Posts by Hebe
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Greg and I were both very happy to find the Selling The Dream exhibition at the Canterbury Museum this afternoon. Marvellous! So many fine works.
Sat and watched some of the documentary with the man who printed the stunning New Zealand wildflowers work saying that that was the highlight of his career. Nice.
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Martin Phillipps and Minisnap are at Peterborough St Library 7-9pm tonight.
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Speaker: Christchurch: how did it come…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
..and then there is this:
This happens weeks before, supposedly, the Canterbury Home Repair Programme/Fletcher’s/EQR winds down.
Which also happens a few weeks before new earthquake building standards are finally enforced, which will drive up residential repair and rebuild costs even further. Coincidence? Call me a cabbage, but no.
In fact many thousands of under-cap claims are left to resolve: the difficult ones. Yet the EQC press releases constantly assure New Zealand that it’s all wrapping up nicely. Not true.
The reality is that the processes are grinding on. Anyone on possibly Increased Flood Vulnerability land will learn by the end of this year the status of their land. That decision can then be challenged by the owner. The final decision will impact on repair strategies and costs, including whether their claims stay under-cap or go to the insurer. Insurers, like Tower, are now getting antsy about that.
Anyone with possibly Increased Liquefaction Vulnerability will know land status, supposedly, by the end of the year. But EQC is unsure how to assess ILV, or how to compensate it, so they are still working on the very basics of that process. Then they will start to assess the land.
Both IFV and ILV are land damage and are covered only by EQC. But if a piece of land is deemed either, EQC must compensate. The compensation could be a pay-out, or it could be remediating the land, or in some other way defending the building against the increased vulnerability. The whole land compensation process is a work in progress for everyone, and it will inevitably have points of contention.
Then to the building repairs itself for the houses left to be repaired or settled. Thousands of us are officially “on hold” from the CHRP until we find out our land status. We do not show up as unresolved cases in the statistics that EQC and Minister Brownlee pump out. The official figures bear no relationship to reality: recategorising and omission is EQC’s favoured strategy to deal with unwelcome outcomes.
Others have opted to go ahead and fix or settle, often without understanding this insurance labyrinth. Will they be able to revisit the house fix if their land proves to be IFV or ILV?
Will their repaired land, and therefore vulnerable home, even be insurable? No one is saying.
So much stress and misery could have been avoided had the process itself been made clear by EQC. Why did they not?
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Speaker: Christchurch: how did it come…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Midday: that's evil.
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Reminder to Christchurch people: still time to put in your submissions on the council's long-term plan: keeping the assets and the rest. Have your say.
Submissions close tomorrow.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to andrew gunn,
Bad taste biscuits, fake trenches, John Key – by all means call out these low hanging fruit, but really is that all you’ve got? I couldn’t spot many of the 25,000-odd in Cranmer Square this morning who were there for the glorification or entertainment.
There’s more than one way of remembering and respecting. I, and another 400,000 or so Christchurch people, do not happen to need a military ceremony to do so.
I am not sorry that my very personal and thought-through account of a close family Great War veteran who lived his life in this city doesn’t measure up to your standards.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to izogi,
Are they allowed to trade on ANZAC morning these days?
I don't know about cafes. This household was woken on Anzac morning by a biohazard team stripping out the neighbouring house before demolition. I'm unsure whether to be peeved or pleased.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Russell Brown,
The trenches were a place that young men died, not an amusement park ride.
Quite. Where are the tone police when they are needed? (I didn’t realise the trench was on tour. Presented by the History Channel.)
Christchurch people: I’m told the 19th Battalion and Armoured Regiment Service at The Memorial in Victoria Park (Victoria Park Rd, Cashmere 8.00am Saturday) is one of the most atmospheric and without the vast crowds.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Samuel Scott,
those poor bastards, let’s not do this again’
Yes.
I have been uneasy at so much of the well-meaning over-production this year, and I and many others want to acknowledge the centenary.
But fake trenches in the Auckland CBD? I can almost imagine my grandfather’s reaction. Jack Elliott was tetchy at times, understandably because he was shot and wounded at Gallipoli as a teenager.
Understandably because he limped around with a heavy up-to-the-hip wooden leg for half a century after his leg was blown to bits at The Somme (Ypres) by 19 years old.
He was expected to die. He didn’t. Came home, married, had children, lived his life. He didn’t talk to me about the war; that was not a topic for children. My aunt told me this week he would not march in the Anzac Day parades or wear his medals “because he said he would never salute an officer ever again”. He went to watch the parades to see his old friends.
He wanted to enlist for World War Two – do some office work and be useful. They wouldn’t have him.
He was meant to surrender his rifle. It went under the floorboards in the hall (and the floor squeaked evermore). Jack had a family to protect.
He joined the Home Guard. Resigned in disgust when they set him to guarding the Gasson Street overbridge: “The Japs won’t come across the overbridge. They’ll walk down the bloody railyards.”
But he kept his dress uniform, the full kit, under the bed until the day he died, peacefully, in Grandad’s Chair with tea in Grandad’s Cup on the arm, surrounded by his family.
I feel a little fraudulent writing this: he wasn’t going to talk to a small girl about the Great War (though I won a prize as a child for the poem I wrote about his spare leg kept in the hall cupboard). I know little, and I don’t claim any knowledge of his political views, but I know the outpouring of politicking and sentimentality would not have appealed to him in the slightest. Remembrance and emotion, yes, but that’s a different thing, isn’t it?
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The PM signals that the CCC will not be held to the cost-share agreement in the last three pars of this morning’s Press story http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/67933951/rugby-union-ok-with-possible-lancaster-return
Prime Minister John Key said he spoke with Dalziel about planning issues on Sunday.
“Of course there are hopes and expectations that all this infrastructure can be built but I don’t think we’re going to say well on a piece of paper you said you’d do this, and be belligerent about it – we’ll work with them."
Former Mayor Bob Parker says in the story that the cost-share deal is not binding and can be renegotiated. Let’s hope he is correct – that is not what Chch has been told since the deal was signed. That, of course, would remove the need for asset sales.
(Press miss of the month as a prime front page lead is buried at the end of a p5.)