Speaker by Various Artists

A note from June

I wrote this initially because I thought it was an important story to tell, but  I asked Russell to publish it anonymously on my behalf. A decision driven primarily by fear. Fear or scrutiny, fear of judgement, fear of the sense of shame that still lingered.

When I read the result of the trial involving the “prominent New Zealander” this week I felt physically sick. The parallells with my own case were pretty big. Right down to the exact same defence lawyer fighting to win the exact same end result. Arthur Fairley. A name I'll never forget. An I have no doubt that he fought harshly. Especially when it came to cross-examination.

I felt sick for the girls involved, and what now lies ahead of them.

But I also realised something about myself. I'm not afraid anymore. And I refuse to feel shame. That shame, and that fear, is what drives so many unreported assualts. And I don't want to be a part of that anymore.

Which is why, if I could, I'd own my story today and put my name to this.

Unfortunately, legally, I can't. But the simple fact of knowing that I would if I could feels like a huge weight lifted.

When my own trial resulted in a not guilty verdict, a friend sent me a message. “Not guilty doesn't mean innocent. It simply means not proven.”

To the girls involved with this week's trial, I know that the road ahead will be a long and difficult one.

Take as long as you need to get through this, but don't ever let it break you.

It may not feel like it right now, but you're stronger than that.

"June"

April 13, 2016

–––

 I read something on Twitter a while ago. A question from a well-meaning friend of someone who had recently been sexually assaulted.

“How do I convince her to go to the police?” he asked.

And I felt an instant pit in my stomach. A combination of fear and frustration.

I wanted to get involved. You don't. You can't. Please don't try.

But I didn't. And thinking about it now I hope that he was given similar advice by others online.

There's a lot of talk about rape and sexual assault. Figures being dropped that indicate the low rate of complaints compared to the high number of attacks.

Questions over why people don't press charges. Questions over how we can get more prosecutions. But little discussion over exactly why it is that when someone is raped, or attacked, or violated, the most difficult thing possible would be to press charges.

I know. Because I did. And to date it's my biggest regret.

I was still at school when I initially spoke to police. And incredibly naïve. I was young at the time of the assault. He was a much older man. I'd trusted him. He'd shattered that trust. And the guilt that I felt for years was unbearable. When you trust an adult, and they hurt you in the worst possible way, it's impossible for a child to realise that they somehow didn't make it happen. Because adults are there to protect kids. To conceptualise anything else as a kid who trusts that the world is a good place in inconceivable.

But ultimately, that was the easy part.

I never approached the police. They came to me. Actually, they went to my mum. She passed the message on one day after school. I walked in the door and she sat me down. The police had been to her work that day, she told me. Told her that other people were involved. That my name had come up. And should they talk to me?

They wanted to talk to me with the promise that there would be no pressure to lay charges. They just wanted to talk. So I agreed. And there began a four year whirlwind of police, lawyers, courtrooms, accusations, red tape and second guessing myself.

When I met the detective for the first time I found myself not having a casual chat, but making an official statement. It took a couple of hours and I found myself having to describe intimate details of the abuse to a complete stranger. The detective was a middle-aged man – nice enough – but the whole ordeal was intimidating. The initial statement was the first, but certainly not the last, time of having to recall and describe personal, intimate moments, in intricate detail to people whose job it was to judge whether I was telling the truth or not.

And then, when it was over, he gave me a ride back to school. I walked into calculus class and tried desperately to forget the past few hours and pretend everything was fine.

Then he was arrested. And it all became very real. Word got out. I overheard teachers and students discussing who they believed and I had friends no longer talk to me because they'd decided that I was in the wrong.

Possibly the most difficult thing, once the charges had officially been laid, was not being able to move on in any real sense. Rather than trying to forget the past and get on with life, I HAD to remember. And remember everything. And it felt like life was completely on hold while I waited for anything to happen.

I assumed, in my naivety I guess, that the wait between the arrest and court date would be smooth and relatively short. Years later I was receiving regular calls from the detective to update me on various moves by the defense.

When charges were laid it looked likely that I would give evidence to support another complainant’s statement. There was a lot of evidence and a number of victim statements.

Over the years evidence was thrown out and dates were postponed. By the time I went to court I was too old for any sort of barrier protecting me from seeing him so I was forced to sit a few metres away from him throughout the trial.

Finally though, a court date arrived. I have never been more intimidated or frightened as walking into the courtroom that morning. I was taken to a small room and had to sit there for a couple of hours while a jury was chosen. I had no idea what I was about to walk into. I desperately tried to stop shaking and my mind was spinning with the idea of entering a courtroom full of strangers and talking about details of abuse, with the man responsible watching and listening to my every word.

I'd read about the process. But nothing can prepare a person for actually sitting on a stand, being called a liar and being yelled at for hours on end, by a complete stranger, while a room full of people judge your every word and try to figure out if you're lying.

I didn't want my partner or family with me. It all seemed too personal to want to talk with them beside me. So the court appointed a support person to sit with me. When she walked in she seemed more scared than me. A friendly-seeming woman, but her timidness made me incredibly uncomfortable. So I denied the offer of her sitting with me. I was on my own. In a way I'd never felt before.

I was on the stand for a day and a half. I sat, on my own, in the witness booth to the side of the courtroom. Opposite me were the jurors. Every time I looked their way I could see them dissecting every word I spoke. When I started breaking down a few of them seemed sympathetic. Others seemed to portray a look of total disbelief. When the defense lawyer stood up to cross-examine me, he immediately went on the attack. I was accused of lying, making things up, being vindictive, being overly imaginative, dreaming what happened, of the whole thing being in my head. When I couldn't answer his questions immediately he started yelling. So much so that the judge would intervene at times and tell him to stop.

The questions never stopped. “What way were you facing? Were the curtains closed? What colour were the curtains? How old were you in spring of 1992? Why are you hesitating? If you don't know that then how can we believe anything else you say? Was it raining outside or sunny? What happened, word for word? Where did his hand go? For how many minutes? What did you say? What did he say? Did he ejaculate? What did he do then? Did you tell him to stop? If you were so scared why didn't you cry out? What did you do after? You stayed with him? Why would you stay with him if you were so scared? Were you pressured into pressing charges? You've spoken to people about this? They could obviously have put thoughts in your head. You used to have vivid nightmares as a kid didn't you? So this could easily have been a dream? Oh, you say you've developed social phobias? That's an easy thing to say. You look fine to me.”

It didn't stop. When I cried, he pressed harder. When I got defensive he used that as evidence that I was lying. The day ended and he still wasn't done.

“Remember that you're still under oath,” the judge told me as the court adjourned for the day.

