WHO'S IN CHARGE? | Stuff.co.nz
WHO'S IN CHARGE?
LAWRENCE SMITHLEADERS MEET: Prime Minister John Key and Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker in Christchurch today.
DEAN KOZANIC/The PressChristchurch mayor Bob Parker, left, takes Prime Minister John Key on a tour of the city following the quake.
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Is anyone actually in charge? That is the surprising question people are asking as they look around to see who is leading Christchurch in the big job - the probable $5billion to $8 billion three-to-five-year job - of rebuilding the city after September 4's earthquake.
In the immediate aftermath of the quake, we had impressive leadership. Mayor Bob Parker stepped up as the face of the town - compassionate, reassuring, decisive. At crisis central, the council's temporary headquarters in Christchurch Art Gallery, there was someone visibly in charge, someone holding it altogether.
Prime Minister John Key equally was a visible leader. He arrived in a hard hat with cabinet ministers in tow to send the message that Government and country were fully behind the recovery process.
But now? Sure, there are a lot of things happening, an incredible amount of activity. But is it being led? Is it more than just people rushing around patching and fixing? Where is the person in charge, the "chief executive, earthquake recovery", the guy (or gal) with the vision and mana to lead Christchurch and its institutions in the direction they need to go?
"The point is not to rebuild things the same, but to rebuild them better," says former three-term Christchurch Mayor Garry Moore. The earthquake is a problem, yet also an opportunity.
Moore says with a little imagination, all the money going into fixing Christchurch could take the city a big step towards a better, smarter, more inclusive future. But this requires leadership. And in the absence of a rallying figure, it is only natural that people and institutions will start to fall back to the path of least resistance, or what serves their own self- interests - something he believes is already now happening.
"I was filled with hope," says Moore about the initial outpouring of goodwill that the earthquake unleashed. Old enmities were going to be set aside and a new energy would be seen. "But it's been five calendar months since the earthquake. Do I still have a sense of hope? No," he says bluntly.
Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Townsend is another saying Christchurch may be falling back for want of a leader.
"There is a need for strategic leadership that knits together all those factions of earthquake recovery which are carrying on semi-independently and that pulls them all together so we can really optimise the outcomes for the city," Townsend says.
"There is a tendency to go back to where we were and we need leadership to make sure that doesn't happen."
Townsend notes that the Government immediately appointed Gerry Brownlee as the Minister of Earthquake Recovery - a "go to" guy, vested with special statutory powers. "But the same thing didn't happen on the local level. There wasn't a person for the region who was made chief executive of earthquake recovery."
Many are echoing the call. "Yes, I would appoint a tsar for earthquake recovery," agrees Christchurch East MP Lianne Dalziel. "You need somebody who can give the public confidence that the council's got it under control. People are begging for leadership, someone they can look up to, rely on and trust. This is a huge issue."
Over a cup of coffee, Dalziel reaches for a pen and tries to sketch an organisational chart of who's who in the earthquake recovery process. Her blotter page quickly becomes a confused mess of arrows, names and acronyms. A lot of good people are doing a lot of good things, says Dalziel. But she cannot see a person or body playing the role of overall leader.
It is a dangerous muddle. And she believes two early decisions were responsible.
The first was that in its haste to create special enabling powers under the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act, the Government inadvertently set up an extra layer of bureaucracy which has trampled over a Civil Defence template.
Dalziel says as events showed, New Zealand has some well thought-out mechanisms for coping with natural disasters. The value of the Earthquake Commission (EQC) as an insurance agency has been seen. And the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management (CDEM) not only has thick manuals on how to deal with the immediate response phase of a disaster, but has given much thought to the kind of organisation needed to ensure a smooth recovery phase.
Recovery is multi-faceted, says Dalziel. It is not simply about rebuilding homes, roads and sewers. The CDEM template sets out a management structure that is four-pronged, with task groups to handle the recovery of the natural environment, the social environment, and the business environment too.
Within a few weeks of the quake, this structure was up and running. Leaders for all four functions had been drafted in - Townsend, for example, was in charge of economic recovery - and all the lines of reporting converged on a co-ordinating executive group.
So a plan was in place. But then the Earthquake Act created a second reporting mechanism, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Committee (CERC), chaired by a Wellington civil servant, former Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry director-general Murray Sherwin.
