Editorial: Govt needs to slow down or risk panic

Prime Minister John Key. Photo / Getty Images

In the aftermath of an event such as the Christchurch earthquake, communication must be handled with the utmost caution.

As much as residents and the media press for information on what lies ahead, and as much as politicians want to provide certainty, care must be taken not to promote possibly unwarranted alarm.

Remiss statements prompt only greater uncertainty. On that score, the Government has failed to strike the right balance.

The Prime Minister was doubtless seeking to be helpful when he suggested that 10,000 houses and some areas of Christchurch would have to be abandoned.

His estimate provided a sense of the extent of the damage in a city of 190,000 homes. The only problem was that this was very much an off-the-cuff evaluation based largely on aerial observation of the extent of the damage by Earthquake Commission engineers.

Subsequently, John Key admitted as much. The damage had already been done, however. Even if the estimate proves accurate, the statement erred in not naming suburbs or neighbourhoods.

Many Christchurch residents are, consequently, increasingly fearful that their home and their community will have to be abandoned. Further evidence of the folly of the Prime Minister's statement was soon provided by official Civil Defence figures that showed only 2198 homes had been deemed unliveable.

Obviously, Mr Key would have been better to wait until geotechnical data had provided a more definitive verdict on the damage to individual houses, land and communities. Then a clearer idea of what can and what cannot be rebuilt will emerge.

Unfortunately, it will be a few weeks before that data becomes available. But both politicians and the public should await its arrival, rather than make or request snap judgments.

This has not been the only occasion when the Government has been too quick on the trigger. The Earthquake Recovery Minister, Gerry Brownlee, raised unnecessary alarm when he suggested that if he had his way, most of Christchurch's heritage buildings would be bowled tomorrow.

The old buildings killed people when they toppled during the earthquake and they could not remain, he said. His statement pointed to a wish to take decisions not only in haste but with an arbitrary wave of his hand.

Mr Brownlee, like Mr Key, subsequently had to beat a retreat. He had, he said, "no desire to bring out the bulldozers and take Christchurch to the ground".

Furthermore, he had even been part of a trust that had saved one of the city's heritage buildings. Yet that did only so much to diminish the dismay felt by those who place a higher value on heritage and want a more considered approach to the buildings' future.

One of these is the Christchurch Mayor, Bob Parker. "I wouldn't agree that all of those buildings would need to go tomorrow," he said. Mr Parker also, quite rightly, described talk about abandoned neighbourhoods as speculation.

His statements illustrated a further outcome of flawed communications, the opening and highlighting of cracks between central and local government. Mr Parker, while wanting the central city to be reinstated quickly, clearly does not want to act with haste.

Again, the Prime Minister has had to repair the damage. He talked of a joint approach to governance, with the Government "hand in glove with Christchurch city". That is a statement of the obvious. It would not have had to be made if the Government had been more careful.

In such circumstances, it is never ideal to have to wait for the right information to come to hand. But there is no choice when the alternative risks spreading undue alarm and anguish.