When I was in Christchurch recently to interview the two main candidates in the Christchurch Central electorate, I was shocked to see that people on the street seemed even more weary and downtrodden than ever - just as we're hearing everything is on the up.
People seemed not just tired, but exhausted to their bones. Residents in frequently-flooded areas were grimly determined, but in truth, they were over it. Some had kids who cried whenever it rained, because they were so scared of flooding. At public meetings, people burst into tears because they sometimes couldn't even get out of their homes in bad weather. The news of the day was that a woman who'd had a caesarean two weeks earlier was now living in a garage with her baby. Rents were just $20 cheaper, on average, than in Auckland.
It wasn't doom and gloom for everyone, of course. I met Nicky Wagner, the MP for Christchurch Central: an affable, hard-working woman. She was full of the joys of spring, about all the great opportunities the rebuild offers. She acknowledged there were problems, but even then disputed how bad they were: she believed, for example, there were only about 30 cases of genuine, absolutely-nowhere-to-sleep homelessness in the city; that the other 5000-7000 people identified as homeless in recent statistics did have somewhere to sleep - even if that was on someone else's couch.
She is right to suggest that a rebuild offers a unique opportunity to create a city of the future. But it seems the opportunities are being shared unequally, leading to vastly unequal outcomes. Business is charging ahead, millions of dollars in public and private money is pouring into the city. But the people who are best at capitalising on this surge of capital believe, as such people always do, that a strong business backdrop will inevitably lead to the provision of appropriate social services.