Suddenly CDEM's task groups were supposed to be reporting to CERC. Or maybe not. Dalziel says that behind the scenes there has been a lot of wrangling as people have been trying to work out who is really in charge.
What is worse is that while CERC was inserted as the apparent umbrella organisation, it actually has little power. "CERC's terms of reference show it is only an advisory body. It can write reports, but it can't decide," says Dalziel.
Then there is for Dalziel a second wrong move - Christchurch City Council's early choice to treat earthquake recovery as "business as usual".
Dalziel says the council appears to have stepped back and is trusting CERC and the EQC to run the city's recovery. "The council hasn't taken ownership of the process."
Dalziel clicks through the emails on her BlackBerry and shows confirmation from council chief executive Tony Marryatt that earthquake questions are being dealt with as part of the council's overall business. "Civil Defence recommend that you need a recovery manager. It's in the template. The problem with the Mayor and his chief executive trying to do recovery as part of business as usual is that both parts of the job will slip - both recovery and the normal business. You can't afford divided responsibilities. You've got to have someone whose total focus is rebuilding."
- The Press
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New Statesman - Watch: Paxman drops the C-bomb
Watch: Paxman drops the C-bomb
Posted by George Eaton - 01 February 2011 08:39
Newsnight presenter becomes the latest BBC figure to utter the "C-word".
Jeremy Paxman has become the latest BBC presenter to join the corporation's quest to smash the taboo around the use of the "C-word".
Introducing a Newsnight feature on UK Uncut, Paxman said: "Supposing, though, some of the people who ought to be paying taxes so the cunts, cuts aren't so bad aren't actually doing so".
It was Today programme presenter James Naughtie who set the ball rolling when he "misspoke" while introducing Jeremy Hunt, an error repeated less than an hour later by Andrew Marr.
But with Paxman recently railing against cuts to the BBC World Service, perhaps it's no surprise that such intemperate language came to mind.
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Dietary Guidelines Urge Less Soda and Smaller Meals
More important, perhaps, the government told Americans, “Enjoy your food, but eat less.” Many Americans eat too many calories every day, expanding their waistlines and imperiling their health.
While the recommendations may seem obvious, it is nonetheless considered major progress for federal regulators, who have long skirted the issue, wary of the powerful food lobby. (The 112-page report even subtly suggests that people eat less pizza and dessert.)
Previous guidelines urged Americans to curb sugar, solid fats and salt, but avoided naming specific foods, let alone urging consumers to eat less food over all.
“For them to have said ‘eat less’ is really new. Who would have thought?” said Margo G. Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “We should have been saying ‘eat less’ for a decade.”
Ms. Wootan said she was nonetheless pleased that the guidelines provided “understandable and actionable” advice rather than the “big vague messages” of the past.
For instance, she applauded the advice to make half of your plate fruits and vegetables.
“Before, the dietary guidelines said, ‘Eat more fruits and vegetables,’ but that could mean add a slice of tomato to your hamburger,” she said.
Robert C. Post, deputy director of the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion at the Agriculture Department, said regulators hoped simple messages would resonate better than the more technical prose of the past.
“Maybe that is what will help this time to get the consumer’s attention,” he said.
While the guidelines are ostensibly for consumers and federal nutrition programs, they will undoubtedly put additional pressure on the food industry to reformulate processed foods, particularly to reduce the amount of sodium, which was emphasized in the report.
Similarly, the guidelines’ advice to reduce portion size could put pressure on restaurants, many of which continue to serve portions so large that they could easily serve two people under the government’s guidelines.
“If companies don’t change their practices and reformulate their products, people don’t have a chance of following the dietary guidelines,” Ms. Wootan said.
Just two weeks ago, Wal-Mart Stores announced a five-year plan to reformulate its store-brand packaged foods and drop the price on fruits and vegetables. Wal-Mart said it would pressure its major suppliers to do the same.
In addition, the first lady, Michelle Obama, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have pushed for manufacturers and restaurants to reduce the amount of trans fat and sodium in their products.
Several food manufacturers noted that they had already taken major steps to reduce the amount of sodium in their products, though some critics say they have not gone far enough.
