Speech: Shifting from Response to Recovery - Rebuilding a Broken City

Lianne Dalziel 

The Plan Ahead – Business Continuity Conference

Employers Chamber of Commerce Central

James Cook Grand Chancellor Hotel, Wellington

18th April 2012

Thank you for inviting me to speak to today’s Business Continuity Conference.  The fact that the government has just announced the decision on the “Christchurch CBD rebuild” has made this address very timely indeed.

I want to make an initial comment about what the government has announced and how it has been announced, because it is relevant to the comments I wanted to make today.

The fact that the city councillors learned at 4pm yesterday what the government had decided to do with a plan that they submitted in accordance with the terms of the government’s own legislation over 4 months ago is a travesty of process and substance.

Ironically the announcement coincides with the anniversary of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act which received the Royal Assent on the 18th April 2011.  We have wasted almost an entire year with ill-thought through processes leading to a result that could never deliver the visionary Master Plan our central city needs.

Today’s announcement is nothing more than a patch-up job – something Christchurch is used to post the earthquakes – papering over the cracks in a structure that has put a single government Minister in charge of the recovery.  Without a layer of governance between the Minister and the recovery authority we have decisions being made by Cabinet, implemented by bureaucrats and undermining the last remaining democratic institution in Christchurch – our city council.

And now we have a new unit within the department that has 100 days to provide a blueprint of what it will do with the city plan. I am sure that this will be a relief to some, because it signals action.  But that’s a better late than never response to what has been a terrible process.

My address to you today must serve as a warning.  You must prevent this happening in Wellington.  And the only way you can do that is to start planning for your recovery now.

I often talk about how my fear of earthquakes was firmly located in Wellington not Christchurch and say how I now have two cities where I don’t sleep so easy anymore.  But although my world has been rocked in more ways than one since that 4am wake-up call on September 4, 2010, I feel as if I have been on a journey of discovery that has traversed the scientific, the geotechnical, the pyscho-social and the economic aspects of disaster response and recovery and the inter-relationships between them all.  I have learned so much, so I am always pleased to be able to share what I have learned, because there is so much to be gained from the accumulated wisdom and knowledge that gives us international benchmarks and evidence-based best practice.  Lessons learned from success and failure – we ignore them to our peril.

I was glad when I was given a title for my address: Shifting from Response to Recovery: Rebuilding a Broken City.  First because it identifies that there is a difference between response and recovery – there is a connection between them as much of what occurs during the response phase will colour the recovery – but they are distinct.  I will return to that.

I am going to however challenge the use of the word ‘rebuilding’, because in my mind’s eye we cannot rebuild what we had, and we need to use language that speaks to our future rather than our past.  However, at the same time, there are powerful expressions of our identity as a city that exist in our built heritage and we must seek to preserve those in a way that connects them to our future.  This is challenging, but it is what makes it exciting.

As I have said on a number of occasions I want Christchurch’s earthquake legacy to be a powerful message of recovery leading to new opportunities that makes us more resilient and more sustainable than we were before – and that is a legacy that I want to share with the rest of New Zealand, so that the cost of renewing our city becomes an investment in our future as a nation.

My optimism about the opportunities that can come from this disaster does not stem from a lack of appreciation for the scale of the damage that has been done.  People look at the centre of Christchurch and the eastern suburbs and speak of the war-zones the images invoke.  This has led me to wonder why could we not have a “war-time Cabinet” for Christchurch with no “opposition” as such, but rather representatives of the people and the parties engaging with the government in a relationship of trust, making recommendations for the good of the people and the city as a whole and modeling the collaboration that is essential to successful recovery?

Instead of criticising MPs for having alternative views or accusing them of politicising the disaster, why not harness the potential that such diversity in thinking would bring to the table?  Do some of us have nothing to offer our city because our political views are not those of the current government?  This is nonsense regardless of who is in government and besides which there will be more than one government in the period of recovery.  We all have skill-sets and knowledge about our constituencies as list and electorate MPs that would be invaluable in designing and delivering a recovery strategy that would see the government operating in a truly accountable and transparent manner, co-ordinating the planning processes, facilitating market solutions where possible and intervening where necessary.