“So you can't talk to anyone about this tonight.”

I left. I cried. And the next day I returned for more.

The whole trial lasted a week. The jury left to make their decision and I received a call from the detective about six hours later. They couldn't decide. It was a hung jury. We had to go back and do it all again.

“I'm sorry,” he told me. He sounded like he was struggling not to cry.

So the waiting began again. I went back to my life. All the while, once again, not being allowed to forget and move one. In fact, having to remember every detail.

At the time I was drinking and partying a lot. Trying to find normality by living to excess and putting myself in dangerous situations. It was during one of these situations that I was raped by somebody I thought I knew reasonably well. Looking back, it was a deliberate thing. I was drunk but had gone to bed and was asleep. He woke me, bruised me, ignored protests and raped me. Then he got up and left me in tears.

At Family Planning the next day, while getting the emergency pill, I told the woman, through tears, that the sex was consensual. All I could think was that if I said otherwise I'd be pressured into going through the whole process again. And that was something I'd never do. After all. I got drunk. I let him drink in my house. I put myself in unsafe situations. These things don't happen on multiple occasions without some blame being placed on the person that let it happen. So I tried to forget and focus on what was still ahead. Another trial, another judge and 12 strangers judging every word I say. I focused on remembering the details of the childhood assault while trying desperately to forget the details of the adult rape.

And before I knew it I was once again sitting in a corner room of the courthouse with the prosecution lawyer and the detective – both of whom I'd come to respect and rely on – both of whom had let this case take over their own lives as well as mine. The longest wait was the hour or so of sitting in that room, trying desperately to distract myself with music and books, while also trying my hardest to focus on not losing control of myself throughout the day.

I will always be grateful for the two people that went above and beyond their roles to support me through the months I spent in and out of court. From the detective sneaking my cigarettes into the courtroom so that he could sneakily let me have one with a makeshift cardboard ashtray when the court took breaks, to the lawyer who tried desperately to prepare me for any question that the defense might throw at me on the stand and who objected passionately every time the questioning got anywhere near personal attacks.

But  none of this made the ordeal any easier. His family would wait outside the courtroom so that as I walked down to enter, I'd have no choice but to see them, standing as a group, staring, glaring at me as I entered.

That added to the guilt. This person was someone I trusted. And they were people that he loved. And I was actively trying to tear their lives apart.

While in court the first time around he had said, “I never hurt her. I only ever loved her.”

Self doubt brought about by manipulation started playing on my mind again. I felt like the most vindictive person possible. I just wanted out. But once again I made the by-now-familiar walk into the courtroom and took my place on the stand – facing a different group of 12 strangers – the people that would ultimately decide my, and his, fate. One of them, a woman who sat at the end of the front row, had a kind, almost sympathetic face when I spoke. I made a point to focus on her as much as I could throughout the day.

The process went through the same as the time before. It was easier, because it was no longer completely foreign. Being placed under oath wasn't as frightening, my lawyer's questions were comforting, and his hadn't changed. As much as he attacked, blamed and denied everything I said, his questions didn't change so at least this time I knew what was coming. Once again he kept me on the stand for the entire day. And was due to continue the next. Once again I spent most of the day in tears, was forced to recall every detail of every moment. Made once again to recall physical feelings, smells, conversations and fears. And once again told that I probably made it up, or dreamed it, or just felt like being vindictive. And once again I was exhausted, scared, emotional and questioning everything I was doing. But it was easier. And it was almost over. And in a couple of days I would be able to return to my life and do my best to rebuild it.

The next morning there was an article about the trial in the paper. Nothing long or detailed. A small paragraph in the middle of the paper that mentioned a man was “back in court”. And that one word changed everything. “Back”. The last trial had resulted in a hung jury. Another case against him was not allowed to be made known to the jury. So his lawyer took that word and ran with it. After a couple of hours the detective came to me and knelt in front of me.

A mistrial had been called. I'll never forget looking at him as he told me and noticing he had tears in his eyes. It brought home how important this had become to so many people. It was no longer about me. I now had a lot of people counting on me. And the pressure felt huge.

Technically the police were entitled to force me to return for the third trial. But he gave me the choice. Call it off or make a new date and do it all again. I wanted out. I wanted to forget. I desperately wanted to never have to walk into this courthouse again. But by now I had so many counting on me. The person who pressed charges earlier and had a not guilty result. The people coming after me who maybe wouldn't have to if we had a guilty verdict. The police, the lawyers, the countless people that were now invested in this. So I said yes. A new date was made and the waiting continued.

Thinking back now the third trial is a blur. I was exhausted and scared and, years on from initially making a statement, I just wanted it to be over. The sight of his lawyer both made me terrified and nauseous. I got through it. But I broke down multiple times and when I did he went in for the kill. Verbal accusations of lying, making things up, imagining things, being pressured by other vindictive people, being vindictive myself and they didn't stop. I remember giving up the fight. And just crying my way through.

The trial continued for a few days but I didn't return. I couldn't face seeing him on the stand or hearing him talk.

A few days later I was home in the kitchen. I remember it clearly. I was sitting on the bench looking out the window, waiting for toast to cook, when the phone rang. It was the detective and this time he didn't try to hide the fact that he was crying.

The only words I remember from the phone call were “NOT GUILTY”.

I hung up. I cried. And I don't think I really stopped for days. I struggled to find a way to return to a normal life.

Years of my life had been focused heavily on one thing and now it was over. And it had been for nothing. I don't know what he's doing these days. I don't like to think about it. I just hope that this at least gave him a wake up call and nobody else was hurt by him.

Thinking about any alternative to that is not something, even to this day, I can bear thinking about. Knowing that I could have stopped this happening to others and failed. I fear it might break me.

I've struggled with a lot of personality faults over the years. I have an intense fear of being judged. I struggle with confrontation of any sort. I fear failure to the point of panic. I get nervous around figures of authority. It took me a long time to overcome social anxiety and while I always liked the idea of being a court reporter I am yet to be able to bring myself to face stepping into a court room.

I firmly believe that pressing charges and going to court affected me more, in the long term, than the abuse itself.

I suffered nightmares for years about being in court. I can still see his lawyer's face more clearly in my mind than I can his.

I found it difficult not to hate myself. Not to blame myself.

Even now, when things get hard, I fall back into those habits. I still struggle to come to terms with my past. That those months in and out of court have had a more detrimental affect on my life than not having pressed charges ever would have.

My time in court was a while ago. I have no idea if things have changed for the better. But if I, or anyone I knew, found themselves in a situation where the option was there to press charges, I would never advise to do so.