“We feel great about the progress we are making,” said Susan Davison, a spokeswoman for Kraft Foods, one of the largest food makers in the world. The company has vowed to reduce sodium in its North American portfolio by an average of 10 percent by 2012, and Ms. Davison said it had already met that goal in 350 products and would eventually reformulate more than 1,000 products.
“We know that our consumers are interested in monitoring their sodium intake,” she said. “We are looking for ways to help them without giving up the foods they love.”
David S. Smith, a vice president at Campbell Soup who oversees research and development, said his company was offering reduced-sodium versions of hundreds of its products, in some cases replacing regular salt with smaller amounts of sea salt. He said the company was continuing to look for ways to cut sodium even further.
Salt is not an easy thing to replace, he said. “It is very challenging.”
The specific recommendations on various nutrients were largely unchanged in this year’s guidelines, compared to the last version in 2005, though reductions in sodium were given much greater emphasis.
Under the guidelines released Monday, about half of the populace should consume 1,500 milligrams of sodium or less each day. That includes children, African-Americans and anyone who is older than 50 or has hypertension, diabetes or chronic kidney disease. Everyone else may consume up to 2,300 milligrams, about a teaspoon.
Now, Americans on average consume about 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day.
In addition, the guidelines recommend consuming less than 10 percent of calories from saturated fatty acids, replacing them with so-called good fats like monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids.
The guidelines suggest making fruits and vegetables cover half of the plate at a meal, choosing fat-free and low-fat dairy products and eating more whole grains and seafood.
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Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
Election 2011: GO! • OnPoint • Public Address
15:05 Jan 27, 2011 143Election 2011: GO!
Yes, you can sell your house to pay off the mortgage, then you'll be mortgage-free. But you'll also be minus a house.
In New Zealand's case, we can sell our SOEs to pay off debt, which means we'd pay less interest to overseas creditors. But if we sold the SOEs to foreigners, then we'd just end up paying dividends to foreign investors instead. This may actually be worse than paying interest on debt. Bernard Hickey looked at the SOEs being singled out and found they had an average dividend yield of 7.6% - considerably more than than the 5.5% interest the government is paying on new debt.
And if we sold it to New Zealand investors? Well, where would they get the money to buy it?
- By investing less in other NZ companies (who'd buy up those companies then?).
- By investing less in overseas companies (which would have brought dividends back to NZ).
- By taking up debt (from overseas creditors).
The point is that you can't look at debt in isolation. Debt and assets all amount to money. Pushing stuff from one column to the other doesn't solve the underlying problem. I'm keeping an open mind about asset sales though, as there are a lot of indirect issues like efficiency gains and debt exposure that might come into play. But the onus is absolutely on the Government to prove why it makes sense to sell off a profitable asset.*
And while it might be the wrong solution, it's definitely the wrong problem. The concerns of the Standard & Poor's negative outlook had little to do with asset sales. It was about a) we're constantly sending money overseas because we (private individuals) borrow too much, and b) the government is on an unsustainable path. (And we're on an unsustainable path because instead of preparing for the aging population during the good times, we got stuck in a pissy (and in hindsight, delusional) debate about whether we should have more spending or less taxes (and we took both the money *and* the bag, even after things turned to shit).)
Asset sales does not address either of these problems. It's association with the S&P report, with our private debt problem, with our long-term fiscal problem is simply the product of a spin-doctor putting all these things in the same speech. This is a rhetorical trick. They are, at most, tenuously connected.
This rhetoric created the "changing our asset mix" euphemism. The idea is that we can't take on any more net debt, therefore we can't take on any more public debt, therefore if we want new assets we'll have to sell old ones. This logic tells us to sell assets to avoid debt, even when it's unprofitable. Come on, right-wingers. This is a slap in the face of capitalism itself. It is the very foundation of capitalism that we borrow money in order to do productive things and profit from it. To ignore the cost of borrowing or the potential gains, and to just assume that any activity that involves borrowing is bad... that's just bad capitalism.
(I am not accusing Key of being anti-capitalist, of course. He is just using anti-capitalist rhetoric to cover his ideological purist motives about the efficiency gains, etc.)