I would observe that many of the emergent ginger groups that have arisen in Christchurch have done so because neither the city council nor the government has had the wit to engage them in the recovery effort in a meaningful way.

I am going to come back to this, because I want you to realise here in Wellington that if you don’t organise in advance of a disaster what recovery would look like for you, then you risk what has happened in Christchurch happening to you as well.  And if you find yourself here in Wellington having to rebuild or renew a broken city, the last thing you want to have happen is to have central government usurp your role as a city – even though in your case you are co-located.

That’s why I have been saying that it doesn’t matter that our government department CERA is physically located in Christchurch – the ethos and the culture belong to the Wellington public service with the government as its master.  The public service has a role – in fact a vital role – but to serve the recovery effort on a collaborative basis, not to serve a single Minister in charge.  

And unless the process itself is democratic in the broad sense, there is a real risk that the right commercial expertise will not be applied to the planning processes, and that vested interests will steer the decision-makers towards business as usual, and opportunities will be lost.  Communities will also feel isolated from the decision-making process which may be for many people the difference between staying or leaving. I was at a meeting last night and one of the speakers, in his eighties, said why are we focusing on the buildings in the city before the people know what is going to be happening to their homes?  He said he didn’t have so long to wait for answers as others.  I mention this because the relationship between the pyscho-social recovery and the economic recovery of a city cannot be over-stated.  They are integrally linked.

Let me explain first the difference between response and recovery.

Response is what happens straight after the disaster occurs and here in New Zealand it assumes the classic command and control model – the leader is in charge, he or she issues commands and is obeyed without question. We prepare for response relatively well in New Zealand. Many of you will have participated in civil defence exercises that specifically test our preparedness for response.

That being said, I think it is time that the volunteer structure of Civil Defence, its resources and its training structures are overhauled and embedded in neighbourhoods and communities.

In other countries they talk of civil protection, which is bottom up rather than civil defence which is top down. And that is something we must take on board for the future.  And I think we need to provide for spontaneous volunteers in a much more planned way – even though planning for spontaneity may sound oxymoronic.  It’s actually the relationship between the formal response and the informal response that needs to be planned for.  But that is not my focus for today.

Recovery is related but different.  Specifically it requires a special kind of leadership – these leaders are not ‘in charge’ as such, although they do have to make hard decisions.  But that is made easier by the style of leadership, which is engaging and inclusive, looking for feedback and drawing knowledge from affected communities, as plans are formed and milestones signaled and achieved.  All of the research says that the mode of engagement must be: deliberative, innovative, creative and transformative if we are to recover well. It is not ‘consultation’; it is a form of empowerment. That is why this form of leadership generates hope and hope is the lifeblood of recovery.

It also requires courage.  Some say that is what politicians lack – and there is a degree of truth in that, because doing the right thing may not always be the same as doing the politically expedient thing.  I learned that listening to Art Agnos, who was the Mayor of San Francisco, at the time of their earthquake.  He talked about the capital that is invested in order to develop a successful enterprise, and then he talked about the capital that a politician has to invest in the city or the community’s agenda.  The politician’s capital wasn’t money it was his or her popularity – political capital we call it. He said no matter how long you serve, your time as a politician comes to an end, but what sticks to you is the knowledge that you used that opportunity to do something lasting.

The citizens’ advisory committee recommendation he took to the Council against bitter opposition from vested interests, cost him his job 2 years later; but what a legacy he left the communities that were freed from the shadow of the elevated freeway, which the Council demolished and which unleashed the full potential of the San Francisco waterfront.

This story told me two things.  One it is important to face the facts of the situation with an open mind and not allow vested interests to dominate.  The second was to do the right thing, regardless of the political consequences.

Another lesson I learned from this is trust the people.  Locking people out of their homes with cordons led to huge distress in San Francisco.  Art Agnos’ photo of the people crowded behind the wire barrier with the desperate face of Joe de Maggio to the fore was the image that brought change – managed access, which included telling people what the risks were, having them waive responsibility and allowing them to assume full risk in entering to remove their most precious possessions.  We wouldn’t even let business men and women do this.  Business owners take risks every day.  It was disgraceful and remains a disgrace today over a year later.  You must plan as a city for how you will assess and communicate risk.  You need to have a strategy in place before it happens and forming a relationship with civil defence now is your first step.

