No favourites - mayor

ANTHONY HUBBARD

THE EARTHQUAKE mayor is spreading his smile across the shattered east of his city. Bob Parker is the working-class boy with the voice of a toff who knows how to handle a crowd who haven't had a shower for a while.

An older woman with purplish hair asks for advice about her chemical toilet. "I don't know if you've had a practice run yet, ma'am?" he responds pleasantly.

"I had a meeting to go to," she jokes. She is one of about 100 gathered in a tiny park in Avonside. "Oh, so you're saving that pleasure for later," says Parker.

A norwester is shaking the trees and for once you can't smell the stench of silt. Parker thought there might be some hard questions, but there was only one – inevitably, about portaloos. "We've still got portaloos from the last quake," grumbles one man. Six months and the sewerage system still doesn't work. "If you've got a portaloo you don't want, we'll have it," another man shoots back.

The portaloos have become a totem in the east-west argument. The impoverished eastern suburbs took the heft of the quake and have allegedly been neglected. The wealthy west sails on. Parker says that's all wrong. "There is no way we are going to pick favourites."

He looks like a man of the west, perhaps even Fendalton. In fact, he is the son of a plumber from downmarket Heathcote Valley, and his voice comes from elocution lessons he took while trying to get a job in radio. He agrees he's seen as a Nat, although he says he voted Labour most of his life, switching in 2008.

He tells the unshowered people of the east he's only just got the power and water on at the warehouse apartment near Hagley Park he shares with his second wife Joanna. "Till then it was flannel-baths," he says.

He hasn't used his position to get privileges for himself. Besides, he tells the Sunday Star-Times, it's right that "we are in the same place as our citizens".

Certainly there is some resentment in the east about the comfort in the west, although most people are polite to politicians. Eastsider Richie Olding was cycling through Fendalton and saw a woman watering her garden. "I said: `Don't you know there's been an earthquake?' She said: `What do you mean?' I just carried on so I didn't lose my temper."

Laura McConchie went into a Fendalton supermarket. "You stink and you're all dirty and they're all in their makeup. They have no idea!"

Parker tells Laura's mother Dianne, who is leading dalmatian Shilo, that "the technical term is `munted'. There's mega-munt, medium-munt and minor-munt".

At 12.51pm, 10 days exactly after the earthquake, Parker looks around at the blasted roadscape, bent houses and silt piles during a walkabout in Bexley with Prime Minister John Key. "This is mega-munt."

McConchie asked Key some hard questions, but reports of an eastern revolt are exaggerated. Lance Johnston, whose brick house has fallen into a lake of silt, shook Key's hand and told him he was doing "a great job". He says the same about Parker. The Labour supporter voted for neither man.

Parker is out on the street hugging the family of Tracey Bolton, a National voter who is also full of praise for the mayor. Her husband Riki, she says, is a drainlayer and is "very busy" right now. He will be for the foreseeable future, it seems.

IT IS hard to remember now that Parker was once a controversial mayor who stood to lose the last election. He was criticised for being high-handed, abrasive, secretive, and too slick for his own good. His challenger, MP Jim Anderton, allegedly said "only an earthquake" would stop him winning – the tale is apparently untrue. But Parker agrees the earthquake helped him, although he believes that without it he would have won "by a narrow margin".

He is a brilliant TV performer, calm, easy, suave and reassuring. His press briefings mix hard facts with rousing references to "our people" and "our city".

Is this just a political performance? "I am what I am," he replies. "I am in this position and I'm doing my best."

The earthquake has dampened the political heat surrounding the mayor, because no rival politician wants to appear to be scoring points amid the rubble. But not everyone loves him. "He might look good on TV, but he's not a nice man," says one Aranui Labourite.

Chrystal Perelini, who with her husband Amo runs a free-food shop at the front of their house in Dallington, says Parker arrived there with a pile of reporters and later that day two much-needed portaloos appeared. "Well, wouldn't you be cynical?" she asks.

Parker insists the precious portaloos were put where the need seemed greatest, although there weren't enough to go around.

When the earthquake struck, Parker couldn't get hold of either of his 80-something parents, whose L-shaped house broke in half, or his eldest son Nick, whose house in tony Redcliffs was wrecked.

He has learned how to deal with the criticism. "I'm a fairly spiritual guy," he says. About 20 years ago he read a book about Buddhism that made him realise, he says, that he was merely one tiny piece in the jigsaw of life.

He "walked away from alcohol" about the same time, after spending six weeks at the drug and alcohol treatment centre at Hanmer Springs. He learned that "real peace and happiness come from inside you, not from material things".

So is it the Buddhism that has kept him so apparently calm? "I don't know."

Certainly Parker can tap into the powerful feelings of solidarity that follow a calamity. That, and anger at people who behave selfishly, is widespread. Single mother Angela Lynch was driving cautiously down Baker St in New Brighton soon after the earthquake, amazed to see cars submerged in sinkholes. A man behind her kept "beeping his horn and then he passed me on the left – and drove straight into a huge hole". She couldn't help laughing.

Now, however, her three-year-old daughter "has started wetting the bed and screaming" and she is taking her two girls south to Invercargill to have a rest. An aftershock hits as she speaks, and there is a discussion about its intensity. Christchurch people have internalised the Richter scale.

Catering entrepreneur David Cusiel, who with his partner Hayley Brosnahan has been running a free cellphone charging service at their South New Brighton home, laments that it takes a disaster to bring people together. The pair were overwhelmed by the response to their service, with people offering money, fruit, vegetables and other goods in exchange for having their cellphone link restored. "It's been real fun, and I'm going to be gutted when the power comes on and people go back and hide in their houses," says Cusiel.

THE EAST is shocked and damaged, although only rarely is the ruin as horrible as in the CBD. Within the cordon, many streets are deserted. Army trucks and the tank-like light armoured vehicles patrol in the silence.

Above, you can see the now familiar leaning tower of the Hotel Grand Chancellor, lopsided on its right like the face of a stroke victim. The clock on the old Post Office opposite the ruined cathedral in the Square has stopped at 12.41 – it must have been slow, because the earthquake, as everyone knows, struck 10 minutes later.

A tram sits frozen where it stopped at zero hour. A headless dummy with a merino jacket has fallen through a shop window, and lies amid the shards. It's as though the city has been bombed and is under martial law.

But in the eastern suburbs, the damage is typically less spectacular. The roads are crumpled and sometimes split, but most are passable. Houses are sometimes a pile of bricks, but more often, they have a blue tarpaulin where the chimney was, or plywood over a window. Brick and breezeblock fences are toppled.

People tend to be stoical and good-humoured. "I'm sick of hearing them grizzling on the radio. I thought we were supposed to be staunch on this side. Harden up!" says Jill, a beneficiary, who with partner Peter is picking up a parcel of free food at Aranui School.

It is not surprising then that when Parker gave his speech at the park in Avonside, explaining that everything that could be done was being done, there was no great hostility. When he finished, the listeners applauded. Even the man who complained about the portaloos seemed abashed. "I didn't mean to cause any aggravation," he tells the Star-Times. Nobody wants to moan too loudly after the horror of February 22, he explains, because "people have died".

- © Fairfax NZ News