The big quake was in 2003. There was an after-tremor last week but nothing broke. But lying under the silt is another faultline, ready to facture.
This is not about Canterbury. Last week’s column had to be filed before Saturday’s massive shock. Nothing can be added that hasn’t been said. Wellington dwellers have been reminded how precarious their perch is and have seen the huge cost in money, assets and personal wellbeing.
Two big earthquakes close to the same magnitude. One, in Haiti, killed around a quarter of a million people. The other, close to Christchurch, killed no one. That’s a price of inequality.
Humans can’t stop earthquakes. But humans can mitigate them with building regulations and other measures. Since the 1931 Napier earthquake governments here have progressively tightened building regulations so people are much less likely to be killed — though some buildings apparently don’t yet conform, judging by Christchurch’s wall collapses.
You might call it socialism with New Zealand characteristics: lashings of taxpayer money to lucky or shrewd depositors in shoebox South Canterbury Finance who have been creaming high interest, coupled with respite for “underwater” farmers who made bad purchases and businesses which made bad debt decisions.
Colin James’s paper to the Reconstituting the Constitution conference, Institute of Policy Studies/Centre for Public Law, 3 September 2010
New Zealand was for a long time attached to Australia or, rather, was under the sea next to Australian Gondwanaland,. It was briefly part of Australia when incorporated in the colony of New South Wales before the Treaty of Waitangi made it a separate colony. It chose to stay out of Australia when the continental colonies federated in 1900 but under section 6 was designated a colony of the Commonwealth of Australia and could therefore, at least in theory, choose to join as a state (provided section 6 is not amended to exclude New Zealand).
Colin James on super-Auckland for Metro Auckland September 2010
Auckland is small. Until it figures how small it is, it won’t get big. Maybe it doesn’t want to.
Auckland is small in three ways: in population compared with great cities around the world; in creativity and economic innovation compared with the great international centres; and in its lack of large spirit.
In 1996 Helen Clark got a big hairdo and flash makeup and went public with this near-unrecognisable persona. It was the boldest cosmetic rebranding since Bob Harvey remodelled Norman Kirk in 1972 from greasy slob to greying statesman.
Julia Gillard had a cosmetic remake, for a women’s magazine, as a campaign manoeuvre in Australia’s election last month. As the polls plunged she then proclaimed that she was going back to the “real Julia”.
Going to vote in your council elections? Or do you think it doesn’t much matter who gets in? If so, join the majority. Representative democracy’s grip is loosening. That bothers some public-spirited people. Should it?
Representative democracy substitutes for direct democracy — voting on issues by referendum or, in a small electorate, in a “town hall” meeting — and participatory democracy through meetings and “consultation”.
The “recovery” has gone patchy. Not surprising, after the biggest financial crash in 70 years, perhaps of all time. But what are we supposedly “recovering” to? That question will dog economic policymakers for some years ahead.
It has been obvious for at least 18 months — arguably five years or more — that we are not going back to business-as-usual. There will still be economic growth but it will be qualitatively different from the 1990s and 2000s.
Here’s a thought for Julia Gillard: if Australia had MMP she would have a majority, with the Greens (on initial figures). But the Greens’ 11 per cent vote share in the government-legitimising House of Representatives got only one seat.
Here’s a thought for Tony Abbott (wrongly declared “mad” by Australia’s myopic mainstream media): aside from their environmentalism, Greens mainly lean more left than Labor on international, social and economic issues. So: problems in the Senate for an Abbott government.
Big parties have radical fringes. Small parties have fundamentalists and realists.
Deep greens left the Green party while it was inside the leftist Alliance. The Alliance split when its fundamentalists rejected Jim Anderton’s compromises with Helen Clark. Now ACT is in the same grinder.
The dividing lines are not black and white and are as much by personality as principle. Rodney Hide is expansive, bouncy, rummages through ideas and leans to the realist side. Heather Roy is gritty, less intellectually supple and leans to the fundamentalist side.