up and who have pushed really hard for local leadership and for Regenerate Christchurch to be at the heart of decision making and to have a much greater role in the development and planning of the anchor projects and the residential red zone areas and so on. It is incredibly important that that does happen and it is a relief to be at this point where there has been sufficient accommodation made for these very important issues that have been raised so that we can now support the bill.What I want to focus on—rather than rehashing what everyone else has said before me—is the importance of all these plans for the city incorporating genuine accessibility and universal design principles into the planning the design and the implementation. This is what the people of Christchurch want. It was one of the most popular ideas and common themes that was put forward during the Share an Idea campaign several years ago and it is absolutely critical to social recovery. We have a golden opportunity right now to rebuild Christchurch as the most accessible city in the world. There are absolutely no barriers to stop that from happening given political will local leadership and a genuine commitment to making that happen. It would be a city that is accessible for all—for children for the elderly for parents for the disabled—and it is critical to the social recovery. I have constantly raised this issue—will the city be accessible and will there be a commitment to accessibility implemented and taken on board by the planners and designers at all stages—and repeated assurances have been given to me that all the anchor projects would be accessible and that there would be independent accessibility audits incorporated into every step from design through to implementation.Now we have seen that some anchor projects have been accessible such as the Bus Interchange which is a very good example of that where all sorts of features have been incorporated to make using the Bus Interchange a generally positive and inclusive experience for many users. But there are other areas where they have not got it right and probably the most striking example of that recently was the Margaret Mahy Family Playground. This was a playground that was welcome. People were so excited when it opened. There was just this massive positive vibe and people were going to it and then a few days later there were people saying: “Well actually my child can’t use it. It’s not accessible for children in a wheelchair. There are not enough facilities for people in wheelchairs to use it.”This was an appalling failure and breakdown of the planning process. It was a reversal of what we really want and what we mean by an accessible city. We must not exclude children from that conceptualisation and we must not exclude disabled people. It must be independently audited because you cannot rely on the various design groups having in-house expertise. These projects right from the start must be independently audited. Thank you.