Adams Amy: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
Adams Amy: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — Second Reading In Committee 
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AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) 
: 
 This is the first time Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson that I have had an opportunity to congratulate you on your new role. It is very nice to have you in the Chair this morning. 
I rise to take a call in the second reading debate on the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill. I want to start contribution where I left off in my first reading speech and restate that what this bill is all about is stated in clause 3 the purpose clause. This bill is about providing a mechanism and framework of powers that will be sufficient to allow our Canterbury communities to respond to and recover from the two—arguably three or more—devastating earthquakes that have ripped through our province. The bill provides a framework that of necessity sets up a balance between a timely effective and I am not afraid to say quick—although that is a relative term—response while ensuring that we do engage involve and bring our communities with us. 
Through the course of the select committee process since Tuesday night and through yesterday one submitter was very concerned that some people may feel that “quick and timely response” and “involving the community” are mutually exclusive terms. I have never thought that that was the case; and I do not think that anyone does. I have always been of the view that one can have a quick timely and focused response while still bringing the community along and involving them in the process. But we do have to acknowledge and accept if we are going to make our way through this that that involvement will not mean the agreement of everyone. 
If some people go into this process thinking that if they at the end of the day do not get the outcome they wanted then the process has failed or it has not been democratic or it has not listened to the community then we are all setting ourselves up to fail. So my plea to everyone engaged in this process—community leaders the public of Canterbury central government elected representatives or anyone—is that they accept and be very clear from the outset that the necessary and absolutely central process of engagement will leave some people feeling unhappy with the outcome. 
Much has been said about the great work that has been done in the Waimakariri and Selwyn districts since 4 September and I concur; it has been great work. But even in those provinces some people right now still do not think that the process and the agreements that have been reached are right and they will grizzle and say things should have gone a different way. That will happen and in my view the trick to this balancing act is to work out how and when one draws the line under that process of listening and engaging and gets into the “making decisions and making things happen” state. I have no doubt at all that the process of finding when one should draw the line under discussions finding the point where a decision has to be made and acted on will be the crunch point going forward. 
I come back to some of what we heard from submitters over the course of the last 24 hours. I was very heartened that overwhelmingly what we heard from the submitters whom we spoke to—the key stakeholders in this process I guess one could say—was a sense of positivity agreement and collegiality and an acceptance of what actually needed to happen. 
We can see certainly from the Labour minority view and from the tenor of the select committee report that there is a general sense of acceptance that a centralised framework of enhanced powers is absolutely necessary. I do not think I have heard anything from across the House that suggests that that is not the case and I think that is a tremendously important point to get on the record. We do have in this House a very good political consensus around the fact that there needs to be a centralised system of enhanced powers reaching across the Canterbury region if we are to get the sort of recovery the sort of timely focused and involved process we must have in Canterbury. Let us not forget that. 
I am not saying for one minute that every submitter thought everything in the bill was absolutely perfect. They all came with a number of suggestions and comments as to things that could be looked at. I appreciated that and a lot of that was very valid information but the thing I really respected them for was that even where they thought changes should be made they approached the process in a sense of positive collaboration and constructive input. That is the absolute tenor that we will have to stick with all the way through this process. 
A couple of comments from submitters really stuck with me during the select committee process; the truncated process that it obviously had to be. One was the submission from Mark Solomon of Ngai Tahu and he has already been quoted by Heather Roy in her contribution. He talked about the fact that yes these are extraordinary powers but it is an extraordinary and unprecedented situation. The other thing he said that I think is worth repeating in this forum is that these are extraordinary powers but they are not unchecked powers. 
There is a comprehensive system of checks and balances on these powers and to suggest that it is a carte blanche operation is an absolute farce and would be completely leading people down the wrong path. There are considerable checks on the exercise of these powers and what is more we have had a bit of a trial run in the response to the 4 September earthquake where we have seen the use of this sort of open-ended power work remarkably well even to the point where the initial critics of that process have been saying it has been working pretty well. So we are not going into this blind. We have had a dry run. It has worked very well and I think that is why we are seeing so many of the stakeholders engaging with us in a constructive way accepting that this is necessary and wanting to talk with us around the edges of that. 
I will comment on a couple of the points made in the contributions we have heard from around the House this morning. I thank Dr Kennedy Graham for his contribution and the way he approached the select committee process. Obviously we do not agree on a lot of things but I particularly appreciated the fact that Dr Graham approached the debate in a constructive professional and polite manner at all times. I certainly appreciated that from him. As I understood it Dr Graham’s view was that extraordinary powers are needed only in the civil defence response period and I cannot accept that. I cannot accept that because I am seeing in my communities every day situations where lives and families are at risk because of potential delay. 
Just this week I have been working with one constituent in my area whose family has a business that they have run for 35 years in a rural community. They were well insured they had 12 months’ loss-of-business cover but they are now 7 months into that cover and they are still waiting for consent to get their dangerous red-stickered property demolished so that they can begin a rebuild. The owners want it demolished the insurance company wants it demolished and two structural engineers have agreed that it is dangerous and needs to be demolished yet since 4 September they have been battling to get a demolition consent for no other reason than that the resources to deal with this appropriately are simply not there at a local council level. 
That family is 7 months into this process they have 5 months left before they face bankruptcy and the only thing holding them up is the red tape and bureaucracy of the business-as-usual process. I cannot sit by and watch that business that family supporting two generations go into bankruptcy because the bureaucracy is not set up to say: “Clearly the building has to come down so get it done; bring it down.” So I do not accept that we do not need continued extraordinary powers and I do not agree with Dr Graham that we can just leave it to councils to get on with it. 
We have four councils in this region that have to come together and work together. We have to ensure there are centralised coordinated powers and we have to ensure there is a framework of ultimate power that can be exercised if the normal processes do not work. That is what this bill does and that is why I support it. In the words of Mark Solomon from Ngai Tahu: “When we are rebuilding Canterbury we have to remember that we have to get on with this. We have to do it for us and for our children.” What we know from all the international evidence is that a fast rebuild is the best thing for our communities socially environmentally culturally and economically. We have to get on with this. We have to do it well and we cannot afford the delays that business as usual would bring. I commend the bill to the House.