The court process for victims of sexual assault is easily the most traumatic thing possible for someone who is already traumatised. I don't have the answers for how it could be made better. I don't know how to go about making the number of rape and assault prosecutions higher. I don't know how to make convictions more likely without being detrimental to the rights of the accused.

But I know that it's not easy. It's terrifying. It's traumatic. It's something I'd never do again.

And that may be the saddest thing of all to have come to terms with.

On Saturday morning London time, a rag-tag bunch of left-wing weirdos will descend on my flat to huddle around the glow of livestreams, making panic pikelets and schadenfreude pie, and wishing it was evening here so we could justify sinking piss with the rest of you.

This has been my third election as an overseas voter.  Nothing makes me miss New Zealand like election time.  From out here this vote is sacred to me, not as a symbolic ritual of connectedness to nationhood and citizenship but - duh - as the actual, literal connection to nationhood and citizenship.

However, once you send in your vote from overseas (early of course), then what?

Where is the rest of the connection?

WAIR IZ MAI LIVESTREEM???

When the seal of crazy was broken over a month ago with the release of Dirty Politics, I was jolted by memories of the first New Zealand election when political blogs became A Thing. It was 2005, my (and Keith’s!) first year blogging on Public Address.  No-one on PA had a TV show; politicians referred to blogs as ‘blogspots’, Whale Oil was just one of many fringe voices not to be taken seriously, and Russell told me to check out a technically ‘Asian’ female blogger called Cactus Kate out of - why not? - solidarity. 

It was a little heartbreaking to think of how innocent and scrappy political blogs seemed then, and how corrupt and institutionalised things got after just one more election cycle.  I left New Zealand in 2007, and while I was away the Scooby Gang morphed into Game of Thrones. 

But let’s face it: Game of Thrones is awesome viewing. And after nine years, New Zealand finally gave us expats an election to actually pay attention to. Aotearoa is having a world news moment! For being world-class awful. Weirdly, this is less embarrassing than the norm. The spectacle of citizenship is perverse; as if to be taken seriously it needs blood sacrifice, a Joffrey, some animal mutilation, the full smorgasbord of Cray. Not only did overseas voters want to watch the ever-peaking crustacean, we finally had the technology.

Take 2008. It was a boring, depressing election for the left. On election morning in my flat in Geneva no-one could find a functioning non-geoblocked TV livestream, and we were reduced to flipping between digital radio streams of bFM (was it Wallace? Whoever it was, they were hammered) and NatRad, eating Swiss Surrender Cheese and waiting for the inevitable. Once it was over, I ignored everything for three years.

In 2011, the outcome was so predictable (earthquake; rugby), I’m amazed I remember anything about the election. Outside the country, we were vaguely aware of a last-minute journo-frenzy around some accidental tape-recording that people on the ground were taking Very Seriously. Seemingly because there was nothing else for journalists to do during that campaign. But at least we had an open livestream for the count. Small mercies. Very small.  I needed a stiff drink, but was pregnant and had to settle for Blueberry Pancakes of Bitterness. 

Flash forward to mid-August 2014, six weeks out from the election: My toddler demands to know what I’m looking at on my computer as I shove his breakfast paratha into his face with one hand, and scroll with the other.  “Erm… Mummy’s working,” I say.  I feel Dirty.  Nicky Hager has made me lie to my child. I am stuck to my New Zealand twitter feed, because SCANDAL.  People I know are in a book!  Not in a good way!  And it doesn’t stop. It does not. Ever. Stop.

For the first time in seven years I had the means and the motive to follow all the debates, all the journalists, the ever-mounting peaks of cray. It’s been like catching up with old friends. How times have changed since 2005. When did Sean Plunkett get so old?  When did the Press Gallery get so young?  Jesus, how long have I been gone?? 

We’ve gone beyond every journalist having a blog.  Now it seems every blogger has a column or two, a radio slot or three, and a TV show.  TV and radio are tweeting out print stories.  Newspapers are tweeting out video stories and half-hour long interview panel shows, and the Herald and ZB are now some double-headed conjoined twin, but which is the evil one? There are TV debate shows based on tweeting out comments about other TV debate shows happening on the other channel.

While the UK media retains a degree of format specialism because it can afford to (also stratified neatly along the lines of the class system and the left/right divide), from the online-facing content it seems like the scrappy, survivalist New Zealand media has become a massive multi-platform clusterfuck.  If Fairfax buys APN, this may not result in anyone’s… well… satisfaction.  But right now, I can’t be mad. Every expat knows the embarrassment of going back with a foreign partner to New Zealand to visit, and turning on the news. Or handing them a copy of the Herald. This election, the knives came out and everyone sharpened up. New Zealand journalism became much less embarrassing, because there was something to cover.

I’ve been privileged to follow this election campaign live online with the rest of you.  I cried along with other tweeters while watching people around the country talk to Native Affairs about giving up and going overseas. I leapt to my feet in my pyjamas in London and whooped out loud with the Auckland Town Hall, when Snowden’s wan face blinked up on my livestream. From my time zone, I saw who on New Zealand Twitter was getting up the earliest, and who was going to bed the latest. Sometimes this was the same person (you know who you are). I pondered idly, at 6am while a child battered my face with a wooden train, whether these guys were getting enough sleep.

This election has been the first that has made me so ashamed and proud of New Zealand at the same time; and has been the one to make me miss New Zealand the most while simultaneously, making me feel like I’m right there with you. Ah, fuck it. This time there will be Saturday morning drinking.

1)  Politics makes people weird.

2)   Artists and activists are some of the most generous people on the planet.

3)   Good funding is hard to find.

4)   Young people are awesome and often political, they just don’t realise it yet.

I started RockEnrol because I am passionate about empowering young people. I believe my generation and younger have enormous challenges ahead - social, environmental and economic and that for us to turn these challenges into opportunities, we need to bring our ideas, our vision and our values to the table. As Pete Seeger says, “Participation - that’s what’s gonna save the human race.”

But it’s hard to get people participating when it’s all “Dirty Politics” this or “Kill the PM” that. How can we possibly expect young people to participate when it’s one big mud-slinging, name-calling, spin-driven chess game where only certain people know the rules? Where is the inspiration in that? Imagine what it could look like if we took those marketing budgets and billboards of miscellaneous candidates faces and turned them into pieces of art, ideas and inspiration. What would our streets look like then?

Politics makes (some) people weird ... and nasty. I have had bloggers search my entire social media history to question my motives. I have had awful comments made about my appearance in the comments section in media I have appeared in (I’ve learned to not look anymore).

The Electoral Commission fired us as Field Workers because a follower on our Facebook page posted a picture of “John Key: Not Wanted” on our wall and because we weren’t quick enough to remove it, they suggested we must have political leanings. They also stopped NZ On Air from being able to support us because NZOA rely on government funding and needed their endorsement.

