CTV failure offends sense of justice

The common experiences of the 2010 Pike River mining disaster and the 2011 Christchurch earthquake tell us that there are some things we are good at in New Zealand and some things we are not so good at.

We are good at organising anniversaries and constructing memorials.

We are good at promising that bodies will be retrieved or that no-one will be worse off, even if the promises are not always kept.

But we are not very good at holding people to account.

There has always been a peculiar symmetry to the two South Island events that happened just months apart.

News that no-one will be prosecuted following a three-year police investigation into the collapse of the Canterbury Television (CTV) building, which caused 115 of the 185 deaths attributed to the 2011 earthquake, only increases the sense of symmetry.

The Pike River families recently won what they called a ‘‘moral victory’’ when the Supreme Court ruled that a Worksafe NZ decision to drop charges against former Pike River chief executive Peter Whittall, who paid $3.41 million to survivors and families, was unlawful.

The victory that came after three years of relentless campaigning was also bittersweet in that too much time has elapsed for Whittall to be charged.

There will be a similar sense of frustration, sadness and disbelief over the CTV decision. Affected families have expressed their disappointment and even disgust.

It is likely that similar emotions are felt across the wider community, even among those who had no personal connection to the disaster.

The decision not to charge anyone over the collapse offends our deepest sense of justice. Nearly two-thirds of those killed in the February 22 earthquake died in a building that, according to a royal commission, had serious design flaws and should never have been granted a building consent.

Seventy of the 115 killed were foreign students and the police’s decision will be especially difficult for overseas families who not only lost their children to the disaster but will still be unable to experience closure.

One way of creating meaning out of the senselessness is to hope that such an event might serve as an example, a warning or a deterrent.

We cannot abide the thought that innocent people have died in vain.

The deaths at Pike River did at least lead to a law change that families and others could consider to be a legacy of the disaster and might provide a small amount of solace.

But when an obviously faulty building collapses, taking so many lives with it, and no-one is held accountable, it leaves a dark stain on Christchurch that will endure long after the city has been rebuilt.