Who's in charge?

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."

- © Fairfax NZ News