I am also going to suggest that you develop a clear understanding of recovery as a process.  Everything we do must be evidenced based – and it must meet the standards set by international best practice, which have emerged from lessons learned from success and failure.  We risk failure by ignoring the evidence. For those who believe that there is no blueprint for this, then I invite you to read the recovery chapter of the Civil Defence and Emergency Management Plan accessible through your council’s website – every one of them are based on the National Plan which references evidenced based best practice and even contains a template for implementation.  But I hadn’t read this before the beginning of last year.

I don’t think anyone in CERA has read it yet – especially if the draft Recovery Strategy they released before Christmas is anything to go by.

The priorities to be followed in a recovery phase are:

• Safety of individuals – the safety of people remaining in the disaster area.

• Social recovery – the restoration of material and emotional needs of individuals and groups within the community.

• Economic recovery – facilitating the provision to the community of the tools needed to commence their own economic recovery.

• Physical recovery – restoring the built environment, consistent with appropriate risk management practices and principles.

Recovery activities should start when emergency response is still in progress. Key decisions during the response phase are likely to directly influence and shape recovery.

Recovery management personnel and procedures should be put in place as soon as possible during response to an emergency. Recovery should not just aim at recreating the past, but creating the future. Opportunities to reduce vulnerability to future hazard events should be sought and implemented during recovery. The timeframes for recovery are likely to be long, probably 3-10 years and perhaps longer. Recovery ranges from large-scale community planning, to individual assistance. Recovery will involve agencies that have not previously had any direct involvement with emergency management. It will involve a diverse range of expertise and skills.

Entrenching recovery planning alongside the response planning in our nation’s disaster preparedness is the take home message.  We do the reduction, readiness, and response planning reasonably well, but the recovery planning is very poor.

There are answers to how we might address this and I have found an association in the international discourse under the headings of emergence & resilience. The concept of emergence describes governments being increasingly called upon to serve in highly complex and uncertain circumstances, where public issues regularly emerge as surprises and require equally emergent responses.

The literature says that this transforms the role of government and the relationship between government and society. It emphasises the need for more agile, innovative and adaptive approaches to governance and public administration.  The concept of resilience acknowledges that unforeseen events will arise and unpredictable shocks will occur and that the role of government therefore extends to promoting the resilience of individuals, communities and society.  Resilience is about the capacity to absorb adversity and bounce back.

At their essence these ideas promote a concept of partnership between government and society which sees we, the people, not as consumers but as engaged citizens actively involved in decision-making and becoming more resilient individually and collectively.  Governments – both central and local – become:

• Enablers within a framework of collective responsibility;
• Partners who use their power and that of the State to support the contributions of others; partnership depending as it does on trust, goodwill and mutual respect;
• Collaborative actors who work with others to coordinate decisions and to achieve concerted actions;
• Stewards of the collective interest with the power to intervene and to course-correct when the public interest demands it;
• Facilitators who convene citizens and organisations to build communities of purpose;
• Leaders to achieve a common sense of purpose;

 

This is why inspirational leadership is one of those ‘can’t do without’ qualities that successful recovery requires. Unfortunately the government department model chosen for CERA lacks the authority and independence that is needed in recovery, which is why we proposed from the outset that it be established as an Independent Crown Entity.

A governance board would have separated its operations from the Minister, which is actually important given the risk of political priorities driving the recovery rather than the needs of the affected communities.

The absence of a meaningful role for the non-conflicted commercial sector and community stakeholders has already cost Christchurch valuable time and effort with planning processes disconnected from the real world.  A council that has continued to issue consents that fly in the face of their draft plan because the government wouldn’t impose a moratorium while it is being considered is negligence writ large. Why would they do that when they know their vision is threatened everyday that another tilt slab is underway?  I think you will see why courage is required.