The truth is, we don’t have budgets to pay social media staff to monitor our page 24/7. Besides, encouraging political engagement is hard enough without simultaneously banning political posts and opening the floor for debate. Don’t get me wrong I think the Electoral Commission are doing a stellar job but the things we could do with even 2% of the budget - holy shit.

The funding thing has definitely been the hardest part. We sell some t-shirts and calendars, get a couple of donations here and there but mostly we’re run on “sweat equity”. Derek Handley was going to match-fund a crowdfunding campaign for us by chipping in $1000, but then didn’t for some reason (he’s probably just really busy). I chased the offer up with a few emails, but it soon started to feel like begging so I gave up.

Later on at the Candidate launch on Ponsonby Road, when the Spark-sponsored bartab ran out - Derek put  $1000 on the tab for a bunch of probably already voting (because it is the ‘already engaged’ that turn up to such events) young people without batting an eyelid. That hurt a bit.

We drank a lot of that booze that night to console ourselves Even before that we were going to get some money from MobilizeNZ to help with the events and campaign costs, but they ended up running with InternetMANA, so we couldn’t do that, being non-partisan and all. RockEnrol only exists because a bunch of passionate people came together, saw a problem and were willing and able to give away time, skills and stuff for free. I actually think that’s pretty cool.

It’s moments like tonight (/this morning - 2.07am), that I find myself writing a guest blog, absent-mindedly scrolling my Facebook feed  - a mixture of Buzzfeed, bathroom selfies, #FJK, #3moreyears, #Green2014, #forabetterNZ, #icebucketchallenge, smaller government, ‘One Law For All’ and European summer festival photos that I think… how did my life come to this?

Two years ago I was living in the UK working at Glastonbury, holidaying in Portugal and living the Kiwi ex-pat dream. Why on earth have I decided to move back home, work 70 hours a week for very little money, share my salary with my best friend who quit her stable job at the bank to volunteer for RockEnrol to run this under-funded and over-stretched campaign?

And here’s why:

Since our birth in May we (as a collective) have had thousands of one-on-one conversations with young people about their issues, ideas, feelings and frustrations about life in democratic NZ and what that really feels like. I have spoken with and listened to students, workers, party-goers, conference attendees, youth workers, young-at-hearts, too-young-to-votes, young Labour, young Nats, young Greens, musicians, artists, bar-staff and everyone in between and I’ll tell you one thing: we are not apathetic, we are not stupid, we are not unaware (of course there are always exceptions, but this is definitely not the majority). We are waiting to be empowered, inspired and valued.

Through this campaign, I have been lucky enough to run presentations and workshops for countless groups of people. We’ve had two successful crowdfunding campaigns raising $8,000. We have had 30 local and national media hits, our social media presence has grown to more than 3,000 people, we've run 5 successful gigs around the country and attended more than 40 as RockEnrol'ers. We threw a house party with Tiki Taane, enrolled over  2,000 young people, gained more than 100 volunteers and just this week we've started calling all of our pledges to make sure they’re exc to go the polls this weekend.

Just got a call from someone at @Rock_Enrol. I literally do not remember the last time someone sounded that excited about voting!

— Javed Khan (@PastTenseOfJav) September 16, 2014

There is a time in our lives where we can be radically optimistic with a greater ability to take risks. The time before the mortgage and kids, where we can quit our job at the bank and work overtime for a volunteer organisation, we can move into a flat with our friends and share bills to plot campaigns and organise gigs. We can get naked in Calendars and make banners that say “Vote or Die” or posters that say “Just Fucking Vote”. We can try anything, be anything, do anything and that’s what we’re doing.

My generation (and younger) are the most tech-saavy, connected and informed group of people that have ever existed. We could be our most untapped resource when it comes to solving societal problems but we’re just not turning up. Why is this? How can we get every media outlet, NGO, political party and celebrity saying, “Hey, you know that voting thing, it’s really important, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our country. so make sure you vote so we know.”  What do we need to do to ensure the voice of a generation is heard? I’ll tell you one thing, RockEnrol will definitely still be around to try and figure that out.

-

If you’re in Auckland come along to the final RockEnrol shindig tonight at ST Paul St Gallery from 6pm - 9pm. The event is called WE WILL WORK WITH YOU and we are inviting people to submit ideas for a thriving NZ (not in Auckland, submit your idea here). We'll be presenting those ideas to the winning government (the Ministry of Youth Development specifically) within the first 100 days after the Election. The event will mark the beginning of a new phase for us, where our commitment will shift from getting out the vote to civics education and working alongside our young members we are being heard in the political sphere . There'll be food, drink, dance & poetry entertainment as well. Click here for more info & to RSVP.

We may be approaching a point in New Zealand where a consensus is reached that our model for funding and delivering so-called ‘special education’ is inadequate, and has been for some time.

The system survived a comprehensive review in 2010, ordered by the outgoing Clark government and carried out by ACT’s Heather Roy in her capacity as Associate Minister of Education. Roy was rolled by Hide just as she was about to deliver her recommendations to Cabinet, and what we got in the end were small changes – the biggest of which was probably making the voucher-like targeted funding regime known as ORS no longer reviewable (meaning that once your child got it, she would get to keep it, although the rates would likely diminish over time).

Four years later, it is my sense that there is more strength in the sector. It starts with language – we want to talk about ‘inclusive education’ instead of ‘special education’ – and with the consolidation of forums such as Education For All, which presented its list of priorities to the Ministry of Education in July. The document talks emphatically about the need for ‘systemic changes’ and ‘transforming education to quality inclusive education’. Its demands are very bold yet consistent with the commitments in rhetoric of successive governments. The objective of bridging this gap should by rights be achievable.

I set out to compare the policies of the various parties in this area as a follow-up post to Hilary’s, which looked at the broader disability policy framework. My overall assessment is that several parties are readier to recognise the long-term problems in the sector compared to three years ago, and that on a very broad centre-left – including New Zealand First, United Future and the Maori Party – there is ample scope for decisive policy improvements.

Hell, even National recognises that ‘there are students who need assistance at school but do not meet the criteria for higher levels of education support,’ and has responded by offering ‘up to 800,000 teacher aide hours per year’ as well as by planning to ‘focus on supporting those whose needs have been identified locally by their school’. This is a key point, as it suggests National is at least dimly aware that the current allocation of funds – which effectively promotes exclusion by punishing economically the schools that enrol children with disabilities – should be reviewed. It is, however, a very small, vague commitment, just as those teacher-aide hours smack of a non-strategic band-aid measure. But it’s a concession of sorts, which is perhaps the most one can expect from the incumbent.

