Indifference rules response

Auckland-based writer and business owner.

Iread the news of the second Omicron wave hitting NZ while sitting on the chilly, silver shelf of an airport baggage weighing scale. It was 10pm last Saturday and 100 passengers and I were stranded in a closed, deserted airport terminal.

Our flight from Auckland to Queenstown had failed to land because of storms, we’d been redirected to Christchurch, there was no fuel to get us to Auckland, no flights to Queenstown until today, no replacement flights scheduled, no buses and no overnight accommodation. There were mattresses/yoga mats if we wanted to sleep on the floor of the Koru club. Next to me, a pigtailed, pink puffer-jacketed girl was howling through a mouthful of half-masticated gummy worms in a surprisingly articulate summary of the events.

Actually the exhausted, overwhelmed, grumpy kid is a fairly accurate metaphor for the mood of the nation right now after two years of Covid. And it’s why most of us are reacting to the news of the second wave with, well. We’re not really reacting.

This collective general shrug has been described as Covid complacency. Basically, people are over this. So despite the second wave, we intend to keep carrying on with normal life.

Complacency makes us sound like reckless, feckless twits running around revenge-licking doorknobs to make up for the last two years. Though I also think to some extent it’s inevitable.

Last year in the US, they started talking about the concept of the ‘‘boring apocalypse’’. Our stress response to the pandemic has been progressively whittled down over time. The brain was repeatedly exposed to something that terrified it the last few years. Now it has lived through the terror it has acclimatised to it, getting progressively less afraid with every passing day.

As such, now it’s all a bit normal. Boring, even. The fear that made us suit up for the supermarket run like we were removing asbestos has faded. Now, we’re harder to shock. It would take a plague of locusts fire-bombing our Mums’ pilates classes with bubonic plague-infected Molotov cocktails before we really got worried.

(I’m not saying we should be like this, in fact it’s an awful health response. But this is also inevitably how humans adapt to fear.)

There are a multitude of ways city ratepayers can be spared bearing the brunt of the cost increase burden ...

It’s compounded by the fact that we’ve got two years of frustration, irritation, and exhaustion to exorcise from our bodies. Having one foot in the media, one stiletto in a nightclub each weekend, I can tell you that people are feeling emotionally wild right now.

Covid gave everyone one of those wake-up-torealise-that-life-is-precious-so-suck-themarrowout-of-it-like-it’s-a-strawberry-milkshake-at-2am realisations. They do not want any form of increased precautions, nor any gathering limits. When I hear experts call for indoor masking, I wince at the thought of enforcing that. People just won’t do it. At this point the gap between official advice and the public appetite has never been wider.

We’ve formed a surreal, societal Venn diagram. There’s professional pressure for increased restrictions on one side. Overwhelming public disinterest on the other. And politicians in the middle are trying to win an election.

So what do you do when someone knows they’re wrong, but they’re not going to change? The problem isn’t ignorance, it’s indifference. And how do you change that? Can you change it at all? The Government certainly won’t, it wants to get re-elected. It all feels like we’re stuck in the terminal, and no-one has any idea where to go from here.

Thursday’s council meeting on the stadium’s future presents the opportunity to turn the page on a decade of delay. The bill has blown out, the completion date has been repeatedly reset and at times the Christchurch City Council simply hasn’t exhibited the self-belief, drive and resolve to see this major infrastructure project through to fruition.

The Lianne Dalziel-led council has racked up a world of excuses to repeatedly kick this gigantic can down the road, undermining commitments made, shattering public confidence, and supersizing the capital costs of this delay-plagued anchor project.

In addition to putting the stadium on the backburner in the 2015 Long Term Plan, for the best part of a decade, it has also transpired that the Dalziel-led council repeatedly spurned offers by the Crown to lead the build and delivery of this major anchor project.

Gerry Brownlee and Megan Woods, in their respective capacities as former Earthquake Recovery Ministers, have both just confirmed to me that multiple offers, overtures and approaches were made to the mayor and senior council leadership to hand over the project for the Crown to take charge of, but those offers were rejected outright, particularly in 2017 and 2019.

None of those offers ever made it to the council table, in the form of a staff report, for elected representatives to duly consider.

Early on in her mayoralty, Dalziel never hid her disdain for the government leading so many aspects of Christchurch’s post-earthquake recovery, repeatedly exhorting Wellington to hand back control to the council.

Finally, they did.

But did Dalziel’s parochial streak of selfdetermination blind her judgment?

Allowing Ō tā karo Ltd to take charge of the stadium project would have averted the selfinflicted pickle the council now finds itself in.

I will be forever grateful the council wasn’t entrusted to deliver Te Pae or the Metro Sports

here are a multitude of ways city ratepayers can be spared bearing the brunt of the cost increase burden, as has been widely traversed, from regional rates contributions and real estate divestment to reworking the council’s $5.7 billion, 10-year capital budget.

Councillors have a duty to bring the decade of lost opportunities to an end and finally endorse the delivery of this grossly mishandled anchor project. Depriving Christchurch of a fit-for-purpose prime time sports, events and entertainment arena is condemning New Zealand’s second-largest city to the unambitious ranks of a second-rate city – with a gaping vitality deficit.

By any measure, the stonking submissions turnout provides a clear mandate to get on with it. It’s courted 30 times more submissions than those on granting funding to Christ Church Cathedral and 61 times the number of submissions on this year’s Annual Plan.

In fact, 30,500 equates to nearly a third of all residents who bothered to vote during the last council elections. Commanding 77% support to proceed, the resounding will of the people has cleaned the clock of those wishing to pause or scrap this project. Hear the people roar, I signalled, when submissions first opened. And roar they did.