I am not saying that the recovery plan that they have presented to government is good enough either.  But that’s because the planning process is plain wrong but that was the government’s decision when it passed the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Act, which was subject to such secrecy that not even the councillors had seen it before it was introduced to Parliament.  We need a professional master plan prepared for the CBD and its validity needs to be tested against the future tenants and residents that we need to attract into the 4 avenues.  My suggestion at the city plan hearings was for the Council to meet with a more broadly defined range of stakeholders in an iterative process.  Having hearings where you get 5-10 minutes to publicly state a “position” is not the kind of engagement that produces the kinds of plans we need.

This is why we must get the spotlight onto international best practice, because we cannot let this happen again.

CERA’s core function is to facilitate, co-ordinate and direct.  And yet they are failing to do this.  We are already seeing what happens when other departments continue their roles in separate silos – the Minister of Earthquake Recovery completely unaware that Housing NZ wasn’t repairing its rental stock and the Minister of Housing thinking that most of them were in a red zone, when 80% are not. 

Add to that mix the Christchurch City Council – and I single them out, because the other two local authorities have no trouble with their recovery role – I feel that no-one has a helicopter view of what is happening. 

And why is the Christchurch City Council a problem?  For some reason someone forgot to circulate the ‘there’s been an earthquake’ memo.  Business as usual is anathema to recovery.  Every bit of international literature I have read says so.  But the senior management of our country’s second largest council appears completely unaware of that.  Unlike the Minister, I don’t blame the Council, other than those that reappointed a chief executive in the face of the demonstrably inadequate response to the September earthquake let alone the February earthquake. I have already placed on record what went wrong with the Council, but this has now been exceeded by the response of the government imposing a bureaucracy that is growing day by day, but which cannot and must not replace the core functions that belong to the council – the only body that can offer democratic participation in decision-making.

The solutions to all the problems we face in Christchurch can be found in strengthening the council so that it can perform its proper function in collaboration with the citizens of Christchurch, not to usurp its role with a government department without any practical knowledge and experience of urban planning and design.  Quality planning is critical to how we build our city centre and enhance our eastern suburbs.  We cannot leave this to chance, because if we do, the investment won’t follow.  Investment requires confidence and that requires certainty.

However the truth is that if the government had chosen the right model for CERA, and if the Council had adopted its own recovery strategy after September, we wouldn’t be having the problems we are having now and the government wouldn’t have to be working out how to patch up the problems with the lack of strategic thinking around infrastructure and the CBD.  We have wasted time, but the aftershocks have gifted us time and there is still time to put it right.

If you in Wellington are to learn anything from what is happening in Christchurch it is that planning for your recovery as a city must start now.  

Finally I want to say that I am still optimistic for my city where I was born and have lived all my life.  I am optimistic because there is no alternative. Pessimism will not build our new city.  Confidence and commitment will.

• What we needed from the government today was an announcement to Cera with a Crown Entity or SOE with a wise and intelligent layer of governance that has been completely absent to date;
• A process for developing a comprehensive Master Plan for the central city, and for the affected suburbs which engages the non-conflicted commercial sector, Iwi and the wider community, which will provide certainty for all investors including the government;
• A sensible reflection on the public-private and/or public-Iwi partnerships that could meet a range of objectives;
• The setting of goals that meet the economic and psycho-social aspects of recovery;
• A commitment not to re-entrench pre-existing vulnerabilities;
• The announcement of an inspiring timeline with milestones and stretch targets;
• An appropriate level of intervention in the Insurance market to kick start the renewal process;

 

I think you get my drift.  And the reason I mentioned ethics – is that they are the fundamental underpinning of civil society.

As someone much wiser than I am once said, the foundation of a democratic society is one which relates and is accountable to its citizens and this starts with strong Local Government and this must be reinforced at every turn.

My vision is that Christchurch must symbolise a critical moment in our history that enabled New Zealand to become one of the most resilient countries in the world, with a government fully prepared to respond to emergent issues in an intelligent and ethical way, and which spurred the further development of sustainable technologies that made the world a better place to live for everyone.

And you in Wellington will have taken advantage of what you have learned, so that when your wake-up call comes, you will already be awake.  And people will marvel at how you were prepared, responded and recovered and a new international benchmark will have been set.

And we in Christchurch will have showed you the way and that will have been the greatest tribute that we will have made to the collective loss that we experienced on February 22 2011.