From The Hip

Why?

The government today announced the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) I have five questions. Why?

There are three cores to the rebuild as I see it:

1. Define a new vision for the city.
2. Devise an urban plan that supports that new vision.
3. Acquire the resources (financial and physical) required to execute that plan.

That actually doesn’t require a whole government department to achieve. By far the biggest challenge is number 3. A hideous bureaucracy is perhaps the single most unhelpful thing to solve that problem.

I just get the inkling that someone though, crap, something massive has happened in Christchurch, we need to do some posturing around creating a large recovery organisation… it just feels like something which has been done out of a desire for a certain perception of response, rather than out of an real need or in fact effectiveness of that type of response.

In my opinion, if it takes more than a handful of people in central government to handle this, it’s precious resources wasted which could be put to far better use.

Layton