The worst that can happen...

...and why we're failing to prevent it.

I once worked in accident prevention, from which I learned two unfortunate things: people generally won’t prevent tragedies unless there’s already been one (they have to learn the hard way, if they learn at all); and it’s harder to see the benefits of preventing something from happening than the benefits of saving oneself the effort (so ‘safety’ is easily discounted by decision-makers).

Take, for example, the propaganda that the NZ government went in hard and fast in response to Covid-19. The strict lockdown in 2020 was indeed ‘hard’ but it certainly wasn’t ‘fast’. The reason for forcing people to stay at home (a second line of defence) was because the government couldn’t prevent the virus from crossing the border (the first line of defence). Despite past experiences, beginning in 1918, the official pandemic preparedness plan in place before Covid-19 hadn’t foreseen what was coming and had no plan for a nation-wide shutdown – and so the virus was free to gate-crash the country and party while the government did little for a couple of months. The previously non-existent nation-wide testing and tracing systems had to be hastily put together almost from scratch. District health boards were unprepared – which later became a pretext for disestablishing them.

In short, we had no effective prevention plan. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese were well ahead of us, because they were prepared. They had the whole kitset, ready to assemble with instruction manual.

So, in a way, it surprises me that we hadn’t learned from the 1938 flood (let alone the 1968 and 1988 cyclones) that it’s a bad idea to build at ground level on the flat of the Esk Valley; but in another way it doesn’t surprise me: people generally want to do things on the cheap (‘efficiently’); they don’t want Nanny State telling them to plan for the worst.

But no natural disaster is entirely ‘natural’: a lot of the impact results from factors created by people. Stopbanks increase the flood when it does come. Poor forestry practices and erosion in the backblocks magnified the east coast disaster by sending tons of timber and silt down with the raging torrent.

So, we still insist on building roads that wind around fragile hillsides; we don’t build in redundancy (or backups) into power and water distribution; we don’t invest in robust railways. Meanwhile, Gisborne and the Bay could be knocked back to the 1950s.

The political problem here is that NZ governments are too scared to confront the public with the true costs of building sustainable infrastructure. Instead, they either shelve problems or try to con you with concepts like 3 Waters – a plan to have our water and drink it too: raise finance against artificially pumped up balance-sheets, and conceal the costs from the actual users of the water services.

The government’s implied threat that, if you don’t swallow the 3 Waters medicine, then you’ll have to pay higher rates, gives away this murky financial game. But there’s going to be a price to pay, no matter how it’s bank-rolled.

Politicians are too scared of those middle-class voters who expect first-world infrastructure, but don’t want to pay for it. Many innocents will be led by a centre-right Pied Piper who offers to cut taxes, making it even harder to build the infrastructure that the children of Hamlin expected simply to be there for them.

Let me finish, then, with one of our worst possible disaster scenarios, for which we’re not prepared…

A small volcano appears just off Auckland’s North Shore. Seaside neighbourhoods are wrecked, roads are covered with ash, and the harbour bridge and international airport have to close. Then the lava flow makes the Rangitoto Channel non-navigable, closing the Port of Auckland to commercial vessels – permanently.

We really need to redevelop ports, railways and inter-island ferries, not just PoA. Will politicians ever have the courage to add up all the projects we need to get on with – so that, at least, business as usual can continue, while also mitigating the disasters – and will they tell us honestly how we’ll pay for it? After all, doing nothing may reduce short-term political risk, but often costs more in the end.