O'Rourke Denis: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 01 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19059. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First):A good choice Mr Chairman thank you. There is now a very large question over whether the Government resources allocated in the Canterbury recovery are anywhere near adequate. The member Nicky Wagner who has just spoken constantly looks at the Christchurch recovery through rose-coloured glasses seeing only some of the good things—and yes there are good things—but never acknowledging the problems the many problems that are still with us in Christchurch.We all know that billions more will be needed for the recovery—the Prime Minister himself has said so—but there is nothing to indicate that in what the Government has allocated currently for the rebuild. It has been 3½ years since the February 2011 earthquake. We are now in a fourth winter. Thousands of homes in fact are still unrepaired. Bare-section and self-insured landowners are taking the Government to the Supreme Court over the illegal offers made to them and the legality of the red-zoning itself is in question. Dozens of homes are still expected to be flooded yet again before the winter is over. Port Hills residents are still in limbo awaiting a decision living in rented accommodation while their own homes rot. A massive housing crisis in which people simply cannot find an affordable home to buy is getting worse by the day. For those who need to rent—well that is a nightmare. Even if they can find a home to rent they would have to spend something like $1000 a week for an average three-bedroom house. If that is not a housing crisis then I do not know what is.But I especially want to talk about the Earthquake Commission and its treatment of the owners of units and multi-unit dwellings. No Minister could be satisfied with the progress of the commission in the settlement or disposition of the claims made in respect of multi-unit dwellings. Where the units and multi-unit dwellings are assessed by the commission as being under the $100000 cap per unit but the damage claimed is greater than this and when the cost to repair the building as a whole would exceed the total of the Earthquake Commission - assessed damage for all individual units together then that situation is currently in an absolute shambles. In far too many cases the Earthquake Commission is resisting a realistic sum for repairs of whole buildings where they are multi-unit buildings.Only yesterday in my office there was a case where the Earthquake Commission had failed to assess adequately the cost of repairs to all of the units in one small six-unit building in the central city. It had failed to offer nearly enough for the repairs to obvious damage to each unit but it had also failed to assess the building properly as a whole leaving the owners to take legal action. In that case the total assessment was only $350000 which is clearly grossly insufficient to repair all six units so the total for Earthquake Commission purposes had to go under the $600000 cap for all six together. And that did not take into account repairs that needed to be made to the building as a whole to make it leak-proof again or to the land and driveways and many other issues. The inadequate assessment by the Earthquake Commission in those cases means that the private insurer takes no part and therefore the owners are left to battle the Earthquake Commission on their own.Private insurers would be much better taking over the process in those cases for the full repair or replacement of the whole building but this is prevented by the Earthquake Commission’s intransigence and inadequate technical assessment. Its only interest appears to be to find a way to justify keeping the costs under the cap. The Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery as well as the Earthquake Commission seems careless about the people who are caught in this trap of an inadequate offer by the commission for repairs. The commission insists that units are under cap when they are clearly not leaving the owners to pay tens of thousands of dollars to engineers and assessors to do the commission’s job for it as well as to pay lawyers’ fees.