At first glance, Labour’s targeted policy announcement isn’t much more inspiring. The party has promised 100 additional special education teachers, which is about as meaningless in itself as 800,000 teacher-aide hours. However, the announcement comes with a strongly worded commitment to inclusive education and the promise of a ‘comprehensive review of the entire system of special needs support’. NZ First and the Greens are also calling for such a review (Mana doesn’t, but it’s strongly implied), which is a further encouraging sign and area of commonality. Labour is also committed to continue to fund residential special schools, against the advice of organisations such as IHC and CSS Disability, but at least it’s no longer talking about making them ‘centres of excellence’. That was a bad call.

Internet Mana requires my first disclaimer: I voted Mana at the last election. I’m a socialist, I’m on board. Their education policy is very strong on inclusion, and their disability policy is similarly solid (my slight apprehension that ‘well-resourced learning environments’ might mean special units notwithstanding). It’s the only party talking openly about the need to ‘overhaul’ the system, and specifically of eliminating barriers to access (which is a profound philosophical shift from working within diminishing or non-priority budgets). So there’s your strong call for a Mana vote. As for the Internet Party, however, it has a major policy on dolphins but not one on disability. Its education policy boils down essentially to “let them eat iPads”, makes no mention of special needs and understands an inclusive learning environment to mean one in which more technology is used. It has been suggested to me that where the Internet Party has a policy gap, it simply means we should refer to Mana’s policy. That’s not how Laila Harré explained it to me when I asked her. I’m not sure where that leaves your vote nor, indeed, mine.

Second disclaimer: I was asked to comment on the Greens policy as it was being drafted. It was a very small contribution and I’m not a party member. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the leadership shown by Catherine Delahunty and Mojo Mathers (the overall education portfolio belongs to Turei). The emphasis given to the announcement two weeks ago is encouraging, insofar as the political capital spent to bring into the campaign an issue that has traditionally been very marginal can be as important as the content of your policy, for it’s an indicator of how much you’re prepared to fight for it.

Besides proposing a comprehensive review along the lines of Labour’s, the Greens have been characteristically pragmatic: double the number of children covered by ORS (but not the funding the child, meaning there would still be a shortfall), increase funding for the Early Intervention service, extend after school care provision for children with special needs within their proposed hubs. The price tag comes to $350 million over three years, which is a significant commitment. It’s how much the government’s major new Investing in Educational Success initiative would cost.

As Hilary noted in her post, the Maori Party has been strong advocate for disability, and their legacy includes institutions such as the Humans Rights Commissioner for disability issues, which will assist in any proposed reform. However, neither their education policy nor their disability policy going into this election makes specific mention of school inclusion or special education.

If you’ve seen the ACT Party billboards trumpeting ‘Educational Excellence’, you’re fully appraised of the meaning of irony. Would it surprise you to know that their plan to address the current inequities in educational outcomes is to give parents more choice and ‘make educators face more competition’? Seeing as the significant economic pressures that already exist have so far led schools to compete to exclude children with disabilities, I consider this proposal grotesque.

The less that is said about the Conservative Party, the better. At least in this area, in which they have nothing to say.

If you have been following Tracey Martin’s work, you’ll know that NZ First has had a good track on disability issues. Those who favour mainstreaming as a core philosophy for inclusion may question the party’s commitment towards the provision ‘where possible’ of special units in mainstream schools, but NZ First is calling for a review of the funding system, the extension of ORS to 3 per cent of the school population (currently I believe it’s only 1 per cent), and creating a training and career path for Special Needs Co-Ordinators – all proposals that put it in the same camp as Labour and the Greens.

Lastly, United Future. That such a small party even has a policy in this area may be a function of how long it has been around for, but it includes extending ORS and ensuring that ‘future progress isn’t hampered by a reduction in allocation because the student has made progress’ (this is one of the most genuinely absurd aspects of the current system). So my sense is that Dunne could be worked with, too.

To bring it back to where I began, then, while few of our parties have formulated concrete policies for the overdue transformation of this area of our education system, there is enough shared recognition of the scale of the problem for advocates to make their case and hopefully see it through. It is not a feeling I had three years ago. 

There is a great deal of ruin in a city, to paraphrase Adam Smith’s calm reply to those heralding the doom of Britain after the battle of Saratoga. In other words, it takes a lot to really wreck either a city or a nation. An earthquake alone cannot do it, or at least not one the size of ours. But, an earthquake, combined with paralysing land-use regulatory structures, a confused intersection of building codes and insurance rules, and an army of bureaucrats each equipped with an all-powerful ‘No’, can come much closer than we’d really like.

After February’s earthquake, we had some hope that the city’s planners were starting to recognise the importance of the bottom-up, decentralised response that lets each of us see how best to adapt to the new realities. Coffee shops that were relocating to garages and sheds in Lyttelton were being allowed to operate regardless of zoning regulations – eminently sensible. People were finding ways to help themselves, and each other.

The first sign that this light-handed approach was not to last was the bureaucracy’s attempt to block the University of Canterbury’s student volunteer army. Sam Johnson’s team of volunteers, coordinated by Facebook and responding to a grassroots-level need for help, were hindered by bureaucrats who wanted to micromanage. This, writ large, explains rather well why, in June 2014, so much of downtown remains a shambles. Christchurch’s glacial post-quake recovery really can be traced to these three main factors.

The first, highly restrictive land-use regulations, existed well prior to the either the February 2011 or the September 2010 earthquakes, and are mirrored by similarly stultifying strictures in every major city in New Zealand. This part of the post-quake disaster is a chronicle of a failure long foretold, and easily avoided.

The paralysis generated by the sequence of earthquakes and New Zealand’s particular public/private insurance market, and the problems caused when CCC changed the building code subsequent to the insured event, were only partially foretold. The Earthquake Commission (EQC) warned the incoming National Party coalition in November 2008, that EQC had no capacity to carry out home inspections after a disaster, that the cap on EQC’s coverage per home was too low, and that EQC needed better capitalisation. Governments have a difficult time dealing with things that are important but not urgent; setting EQC on sounder footing never seems important until it’s really very important and too late. But, many of the larger problems were not well anticipated and constitute hard-taught lessons; we would do well to learn from these and fix regulation accordingly before any substantial Wellington event.

Finally, the confusopoly of Christchurch City Council, the Earthquake Commission, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) and the Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU) was entirely unanticipated, or at least I had never expected that this could happen in New Zealand.

