Southland Museum closure a scandal

So it’s come to this. Has the Southland Museum and Art Gallery been dithered to death?

For years stretching into decades, expensive dreams of expansion turned to mirages.

The defence that other imperatives arose in the meantime - Stadium Southland fell down and a wider matrix of inner-city upgrade issues had to be fitted in with - doesn’t explain away a real lack of purposeful planning and effective public engagement.

Those who would defend this sorry inertia also cite the structural issues that arose as new rules regarding earthquake safety kicked in.

But to a shameful extent the clearly necessary task of fronting up to those were treated as tomorrow’s problems.

Tomorrow showed up this week.

All those years with nary a trace of urgency led to a tsunami of it as the Invercargill City Council’s new chief executive Clare Hadley and the also-new chair of the Southland Museum and Art Gallery Trust Board Toni Biddle, fronted up (in the disgraceful absence of the players who got us to this point) to announce the indefinite closure of the facility on the grounds of earthquake risk.

Indefinite, as in God knows for how long. And resolvable at an expense of God knows how much money. Requiring God knows how much recalibration of the priorities set out within the council’s long-term plan, freshly published for public consultation and already looking alarmingly overtaken by events. Casting all but maybe 13 or 14 of the museum’s staff out of work and potentially inconveniencing tuatara.

Cue howls from social media that new building standards are stupidly high for what a practical world should require.

But Hadley’s hardly being gratuitously meddlesome, given that legally the buck stops with her, not just her council or the trust board, as responsible for providing a safe environment for staff and public.

Please note: failing to meet the seismic rating doesn’t itself mean the building is automatically classed as ‘‘earthquake prone’’.

That designation must be applied, upon further investigation, by a territorial authority. But Hadley dismisses the possibility of yet more stalling action - especially given that the 2013 determination that it probably was earthquake prone has just been confirmed by a review.

Here, absolutely, is where massive public reproach is warranted.

Much as Building Act changes needed to be factored in, in the five years since that 2013 report arrived and was made public the council has sat on its hands for a reassessment to confirm that this was a problem requiring action.

That report - oh, come on! - shows up only now, and seems to say little more than ‘‘yep’’.

A climate of sluggardly serenity, and quiet risk-running, has been replaced by a frankly spooked reassessment. The scandal is less the new approach than the old one, which oh-soslowly landed us, quite so unprepared, in this mess.