Our family had a small bar in Poplar Lane which was destroyed on February 22 2011. We had a debt free business which had good insurance. Despite this, our life as a family in the past year has been quite trying.

We were rung last week by the company demolishing our old bar to say that they were starting and that our premises had been heavily looted. Our insurance company last week told us that although we had taken out a replacement policy, and that we had a good asset register, they were only paying out half of our claim and that they would reimburse us invoice by invoice up to the total of our claim. Have a close look at QBE’s policy if you are insured by them. A complicated setting is becoming even worse.

Meanwhile across the other side of the Central City (we are committed to stayingthere) we have been having the most amazing struggle to get a building permit to set up a temporary bar from the City Council. Our plans are for a site surrounded by scaffold, a bus which will become our bar, and some temporary buildings on the site. The Building Act seems so inflexible that our bus is deemed a permanent building and our scaffold is also seen as permanent. My son, Johnny, has put our struggle more eloquently than I could on www. goodbyebluemonday.co.nz. I recommend you read it.

Today in the Press the Department of Building and Housing has issued new standards of how much slump foundations can have before they will be repaired. This sets up a new uncertainty for us as we walk up and down slopes in our homes. Does this cut our house out will be the question in many kitchens this morning. This will be another uncertainty which we don’t need.

I tell these stories because before this city can even start to get its head around a clean green environmentally sound new city we have to beat our way through the bureaucracies which are causing city wide process constipation. We are bunged up with bureaucracy. This is in the private sector as well as the public. Everybody is protecting their arse. The insurance companies are trying to limit their pay outs. The public sector is terrified by the Royal Commission up the road. At the Commission lawyers are tearing apart the building owners, their engineers, and the Council staff who issue consents. It’s all being done in the name of natural justice but it’s achieving a perverse outcome.

 If we are not careful this city will be redesigned by lawyers and engineers. The lawyers will scare the hell out of the engineers who will, in turn, become even more conservative than they are already. Having the design of CTV building sent to the Police for possible charges to be laid sends absolutely the message that this is about blame and utu. I pose a simple question, would the designers of the CTV and PGG buildings have deliberately set about to build a dangerous building?

I would love to write about the amazing ideas which are gathering momentum as people talk in this city about a new future. However we are currently tied up in red tape. All of us. The demonstration against the CEO’s salary recently was really an outlet of community frustration at everything which is breaking up their lives and their families. If something big doesn’t happen there will be more of them. And people will be madder.

I’m not blaming any sector right now. They are all doing their best . They are however acting all within their own narrow framework. There does not appear to be an overall plan. We need to reach out to the international community for help. The guy who has sorted out our bar and the problems with the CCC is an American earthquake engineer who has been working in this sector for 25 years. We appear to be committed to reinventing what has been known for decades in other countries. I have seen experts from overseas rubbished by our professionals. We need to grow up and admit it’s pretty hard and that we don’t know everything. I would start with the engineering profession if I had a hand on the tiller. I cannot understand why San Francisco pulled down 35 buildings after their earthquake and we are pulling down 1300 just in the middle of the city. It will take 30 years to rebuild this area.

I conclude by asking what I think is the key issue right now. We are crying out for imaginative and futuristic leadership which embraces change is empathetic and collaborative in style. Then we might all get excited and forward thinking.

Now where’s that EQC form……………………..

 Garry Moore was Mayor of Christchurch from 1998-2007. He lives in Christchurch .