I had always held New Zealand governance in the highest of esteem, reckoning it to be the world’s best. And perhaps New Zealand’s overall governance really is as good as it gets and other countries are only able to deal with these kinds of events by virtue of greater size and wealth. But no level, branch or agency of government covered itself in glory in the months and years following the initial disaster phase. If this be the best of all possible governments, as international surveys of such things often tell us, what hells be all the others?

While CERA and the CCDU were surely established with the best of intentions, the result was the creation of far too many people who could veto new developments or changes in land use. Economists are well familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons that results when nobody can exercise veto rights over the use of property: the Commons are then over-grazed. But fewer are familiar with the Tragedy of the AntiCommons that results when too many people are allowed to say no. Traditionally applied in analysis of intellectual property, the Tragedy of the AntiCommons applied with vehemence in post-quake Christchurch. When any one of many bureaucrats can delay or ban you from rebuilding, either by explicitly saying ‘no’ or by failing to get around to providing a needed ‘yes’, it’s hard to get anything done. Christchurch has too many veto players.

While the failures are separate, they share a common root: an utter failure of the government, both CCC and central government, simply to allow property owners to get on with the job at hand and to make those changes necessary to allow them to do it.

My colleague, economist Seamus Hogan, reminds us of the analogy in M*A*S*H that, sometimes, meatball surgery is needed. In the Korean War’s mobile army surgical hospitals near the front lines, an extra hour spent providing perfect treatment to one patient doomed others consequently left untreated. In Christchurch, the three-year-long quest for the perfect central city plan stopped anyone downtown from proceeding with any work at all for far too long, bleeding downtown’s prospective recovery as businesses fled for the suburbs, or left town entirely.

In my view, too many city planners spent far too much of their youths playing SimCity, a city planning videogame popular in the mid-1990s, in which you can always press the pause button while you think about your next move and where nobody much objects if you bulldoze their houses or businesses to put up a new park or stadium. Real cities are not like that.

The city would have fared far better had neither CCC nor central government embarked on adventures in planning and instead concentrated on core city functions: ensuring that land-use planning did not stand in the way of expanding the supply of housing after the earthquakes, focusing on core infrastructure rather than masterplanned precincts and buildings, avoiding regulatory and planning uncertainty so that property owners knew where they stood, and quickly sorting out the legal and regulatory morasses that were too late to avoid entirely after the earthquakes.

The failure long foretold: Rigid land-use planning before and after the Christchurch earthquakes

Restrictive zoning practices are hardly unique to Christchurch, or to New Zealand. The effects everywhere are similar: housing has become extraordinarily expensive. While more sensible parts of the Right and Left recognise that we simply have not been building enough new dwellings for some time, they disagree on solutions: the Right lauds new subdivisions while blocking others’ plans to increase density; the Left cheers intensification while blocking others’ moves to increase land supply on the city’s fringes. Meanwhile, councils recognise that home-owning voters reward them for the ever-increasing housing prices that come from restricted supply. Consequently, as Matthew Yglesias put it in his recent Kindle Single, ‘The Rent Is Too Damned High’.

Christchurch was certainly no worse than many places in New Zealand prior to the earthquakes, and was certainly in better shape than Auckland. But the regulatory constraints that served only to mildly increase the cost of housing in Christchurch before the earthquakes became very important after the earthquakes.

Prior to the earthquakes, expansion outwards from Christchurch was fairly constrained, as was any substantial densification outside of specific zoned areas. Solutions found in cities like Vancouver, in which many homeowners built self-contained flats within their existing homes, were prohibited in Christchurch by rules preventing a permitted dwelling from having more than one kitchen.

Surprisingly, neither the September 2010 nor the February 2011 earthquakes resulted in any expedient substantive relaxation of either zoned density regulations or the number of permissible sections on Christchurch’s fringes. Over 12,000 homes were destroyed in the earthquakes, about 7 per cent of the housing stock, with 8000 of those homes located within the residential red zone where rebuilding was prohibited. New subdivisions, increased density, or both were necessary to accommodate the homeless, the families whose homes were being repaired and the influx of construction workers.

CCC did little to ease the resulting pressure on housing. In the short term, new construction would have been very difficult even without council impediment as the ongoing aftershocks made insurance on any new building project unobtainable. But even on those margins where CCC could have helped, they seemed instead more concerned with upholding the existing pre-earthquake rules and protecting amenities for homeowners in the wealthier suburbs.

The worst exemplar here was Council’s steadfast refusal to allow homeowners to build secondary rental flats within their existing homes or on their properties. While insurance on a new building was unobtainable, owners of existing homes with ongoing insurance policies could maintain their existing insurance while undertaking either earthquake repairs or home renovations. This would have provided an opportunity for owners to build self-contained flats. While it is unlikely that thousands of such units would have been built, even a few hundred would have been helpful where people otherwise lived in uninsulated garages, sheds, caravans and broken homes over a couple of winters. These aren’t just apocryphal or inventions of Campbell Live: people were living in our neighbour’s garden shed for rather some time after the earthquakes.

The usual objections to densification manifestly failed to apply in the case of secondary suites. Unlike an apartment block, they provide no concentrated burden that must be accommodated by trunk infrastructure like water, sewerage or roading. They impose no shading or other real, substantive, demonstrable impediment on neighbours. But, the only cases in which they were allowed were for family units where the owner could guarantee that a family member would live in the flat. Under later CERA regulations, secondary flats were permitted where the owner could guarantee, prior to construction, that the dwelling would be used by someone displaced by the earthquakes rather than by an incoming construction worker; the flat also needed to be removed by no later than 2016.

The only sense I can make of Council’s intransigence on secondary flats is a combination of bureaucratic inertia and fear that homeowners near the University of Canterbury would object if their neighbours used the regulatory provision to accommodate students. It seems a pretty thin basis on which to block what could have been a helpful and expeditious way of getting new affordable accommodation onto the market after the earthquakes.

The regulations that were, pre-quake, relatively innocuous, became highly constraining after the earthquakes. These were rules that had nothing to do with building safety or standards but rather aesthetic considerations around minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking minimums, maximum allowed density, and the pace at which new greenfield properties could be developed. While these may have arguable benefits in normal times, surely after a destructive earthquake the balance should have been tipped in favour of increasing housing supply. Council utterly failed to relax the pre-quake zoning rules or to quickly release land to enable new construction.

And this was a chronicle of a housing failure long foretold. Shortly after the September earthquakes, developer Hugh Pavletich argued for the release of more land on the more stable western city fringes. Nothing happened. And, amazingly, neither did anything happen after the February earthquakes.