I still carry a substantial chip on my shoulder about the 2005-08 election cycle. Back then, everyone seemed to think that government surpluses were inherently bad. Debt was low, therefore the government MUST get rid of that money. Nobody was concerned with whether there were things *worth* spending money on, or what the long-term impact would be, they just wanted spending (or tax cuts) to take place. Now, the mob has turned on debt, and the new normal is that debt is inherently bad, and nobody seems concerned with whether the cost of reducing debt is worth it - or even what that cost is (hint: It could well be even *more* debt in the long-term).
Let's not do that again.
* On the other hand, if you're an editorial writer for the Herald, you might consider John Key's case for asset sales to be "powerful". Despite the fact that he HASN'T MADE A CASE YET. Key is saying that the Govt is considering it, and Treasury will be looking at whether it's viable. And the Herald considers that to be a powerful case. Seriously. WTF is wrong with you people?
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As others have pointed out elsewhere, it would seem that asking Treasury for advice on whether or not to sell off state owned assets its pretty much pointless.
Wellingtown • Since Nov 2006 • 80 posts Reply
Email6\"\'luivaSmgeu Yniozcdi8\"n=EsTsuaHlgcz 2\"jnyo3s\"p1mboUh5Tv YeoiTnFayhtpoeptxS4 rljiwaAmcEv\"H=>ealftVi8tS Y\"jm5oPc0.mlDi6aRmAgX@0nrowsuptmWan/8g\"ulYiiazmde8 nnEoTcuiH\"g=zs2sjayl3c\" 1\"bdUn5avlYaoeTLF yftfoopexG4 rljiwaAmcEv\"H=>ealftVi8tS Y\"jz5nP.0cmaD.6oRtAaXk0irawwu@tdnaW/nS\"gluiYaimzed 8nnoEcTiu\"H=gszs2ajlyc3 \"\"1nbaUl5hvcYuoaTlFcyMt olpyxn4arDj wlAicavmHE>\"a=feVl8tSiYtj 5\"Pz0nm.Dt6eRnA.Xe0sriwduatr
I think the Herald's editorial voice takes the same approach to any new National policy. They don't really know what it is. They don't really care. They just support it, whatever it happens to be, because that's what they always do.
Brian Fallow - Granny's Economics Editor - isn't impressed with what passes for economic policy from either main party.
Radio New Zealand : News : Canterbury Earthquake : Residents feel abandoned in wake of quake
Residents feel abandoned in wake of quake
Updated 12 minutes ago
A senior Christchurch City Council manager bore the brunt of residents' frustrations at a public rally on Wednesday, as emotions ran high in one of the suburbs worst affected by a devastating earthquake.
About 100 Avonside residents at the rally say they feel abandoned because work to restore their basic services is taking so long following the 7.1 magnitude quake that hit Canterbury on 4 September.
Water services manager Mark Christison faced the frustrated crowd, amid jeers and heckling.
The rally was held in Acland Avenue, where piles of grey silt have yet to be removed and portable toilets are shared by residents because their sewerage system is not working. People also cannot use showers or baths, or wash clothes.
Residents demanded more information about the time it is taking to restore services and Mr Christison was close to tears as he told them he wished more could be done.
However, he explained that the repair work is slow because of its complexity, and promised residents the council will keep them better informed so they would not feel like their neighbourhood has been forgotten.
Residents of damage homes also say they feel neglected by the Government and the Earthquake Commission.
Rally organiser Angela Wasley says she wanted to get the community together to show that many people are still badly affected.
Many residents were informed by letter five days ago not to use their water or waste water as their area was in need of major repair, with streets still closed and roads being dug up.
But that was the last information they have received and the say they feel in limbo, wondering how long it will be until they are able to get even close to a normal existence.
The council says it might be three more weeks until the Earthquake Commission has assessed every area.
Copyright © 2010, Radio New Zealand
Departmental business time
I got a text message last night asking if I wanted to attend a Ministerial briefing meeting today, and if I did, to wear a suit. I don't habitually wear a suit. I would probably wear one more often but the weather has been off-putting. I hate wearing suit, overcoat and all that jazz - I'd rather wear a shirt and trousers and my trusty Icebreaker. But I made an exception today. As it turns out, I was only in the Minister's Office for 10 minutes and I didn't say a word as my two senior managers led the briefing. Still, I'll be at the adjournment debate in Parliament in the little civil servants' box in Westminister Hall. Somehow, I don't think many others will...Small gadget review - Radiopaq 'Pop' earphones for iPhone
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