Don’t let rebuild slip off NZ’s radar
Not all Auckland's growing pains need to be solved by investing more in Auckland.
OPINION: One of the first impacts of the Jacinda effect has been to focus the election campaign on Auckland’s issues.
Fair enough – Auckland’s the country’s only city of global scale, is growing too fast and needs lots of investment to cope with the fact that New Zealand is going to become more and more popular as a place to live in the next 20 years.
But not all Auckland’s growing pains need to be solved by investing more in Auckland.
In fact, New Zealand already has a modern city with new infrastructure, a stable and relatively affordable housing market, a surfeit of both commercial and industrial property, an underused international airport and lifestyle to die for.
That city, of course, is Christchurch and it would be a shame if its interests and potential were to be forgotten in this election campaign.
One person determined to try and prevent that happening is Raf Manji, the suave, personable and whip-smart ex-merchant banker who’s led the Christchurch City Council’s finance team throughout the post-quake rebuild.
Think of him as a kind of softer edged John Key. Both knocked about in the same circles in London earlier in their careers. Manji has a deep and effective working relationship with the city’s Labour mayor, Lianne Dalziel, and no interest in her job.
Instead, Manji is seeking to unseat former Canterbury rebuild minister Gerry Brownlee in the blue-ribboned seat of Ilam, reasoning that he’s done all he can on the council and now needs to exert central government influence.
Will he get anywhere? Brownlee has held the seat since 1996 and racked up a majority of nearly 12,000 at 2014 election.
But that was then, this is now, and Manji has a better claim than most, not only to read the mood of Cantabrians on the rebuild, but to have a sophisticated view about its progress.
That view is that the rebuild has stalled. After six years of slog, the original vision has worn away under a sea of compromise and complexity, while the city itself risks semi-completion.
Manji makes a powerful argument for why this matters not just to Christchurch, but also to New Zealand.
‘‘Who is holding the vision and who is leading it?’’ he asked at his recent campaign launch.
‘‘I would say no one. When John Key stepped down … I really felt we had lost the one person who at least could appreciate the big picture and understood the strategic imperative for a successful recovery of Christchurch.’’
In the same way that New Zealand needs a functioning Auckland, he argues the country’s second city is too strategically important to allow to drift.
His proposal to bid for the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch may seem farfetched, but it’s compelling as a target for the city to complete its public infrastructure to the aspirational standard it deserves.
‘‘We are building the facilities anyway, a little bit more and we are there,’’ Manji says.
This is not vanity but advocacy for recognition that New Zealand’s second city and the South Island’s main urban centre matters to the South Island like Auckland matters in the north.
So Manji is willing to back a government of whatever stripe but demanding a place as minister for the rebuild in return for his pot single parliamentary vote, which may or may not prove to be important.
It’s a big gamble. Ilam voters would need first to appreciate that Brownlee will be back no matter what, given his high party list ranking.
In the end though, Manji’s success is less important than the idea he’s campaigning on. That not only does Christchurch matter, but that it’s in danger of slipping off the radar just when the job needs to be finished well, for the country’s as well as Christchurch’s sake.