The failure partially foretold: The consequences of planning rigidities, new building codes and insurance

Council failed to move with sufficient alacrity to allow new housing to come to market. Sorting out the regulatory mess blocking the construction of new dwellings was not going to be easy. Council’s consenting office was overwhelmed, though they could potentially have coped under a streamlined and simplified set of rules. Heritage preservation regulations worked at cross-purposes to earthquake-strengthening regulations after the September 2010 earthquakes. Density regulations and restrictions on ‘granny flats’ prevented densification on brownfield sites where the land was sound on the west side of town. Council changed the building regulations after the February insured event, but before insurance-funded rebuilding, thus guaranteeing legal uncertainty as to the extent of insurers’ liability where meeting the new code would constitute betterment but where building to less than the new standard was forbidden. Finally, the slow trickle of land released for new development had important and easily foreseeable implications, though ones that apparently were not foreseen by the planners.

It is worth briefly walking through how the slow release of land at the edges of town can have pervasive negative effects regardless of whether the released land would be sufficient for some number of years’ supply. When only a small amount of land can be released for development every year on a known path, it is relatively easy for developers to buy up the newly zoned land and to release it even more slowly, keeping land prices very high. When land prices are very high, and where those prices are high due to zoning rather than due to the inherent nature of the land, developers face particular incentives to provide larger and more expensive homes on zoned sections: why put a $100,000 house on a $300,000 section? The top-end of the market, with higher margins for developers, gets served first. That part of the market puts fairly high value on restrictive building covenants preventing their neighbours from putting up houses that might reduce their own property values.

Consequently, much of the new development on the edges of Christchurch provided higher priced homes bound up by covenants. Homeowners in the residential red zone, then, were largely precluded from moving their homes onto new land in new developments. While it’s easy to blame developers for those covenants’ restrictions, they’re fundamentally a consequence of a severely limited supply of zoned land. In the absence of those restrictions, a farmer on one of the thousands of hectares adjoining Christchurch could have turned a paddock into a subdivision for houses from the red zone. Instead, Christchurch was exporting red zone houses in 2012 to places as far away as Gore.[i] In the midst of a terrible housing shortage, we were sending houses away because our regulations made it too hard to let people live in them.

It consequently has been extraordinarily frustrating to hear the Christchurch rebuild described as exemplar of the failures of leaving things to the market. Really, we have been in the worst of all possible worlds here. A well-run government rebuild would have been better than what we’ve had. An unhampered market approach led by developers and property owners would have been far better than what we’ve had. Instead, we’ve had developers and property owners trying to provide new housing as and where they could under the somewhat important government constraint that building wasn’t really allowed.

Blame cannot lie solely with CCC though. Shortly after the September 2010 earthquakes, the national government, in an all-party consensus, passed the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Bill enabling central government to do, effectively, anything it wanted in Christchurch. CERA was established a month after the February earthquakes to coordinate the recovery. Such an agency could have been helpful in finding the problems in regulation, or in insurance markets, that were stymying the rebuild. It manifestly failed to do so.

When CERA was established, I was hopeful. In June 2011, CERA CEO Roger Sutton said, ‘I have quite extraordinary powers to actually bypass these planning laws, but my preference would be for the normal legal process to work.’[ii] He noted the lack of lower priced sections on Christchurch’s fringes and the potential for cutting the costs involved with planning and resource consents.

But nothing happened. Where CERA was supposed to cut through the regulatory morass so that the rebuild could happen, they seemed oblivious to the severity of the regulatory problem. Roger Sutton’s appearance on TVNZ’s CloseUp in May 2012 provided ample demonstration of CERA’s problems. The Christchurch Press, and the #eqnz Twitter hashtag, had been filled with stories of the problems involved in trying to get red zone houses relocated to new developments. The Haywoods in particular were very active in documenting and publicising through social media the exact regulatory difficulties they had been encountering in trying to move their house from the residential red zone. But when Sutton appeared on CloseUp and was presented with the story, he said ‘The first I heard of this and the difficulties was today’. The agency that was supposed to have sorted a way through the regulations to allow the rebuild simply didn’t know what was going on. How could we hope that they might fix the regulatory mess if they were seemingly clueless as to its effects?

I attended one meeting of CERA’s Canterbury Economic Indicators External Review Panel in 2013 at which many of us asked very pointed questions about what was being planned to allow for the accommodation of an expected inflow of 15,000 construction workers in 2014, with nobody in CERA, and none of the representatives of the other agencies, knowing where they might possibly live given the constraints against housing construction. I was left with the impression of an agency that wanted to do good but that really didn’t know what it could do for fear of judicial review, despite its broad enabling legislation. What a waste.

Instead of moving nimbly to shed the most restrictive regulations and consequently to allow rapid densification on good land and expansion out into the suburbs, CCC’s planners instead hunkered down and stuck with what they knew best: an overly zealous approach to regulatory compliance, an obsession with masterplanning that makes the best the enemy of the good, and a refusal to consider that maybe, just maybe, getting people out of garages and sheds in the east might be worth regulatory changes that might upset people in Gerry Brownlee’s constituency. The fix in housing would have been relatively simple. In any future earthquake event, we should have a regulatory switch that simply flips automatically enacting the following:

• A four-year window in which all density restrictions are removed. So long as a building meets building code, it can go up. We do not need extensive planning and handwringing over the essential characteristics of particular neighbourhoods and whether they’re consistent with intensification: people stuck living in uninsulated garages count for more than that. Let developers and insurers decide which bits of land can stand taller buildings and let them go up. If Council moves to return to the ex ante land use restrictions after that window closes, any buildings already consented during that window are grandfathered in.
• A similar window in which all green belt or Metropolitan Urban Limit restrictions are removed, barring those that exist to avoid substantial and demonstrable environmental harm. The window here can be shorter because greenfield development is faster than brownfield.
• All restrictions against building secondary units within a dwelling or on-site at existing properties are removed.

Had Christchurch taken this approach, a lot of houses would quickly have gone into construction to the south-west of Christchurch while other subdivisions would have opened up where red zoned houses could have been placed. During the early period, homeowners would have added flats within existing homes or granny flats on existing properties to let out to accommodate the spike in demand caused by the combination of incoming construction workers, displaced families, and ongoing student accommodation demand. We would not have had families living in uninsulated sheds for two or three winters. All government needed to do was to get out of the way.

Downtown confusopoly: The unexpected failure

Commercial redevelopment in Christchurch has been no less shambolic. In the immediate post-quake period, business owners, even those with their own privately hired search and rescue technicians, were not allowed to access their companies’ files and records within the downtown cordon. But if you were a young bride needing to get her wedding gown out of a cordoned dressmaker’s shop, you could get through. While this was only one example, it demonstrates the arbitrariness of the cordon’s restrictions.

