As New Zealand prepares for a lengthy Cyclone Gabrielle recovery, some want a national reconstruction authority to be set up for future disasters. Sam Sachdeva looks at the case for an authority, and the potential alternatives
While there is still uncertainty about exactly how long it will take New Zealand to recover from the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, one thing is clear: it will be a long and expensive process.
On Monday, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced the creation of a cyclone taskforce to provide advice to ministers on the path ahead, modelled on a similar group set up in Queensland after major flooding in 2010 and 2011.
But some would like the Government to take another leaf out of the Australian state’s book, and set up a permanent national reconstruction authority to prepare for and oversee the recovery from similar events in future.
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The Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA) was set up in 2011 as a temporary entity, before becoming a permanent part of the state government in June 2015.
The independent statutory authority is tasked with coordinating locally led rebuilds and recoveries from disasters, as well as reducing risk and building resilience before future disasters.
Before the authority was set up, its functions rested with a disparate range of government agencies, acting QRA chief executive Jimmy Scott told Newsroom.
The organisation had been created to provide a single point of coordination for all those roles, Scott said, while also smoothing out the ebbs and flows in state support following a disaster.
“Before the QRA, what we tended to find in response to disaster events was that in the immediate aftermath, there's a spike in activity in terms of the immediate response, then that plateaus as the emergency services essentially return to base [and] there can often be a delay before the recovery effort then spikes up as well.
“Our mandate is to ensure that the recovery effort starts right from the time of the event so that early relief is provided, and as the initial response phase ends, there's no reduction in effort or activity.”
With the authority’s early work a success, and Queensland the most disaster-hit state in Australia with more than 100 events in the past decade, the decision to make its work permanent was a no-brainer.
“The scale of recovery that we've managed since [its initial establishment] … is more than $22 billion, so it's a very significant programme in Queensland,” Scott said.
With that extraordinary work comes extraordinary powers: the authority has statutory independence and the ability to declare reconstruction areas and critical infrastructure projects.
It can also ‘step in’ and force other agencies to carry out work as part of a recovery process. However, Scott said those powers had been used just three times in its 12 years of existence, with the authority instead preferring to work collaboratively with other parts of government and local communities.
An official Queensland recovery plan required local governments to set up community-focused recovery groups, with the authority sending regional liaison officers to communities to support them in scaling up their own work.
“It’s not their role to take over - our role is very much enabling the locals to get on with the recovery.”
Staff carry out door-by-door visits in an affected area every three months following a disaster to make sure nobody “slips through the cracks”, escalating issues to the insurance council or to government agencies if necessary.
As part of its move to a permanent role, the authority had also begun to focus on resilience work. Following floods in Queensland last year, a AU$741 million fund had been set up to carry out resilient retrofits such as home raising, and in the worst case scenarios to buy back properties to demolish the houses and use the land for non-residential purposes.
Former Kāpiti Coast district councillor Gwynn Compton, who has called for the creation of a New Zealand reconstruction authority, said he had witnessed the success of the Queensland agency while working for Australian telecommunications provider Telstra.
“There's always going to be another disaster not too far around the corner that’s going to be of a scale that necessitates having that sort of capacity available at short notice.” - Gwynn Compton, former Kāpiti Coast district councillor
With huge swathes of Aotearoa destroyed by Cyclone Gabrielle, and local government lacking the capacity to build back on its own, a national agency with the ability to coordinate the response and oversee future events could be invaluable, Compton said.
“We've had two quakes in Christchurch, the Seddon earthquake, the Kaikōura earthquake, we've had multiple huge flooding events, we've now had Cyclone Gabrielle: there's always going to be another disaster not too far around the corner that’s going to be of a scale that necessitates having that sort of capacity available at short notice.”
The Opportunities Party (TOP) leader and former Christchurch city councillor Raf Manji told Newsroom he was also supportive of the concept, contrasting the independence and locally led approach of the QRA with the more top-down, bureaucratic stance taken by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) during the Christchurch earthquake rebuild.
An entity with an independent board that reported to a government minister provided greater flexibility and swifter decision making than a government department like CERA, Manji said.
“An organisation which is built into the government is a problem when you’re recovering from events and you need different disciplines which aren’t about risk management for ministers.”
There are other alternatives that could be put to use. Last year Christchurch rebuild agency Ōtākaro was repurposed by the Government into a company capable of delivering infrastructure projects across government, and some have suggested it could be put to use in a reconstruction role.
However, Manji did not believe the organisation currently had the transparency levels necessary for such a purpose, with little public disclosure on its spending and contracts.
The TOP leader said he was a fan of the alliance model used by the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team as well as the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery group set up after the Kaikōura quake, with government agencies working with local councils and the private sector in a collaborative and locally led manner.
However, with potential duplication of resources and expertise between different alliance groups across the country, Manji said it made sense to create a dedicated agency at a national level.
A mixed response
The idea has so far received a mixed response from politicians, with Hipkins non-committal on whether the task force would be turned into a permanent authority as was the case in Queensland.
“It's a bit early for those kinds of conversations: they didn't do that on day one in Queensland either, it was something that evolved over time, so I wouldn't rule it out.”
National Party leader Christopher Luxon was similarly vague, saying his priority was “getting the appropriate structure in place for [each] disaster” given their differing characteristics.
“Single points of leadership and accountability is what you really want, you want to be able to have empowered leadership that can get on and actually get things done and deliver that infrastructure for people as needed.”
Green Party co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw said he supported the concept of a permanent structure in principle given the increasing frequency of severe weather events.
However, ACT leader David Seymour was sceptical about the merits of a standalone agency, saying it would be wasteful to set up a permanent entity when an ad hoc response could be sufficient.
Seymour was more supportive of bespoke alliances between government organisations and the private sector, such as the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery grouping of the NZ Transport Agency, KiwiRail and construction companies established to deal with Kaikōura earthquake damage.
But with the World Bank having reviewed the Queensland model and found its approach replicable in other countries, Scott said there was plenty New Zealand could learn from Australia in terms of locally led recoveries and resilience work.
