Woods Megan: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10502. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I would like to take a call on two votes within this sector—the Vote Canterbury Earthquake Recovery and the Earthquake Commission within this. We have heard the traditional rubbish from Government members about what a fantastic job the Canterbury rebuild is and the amount of money being put into there and what a positive effect that is on New Zealand’s economic development. Well there is no denying that the rebuild of Canterbury has had a stimulatory effect on the economy. There is no denying that but this is the year when the Canterbury rebuild is forced to cease to become a net generator of growth within our economy.One cannot help but fear the way that Canterbury and the rebuild of Canterbury and Christchurch is slipping down this Government’s agenda because it is not that source of growth any more. Sure there will still be money spent in our region and it still will be good but it is not going to be driving economic growth in this country in the same way that it has been since 2011. The Canterbury earthquake recovery portfolio has lurched from problem to problem under the leadership of Gerry Brownlee. We have wide open spaces and wastelands in our city where Government action was meant to be happening. It simply has not been the case that the Government has performed in the way that it should. Years on only five out of the 12 anchor projects even have business cases completed. The anchor projects were meant to be the things within the central city that anchored the recovery—that provided the stimulus for private enterprise to build around and to fuel that development. Well the anchor projects have become more of a weight and a millstone in the centre of Christchurch rather than having a stimulatory effect.What we have are delays and uncertainty and these delays and uncertainty from Government are actually causing capital flight from Canterbury. We are hearing on the ground in Christchurch all the time about vast sums of capital that is leaving Canterbury because the risk and the uncertainty is far too much for those investors to bear. There are fantastic things happening in Christchurch—there are wonderful things happening within the central city—but they certainly are more than likely to be something the Government has nothing to do with. Where the Government has touched something it is subject to delays and repairs. Just last week we saw that Treasury gave the Canterbury earthquake recovery—and specifically in the central city—the worst rating of any other Government expenditure on capital in this country.And how did the Minister respond? Well when I was 13 years old if I had gone home and blamed the report writer for a bad report my parents would not have bought it. But what we had from the Minister was a tantrum about Treasury rather than him owning up and saying: “Yes things haven’t gone so well. We haven’t seen the kind of progress that we would like to see in central Christchurch. We haven’t seen the development that we need and 5½ years on we are behind schedule. But we’re entering a new phase and I’d like to think that we can get on and do this.” No we saw the usual bluster from the Minister rather than owning the problem and this has been part of the problem all the way through. What we have is a Minister who has presided over a Government department that has spent money telling Cantabrians that everything is OK when the blindingly obvious around them is that this is not the case.In the final part of my contribution I want to turn my attention to the Earthquake Commission. This is quite frankly something we must learn a lesson from. We can see we have gone through yet another financial year where we have huge numbers of complaints. We have re-repairs on re-repairs occurring. We see the sale of people’s property in Canterbury falling through because of shoddy and dodgy earthquake repairs the first time. And still we have a Government that refuses to open its ears to open its eyes and to understand that we must learn from these mistakes. What we have been through in Canterbury is not something that we ever want to see anyone in any other part of this country go through again but this is a Government that is intent on not learning from those errors—not learning how we can do this better. This is something that we simply must face up to by having an independent inquiry—