After the initial crisis phase, we found the commercial confusopoly. Because CCC changed the building code after the insured event, restoring a building to ‘as new’ status (the terms of at least some insurance contracts) was insufficient; upgrading it to the new code would constitute a betterment. The government should have sought a declaratory judgement over a few standard insurance contracts to resolve uncertainty and allow construction to proceed, and similar declaratory judgments over insurance cases where the insurer wished to rebuild on-site but where the government deemed the land unfit; uncertainty instead prevailed for years.

The bigger problem, though, was the regime uncertainty brought about by the government’s refusal to commit to a central city plan. Economists use the term ‘regime uncertainty’ to describe a state of affairs in which nobody really knows what the rules are or what they will be over the next few years. In the first six months after the February earthquake, downtown property owners really could not do much while they waited for Council to decide on its central city plan. By April 2012, the Government had thrown out the proposed CCC plan and established the Christchurch Central Development Unit to come up with a new city plan. The eventual plan that was released was long on visions of precincts, but a bit short on respect for the property rights of existing owners.

Outside of the central city and away from Brownlee’s thumb, business owners were simply getting on with things. Cassels and Sons opened a new brewpub in Woolston only one week after the July 2011 earthquake, then expanded to a full new retail development. But, downtown, nobody could tell you whether your proposed development was consistent with the grand plan. You’d have to wait to find out. Would there be a new convention centre? If there would be, and you’d owned a hotel, you’d want to rebuild your hotel near it. If there weren’t, then you needed to make other plans.

And, if your hotel happened to be in the newly designated Performing Arts Precinct, whether you’d be allowed to rebuild on your current site would depend on some yet-to-be-made decision as to whether hotels were consistent land use within an arts precinct.[iii] At Day 757 after the February earthquakes, the owners of the Copthorne Hotel simply did not know whether they were allowed to rebuild, despite an urgent shortage of hotel spaces in the city. Their insurer had settled and the hotel was keen to rebuild. But they risked expropriation if they did, because nobody yet knew whether it would be decided that hotels weren’t meant for arts precincts. As CCDU official Greg Wilson said in the Press, ‘The test is whether the proposed use would prevent or hinder the public work – in this case the development of the performing arts precinct’.[iv] The Copthorne couldn’t do anything until Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee provided consent, and his office was not known for expeditious decisions about anything. In SimCity, you can pause while you figure out precincts. Christchurch’s pause button was rather more costly.

I had never expected that a purportedly market-oriented National Party government would preside over a dirigiste take-over of city planning. Rather than forcing CCC to get on with things, they instead put their own planners in place for the downtown, with exactly the same predilection for making the best the enemy of the good-enough. As I write this, in June 2014, we still do not know whether the National Party government will force an expensive stadium on Christchurch, who will run a new convention centre, or what will be happening with rather too many of the Government’s anchor projects. On some of these, simply getting any decision two years ago would have been better than the dithering. Businesses can at least get on with the rebuild within a less-than-ideal plan. It’s harder to do that under continued regime uncertainty.

Some of the goals of the CCDU seemed laudable. They wanted a vibrant, sustainable downtown of more compact form than that which we had prior to the earthquakes. But they made an utter hash of the job. They established a Green Frame within downtown to reduce the area of land potentially available for downtown development, claiming it a virtue that land prices would thereby stay high. But in a functioning market, land prices are imputed from potential rent. Tenants willing to pay prices consistent with those valuations were few. Consequently, many moved quickly to the suburbs. If, instead of pursuing the grand precinct visions, the CCDU had simply let existing property owners make what best use of their land that they could, we would have had less flight to the suburbs.

Again, government would have done better by simply getting out of the way. But there were important and constructive things that the government could have facilitated for downtown redevelopment. Insurance test cases would have been extraordinarily helpful.

Much of downtown was under pretty fragmented ownership in small lots, and it is entirely plausible that redevelopment would have been better pursued with more concentrated ownership. But rather than look either to compulsory purchase or to mandatory joint-ventures in the downtown retail area, they could simply have maintained a database of ready contact details for existing owners and encouraged the use of dominant assurance contracts for land assembly. Or, they could have moved quickly to set up the anchor projects, committed to the locations and to the funding, and simply then let precincts emerge from the distributed decisions of Christchurch’s downtown property owners given certainty around the public projects.

If we learn anything from the intersection of the work of Jane Jacobs and of Ed Glaeser, it’s that cities are organic. The best parts of cities emerge from the distributed decisions of thousands of property owners, building near each other to take advantage of complementarities in location that they could foresee and that the planners couldn’t envision. SimCity takes no account of the wishes and dreams of the Sims. All of the small actions of distributed individuals can add up to something wonderful, if only Council and the bureaucrats would get out of the way and let it happen. Instead, we had the worst of all possible worlds: the insistence that a perfect central plan supercede these decentralised decisions, but absolutely no bureaucratic capacity to set or follow through with a plan.

It has taken me far longer than this book’s editors would have liked to write this chapter. I’m an economist who works best when considering issues dispassionately. I cannot maintain any reasonable mental state when reflecting on what the planners, both from CCC and those imposed on us from elsewhere, have done to Christchurch. I have had to keep looking away from this Dementor’s gaze. But if we keep looking away, worse will happen to Wellington when its earthquake comes. There are substantial regulatory problems that need addressing ahead of any future earthquakes. Let’s not have another tragedy well-foreseen. We should know better by now.

From 2003 until July 2014, Dr Eric Crampton served as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Canterbury, where he lectured on economic policy, including the economics of the city, and the economics of political decision-making. In July 2014, he left the University to serve as Head of Research with the New Zealand Initiative in Wellington. He blogs at OffsettingBehaviour.blogspot.com.

This is an extract from the new book Once in a Lifetime: City-building after Disaster in Christchurch. There are two launch events in Auckland for the book today:

Auckland lunchtime panel discussion

Time: 12pm 17 September

Location: The Exhibition Studio, Level 3 , School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland

Media commentator Russell Brown will lead a discussion with the book’s editors Dr. Ryan Reynolds and Barnaby Bennett.

Auckland launch

Time: 6pm 17 September

Location: Q Theatre on Queens Street.

Join NZ Herald Business editor Liam Dann and the various contributors and editors to launch the book over a glass of wine.

Wellington lunchtime panel discussion

Time: 12.30pm 18th September

Location: LT1, School of Architecture and Design, 139 Vivian Street.

Join economist Eric Crampton, writer Giovanni Tiso, architect Chris Moller and public health housing specialist Graciela Rivera-Munoz in discussion with co-editor Barnaby Bennett as they consider the issues and lessons learned from the Christchurch recovery process, and reflect on why these need to be heeded in the case of any Wellington seismic events.