It could be up to 18 months before 660 Christchurch homeowners know who will pay for earthquake damage repairs with a $1 billion price tag. The bill to fix houses in Christchurch that weren't repaired properly the first time round, or have suffered more damage in aftershocks, is climbing - and the government can't say who's liable. The problem is the homes have new owners who can't claim on theri insurance because the damage pre-dates them owning the home. Earlier Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods told us the previous National government put no plan in place, and the current government is being left to pick up the pieces. Former Christchurch earthquake recovery minister Gerry Brownlee disputes the issue.
Christchurch Regeneration Minister Megan Woods says it could take 18 months to decide who is liable for the repairs for 660 home-owners caught in legal limbo. They've bought homes where they thought all the earthquake damage had been repaired - and now find more problems have emerged. Ms Woods told us it's not clear who is liable for these repairs - and it could take as long as 18 months to resolve that basic liability issue. EQC's chief executive Sid Miller has already apologised. He tells Susie Ferguson it's an issue he's been aware of in the year he has been with EQC.
Georgina Hanafin says EQC has offered her $48,000 to fix her house, which has a repair bill of $260,000. She also has a mortgage of $300,000 for the house she purchased after the Christchurch earthquakes.
A Christchurch man says EQC misled him about the earthquake damage to his home and deliberately under-scoped the repairs that were needed. David Townshend said his warnings were ignored.
Canterbury mayors say their ratepayers are already paying for earthquake recovery, roading, water and storm water infrastructure, so a shiny new Christchurch stadium is way down the priority list.
Repatriation, innovation, virtual reality and other digital opportunities and issues around earthquake strengthening buildings will all come up for debate next weekend at our museums' national conference in Christchurch. The MA18 Conference brings together several hundred museum leaders to talk about a time of rapid change in how museums display their taonga and how they reach out to their communities. Lynn Freeman spoke to Phillipa Tocker who's the Executive Director of Museums Aotearoa, and to one of the guest speakers, futurist Kaila Colbin who's curator of TEDxChristchurch and TEDxScottBase, co-founder and Chair of the Ministry of Awesome and a director of ChristchurchNZ which is responsible for tourism, major events and economic development in the city.
Architect Bob Burnett is part of a class action group yet to resolve claims with Southern Response. The group argues the insurer, which was established to settle outstanding AMI claims, has systematically short-changed them. Mr Burnett said the insurer had done more damage to his home than had been done in the earthquakes. The 40 members of the class action group head to court next Wednesday.
The Christchurch City Council's plans to to help curb a rising homeless population has left some people who live rough worried. The council is considering funding the Christchurch City Mission to employ outreach workers for the first time since the Canterbury earthquakes, and police are increasing central city patrols. Christchurch reporter Logan Church has the story.
The government has announced a new "hub" offering a bunch of separate services to Christchurch locals with ongoing earthquake-related problems.
The government is hoping a new one-stop shop will help homeowners in Canterbury still struggling with insurance claims, but as Logan Church reports, this isn't the first initiative of its kind in the quake-rattled city.
We measure the longer-term effect of a major earthquake on the local economy, using night-time light intensity measured from space, and investigate whether insurance claim payments for damaged residential property affected the local recovery process. We focus on the destructive Christchurch earthquake of 2011 as our case study. In this event more than 95% of residential housing units were covered by insurance, but insurance payments were staggered over 5 years, enabling us to identify their local impact. We find that night-time luminosity can capture the process of recovery and describe the recovery’s determinants. We also find that insurance payments contributed significantly to the process of economic recovery after the earthquake, but delayed payments were less affective and cash settlement of claims were more affective in contributing to local recovery than insurance-managed rebuilding.
We estimate the causal effects of a large unanticipated natural disaster on high schoolers’ university enrolment decisions and subsequent medium-term labour market outcomes. Using national administrative data after a destructive earthquake in New Zealand, we estimate that the disaster raises tertiary education enrolment of recent high school graduates by 6.1 percentage points. The effects are most pronounced for males, students who are academically weak relative to their peers, and students from schools directly damaged by the disaster. As relatively low ability males are overrepresented in sectors of the labour market helped by the earthquake, greater demand for university may stem from permanent changes in deeper behavioural parameters such as risk aversion or time preference, rather than as a coping response to poor economic opportunities.
