Dyson Ruth: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — First Reading 
Dyson Ruth: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill — First Reading 
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Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I begin my contribution in this debate by acknowledging those who lost their lives in the quake of 22 February. It is very important for me that we hold those people in our hearts as we move forward to rebuild our region. Many others in Canterbury have lost their homes or their jobs or both. Some still have their jobs some still have their homes intact but they have lost their confidence. 
The Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Bill is the next chance that we have as a Parliament and particularly for the Canterbury members of Parliament as local leaders to light the flame of hope for people in our patch. The bill does a lot of things. It gives extraordinary powers to the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery and sets up a new multi-agency Government department. There will be criticisms of whatever we end up with but I give our commitment—reinforcing the points that my colleagues Clayton Cosgrove and Lianne Dalziel have already made and I know that Brendan Burns will make as well—that Labour will work alongside people of any and all political persuasions to get our region up and running again. We want to work with our elected representatives our councillors and our community boards which must have a role but are not mentioned in the legislation. We want to work with our residents associations and the organisations that have sprung up—like the many springs that have literally sprung up around our city since the two quakes—to take up the challenge of supporting members of our community who need support. We need to do this together in order to get it right. The future of our city is too important an issue for any of us to waste time or energy on political point-scoring or on leaving talented people out of the loop of being part of this recovery process. 
In that vein I urge the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery to listen carefully to this debate and to listen carefully to the contributions that submitters will make tomorrow. His press statement today stated that he would be making only minor changes to the legislation as it goes through under urgency between now and Thursday. It is very frustrating to hear that sort of comment from a Minister. It is very hard to see how anyone from Canterbury can go to that select committee tomorrow with any confidence that they will make a blind bit of difference. That is an arrogant way to treat people who are putting up their hands to be part of the recovery. That is an arrogant way to treat people who have already gone through a lot but who are prepared to take the next step to step up to the mark where we need them to be. For the Minister to say that he will give people 24 hours’ notice to come along to the select committee but by the way that he will make some minor changes is not the way that we should be going into this process. It is too important. My region is too important for the Minister or any of his colleagues to trample over the views of people from that region. It is not acceptable for them to be treated like that and I urge him to give openness and democracy and real recovery a decent chance. 
I will make three points that are in my view vital to the success of our recovery. The first point is blindingly obvious I would have thought but tragically it is not reflected in the legislation. It is that the voice of our communities of Canterbury must be heard and the people in our communities must be the drivers of the recovery of our city and our region. We are the people who want to live play and work in our city. We care about it. We are more passionate more argumentative and more opinionated than any other group of people in our country. We want to have a say and we will have a say. I want the Minister to understand that and I want the legislation to reflect it. 
The second point I will make is that the process has to be open and transparent. There cannot be any secret deals. There cannot be meetings behind closed doors. There cannot be any feeling of suspicion about this. We need an open and transparent process. We need to know what is happening because it is our place where it is happening. This is our life our home our city and our region. We have the right to know what decisions are being made. The fact that we have a multi-agency Government department with one Minister is not a good start to an open and transparent process. 
The third point I will make is that the recovery must be at a good pace. We will all have different ideas along the way but none of us wants this to be slow. It has already been a long 7 months and for many an even longer 7 weeks so we want this process to be good. Again the multi-agency Government department may not be the most nimble structure to put in place and that is a very generous way of expressing my concern that this may become a grindingly slow bureaucratic process. We cannot afford that. I do want the pace to be reasonable—I do not want it to be slow—but in my view it is a much wiser choice to have a considered approach that includes the views and the aspirations of the citizens of our region rather than a rushed job that we all live to regret. I know that Minister Brownlee would get the blame for it and if this was a political issue for me I would say we should go for it because Mr Brownlee will pay for it. We cannot afford to have that happen. I want to rescue Mr Brownlee because his mistake will be one that we in Canterbury will have to live with for decades. I want to rescue him from that mistake and be part of having a clear and strong path forward to recovery. Labour extends a genuine offer of working together to get this right. We want to live work and play in a city that is thriving and that inspires passion—a city where people want to come and share our joy of our city with us. 
These have been big events. We have been through a lot since September. Some people might be asking whether Christchurch is up to this job and asking whether Canterbury is up to the task of contributing to our recovery in the way that I described. Well I want to measure that question of whether we are up to it by looking at the way our communities responded to the quake. If our communities’ quake response was an Olympic sport we would win gold. Our communities have been extraordinary. In places where people hardly knew each other they just reached out their arms and looked after people through a wide range of emotions: through grief at the loss of family members through trauma at the loss of homes—sometimes huge damage to homes for the second time—and for many just through exhaustion. The aftershocks are frustrating. They wake people up. They annoy people. Lots of people in Christchurch jump when a truck goes past their house or their room. Some of it is to do with the hugely damaged roads but for other people it is to do with their nerves being pretty frayed. If we look at the recovery model of having a community-driven response to our future and ask whether we are up to it and if we look at what we did in Canterbury after the quake we see that we can do this. We know we have strong compassionate caring and competent people spread throughout our region. We might get into a competition I know when Amy Adams speaks about people in her electorate because we are quite competitive. We know that we have fantastic people in our electorates but we are not being competitive politically about this. We want to unite our talent our passion and our willingness to be part of the recovery. We want to unite that behind legislation that can be amended to give us that choice. Thank you.