Travesty of Government #EQC Christchurch Rebuild in a Single Letter.

 

On a recent episode of Campbell Live a woman from Christchurch memorably said that though the Christchurch earthquakes were a disaster, the rebuild has become a travesty. Yes. Below is a letter we received last week from the Earthquake Commission (EQC – for my non-New Zealand readers, this is the state entity through which all earthquake claims must be dealt in the first instance):

 

 Thank you for your email. I have made a note of the points in your email on your claim so this information will be taken into account when your quote is reviewed. I have also labelled your quote as urgent in the hope that this will speed things up for you. Unfortunately there is not much more that we can do in the meantime as there are currently a large number of quotes in the queue for review and many are in similar states of urgency. I apologise sincerely for the delay and assure you that we are working as quickly as possible.

 

Kind regards,

 

[Name]

 

[Name]| Claims Administrator | Opt Out Team | Earthquake Commission

 

Over three and a half years ago.

I’ll repeat that.

Over three and a half years ago our house in Diamond Harbour would have been a reasonably cheap fix out of the Christchurch earthquakes, and certainly under the EQC cap of $100,000. These many years later we now have pools of dirty water on the bottom floor which has become unliveable, carpets and timber framing sodden, and I suspect we may be well over cap to fix anymore - (which, perversely, would be great, as we could finally then make it out of this incompetent, Kafkaesque bottleneck created by government through EQC and be able to deal with our private insurer regarding our specific damage and hence requirements, toward getting something done other than pointless scoping reports. As you can see from the letter writer’s sign off, we are currently in the process of trying to ‘opt out’ of the Fletcher rebuild, but this is proving as impossible as getting Fletcher’s to actually rebuild any damned thing.)

There is no better example than this letter of the reason why the Central Business District which has been taken over by government CERA in Christchurch remains an un-rebuilt, lifeless hole, which may never recover to attract business back, while suburban Christchurch has taken off with a life, verve and vigour created from the spontaneous order of individuals and businesspeople going about getting their lives and businesses back relatively unfettered by local and central government busy-bodies. After over three and a half years EQC have not even solved the bureaucratic bottleneck around ‘urgent quotations’ in a queue, let alone the more routine ones. Plus any possibility of action after all this time is still down to 'hope'.

This is bullshit. I never paid insurance so I could be better off via a claim, only so I would be left in the same place/situation on the insured event happening as I was beforehand. What a distance between that and this ‘there is not much more we can do in the meantime’ because we have this long queue, almost four years after an event. I would never take such nonsense from a private firm, indeed, no private firm could stay in business with lack of service to this extent, however, with government we have no choice.

And that’s why I don’t want government running my life, or the city I live; which further explains my frustration from the knowledge there is still a very good chance a Left-centric government that believes in just the incompetency seen here will be voted in the general election coming September. Because regardless of the evidence, too many of us have become brainwashed into thinking the state knows best, it’ll look after us, and can miraculously provide solutions better than we ourselves can. And that bullshit is caused by the death of a former classical liberal ethic in New Zealand under the draconian enforcement of Western tax surveillance states, and the dependency which has been created for so many to the big brother busy body governance those states now represent.

 

Totalibungling the Rebuild - Let’s Put a Wall Around Christchurch and Call it East Berlin

Because that wall seems to be the main structure being built in Christchurch. Local and central government are totalibungling the rebuild to the extent the garden city will soon look like that prison city did before the irrepressible moral right of freedom struck the wall around it down, and availed it of the sanity of free markets – or as near to as we have left in the West now.

Eric Cramption reports on EQC’s new policy for those who want to opt out of the EQC/Fletcher’s rebuild program:  that is, quoting this morning’s Press:

‘In what have been labelled bullyboy tactics, the EQC released a new policy this week saying property owners opting out of the Fletchers repair scheme must pay all bills themselves and wait to be reimbursed by the commission.’

Yeah right, good luck with that. For some this could cost up to $115,000, and because they’re dealing with government EQC, there is no guarantee that all expenditure will be reimbursed, as EQC seem to be able to make the rules up on that as they go along.

I don’t need say much more than my comment to Eric’s thread:

We've still got a house in Diamond Harbour, and the next door neighbour is a very good builder who we want to do our repairs, though EQC are making that damned hard now. As with yourself, the net result is that more people will feel trapped in the Fletcher system, and an even bigger bottleneck will exist than already does. The answer is in de-centralisation of the repair work, not this, the opposite. Put a wall around the city and change its name to East Berlin.

Anyway, for us, after finally getting our 'first' EQC report after six or seven months, and it not telling us anything useful, or what the next step is, we're just going to 'shelve' our house there - its being rented, so covering costs at least - for a couple of years then look at repairs. We might have heard from EQC again at some stage in that timeframe (if we're lucky).

Laissez faire capitalism works so well because it allows, especially in the age of the Internet, for the decentralised marrying of the complex needs and desires of all individuals within a society as they go about pursuing their happiness. When, however, a centralised planner tries to funnel the resolution of these myriad needs and desires through a single point, government, as in all planned economies, then you always will end up choking on a bottle-neck of human misery and chaos because markets cannot work toward the spontaneous order they are so good at if left unfettered (by regulation and the taxman). And this is not a comment on the people in EQC, the people we’ve dealt with are fine, it’s a comment on philosophy: centralisation and planned societies don’t work on every level, right down to four phone calls over six months to get a completed report emailed or snail mailed.

Local and central government have to get out of people’s lives in Christchurch, and we need to get rid of EQC. If my wife and  I could have dealt straight with our private insurer I suspect our Christchurch issues would have been largely resolved by now: as it is, per my previous comment, all we have in our hands is a report that took EQC over six months to get to us, which tells us nothing in terms of the figures we’re looking at, or what they propose per the necessary repair work.

So while we all wait for the rebuild, I invite you to look at these fascinating photographs of East Berlin first under the planned economy which we’ve largely voted in, and then under capitalism.  Why would sane, freedom loving individuals choose anything other than capitalism?