CONTEXT IS ALL.
When a quake shook the brick and clay beginnings of Wellington on a stormy night in October 1848, the first response was to declare not a state of civil emergency, but a Day of Humiliation and Public Fasting. Twenty-four hours after a shock assumed to have been around 7.5 — the Richter scale was not invented until 1934 — Christians and Jews joined in fervent supplication before the Almighty, who had of course instigated this event and yet had their welfare in His hands.
Seven years later, in January 1855, an even stronger quake struck the region, probably an 8.2, the largest recorded in this country. Nineteen hundred square miles of land was raised 20 feet vertically and up to 55 feet laterally, and 30-foot-high tsunami waves rushed into Wellington Harbour, ebbing and flowing over the next eight hours so that ships at anchor found themselves grating on the harbour floor, with ‘an uncommon and disagreeable grinding’. The captain of one of those ships reported the local reaction: ‘What a different scene would have occurred in the fatherland! With shops exposed and every temptation to plunder, there seemed to be neither fear nor thought of robbery, but a generous and manly feeling to lessen each other’s burdens pervaded all classes from the Superintendent to the lowest mechanic.’
The narrative of colonial equality, of sturdy interdependence, takes shape here, along with an admirable practicality: the land so raised was instantly put to use as a base for a northern road and a tidy downtown business district. Resilience, practicality and egalitarianism emerge from geological adjustment, as myths always do.
In 1931, Hawke’s Bay was hit by a massive earthquake — a 7.8 — causing the deaths of 256 people and immense destruction in the towns of Napier and Hastings.
The past is a foreign country, as has frequently been observed. Different forces were at work, nationally and internationally. This earthquake happened in another context.
First, there was grassroots mobilisation. Three days after the quake, while the region was still experiencing hundreds of aftershocks, Citizens’ Control Committees were formed, one in Napier and another, led by a First World War veteran, ‘the Diggers’ friend’, Colonel Hildebrand Holderness, in Hastings. Ad hoc battalions cleared rubble and constructed temporary buildings, with priority given to banks and pubs. A makeshift centre sprang up, quickly nicknamed ‘Tin Town’ for its recycling of corrugated iron.
On 16 February, the Hastings volunteers disbanded, handing over control to the borough council, and on 11 March the Napier committee followed suit. The Napier council then delegated special powers to reconstruct their town to two commissioners: a local accountant, barrister and magistrate, John Saxton Marton, and an engineer, Lachlan Bain Campbell. For two years, until 15 May 1933, these men worked in close conjunction with a voluntary committee made up of thirteen people representing local bodies, the professions and business interests, to rebuild the city.
It was not straight sailing, not in the midst of the world’s greatest economic depression. The aftershocks of financial collapse on Wall Street had reached these islands, delivering destitution and the iconic image of the man in the sacking hood navvying for relief payment. Individuals and businesses struggled to meet the cost of rebuilding without the assistance of any government-backed insurance scheme of the kind introduced a decade later in time of war. But reading about the rebuilding of Napier from this perspective, in 2014, in the midst of another post-quake reconstruction, is to be struck most by its incredible speed.
By August 1931 the borough council had begun work on the Market Reserve Building, to a design already in process before the quake. The building was large and central and its rapid rebuilding was understood to have an emotional impact. It would be a ‘statement of faith’, a structure that could be seen and felt as a cause for optimism. Its architect, a local man, René Natusch, even altered the plans to specify a riveted frame rather than a welded one, so that the builders would make as much noise as possible. It would be the sound of progress, of something happening in the dark, dead heart of the city. He well understood the demoralising effect of emptiness, inaction and powerlessness. He and the council understood how architecture, the very presence of a single building, could alter that.
Natusch took the chair of a newly formed consortium, Napier Associated Architects, which brought four practices together to ensure a unified approach to the rebuilding of the town. Finch and Westerholm favoured the Spanish Mission style, E.A. Williams tended toward the more dramatic Art Deco, Louis Hay was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, while Natusch’s designs were distinguished for their contemporary geometric clarity and arched windows. By June 1932, 129 buildings had been completed, 108 were already occupied and Tin Town could begin to come down as businesses returned to the centre. In May 1933, the two commissioners resigned, having completed their task, according to reports, with ‘compassion, efficiency, dedication and vision’. And the borough council resumed its normal role.
The scale of disaster was, of course, much smaller. In 1931, Napier was a town of 16,000, while Christchurch in 2010 was a city of 480,000. Napier’s centre was occupied by buildings of brick and masonry two, three or, at most, four storeys high, while Christchurch’s CBD was a combination of heritage masonry and concrete. Of the fifty-one high-rise towers built since 1970, only ten survived unscathed.
But it is the social context that is most strikingly different. The background of economic depression ensured a modest recovery, constructing buildings that have since become the focus for a lively tourist industry built around Art Deco tours and festivals with pre-war cars and cloche hats. There was the ready collaboration of men for whom war service was not that distant and to whom it must have seemed natural to work together for mutual survival. And, most of all, there was the intense regionality of the reconstruction.
WHEN YOU ARE FLUNG INTO the air by an earthquake, its most unmistakable characteristic is its complete neutrality. You feel yourself shoved about in the dark, the whole structure around you creaking and buckling in the hands of a blind, anonymous force. This is not a political event. No one has planned your annihilation over a few after-dinner whiskies; no one sat in an office and decided to inflict upon you shock and awe. There is no point in anger, or resentment. This is simply how the Earth is.
It is how we adapt to this fact that lends a quake distinction. Each takes on an individual character. In this volatile country, poised as it is upon its shifting plates, we have developed ways of dealing with inevitable, persistent upheaval. In twenty-first-century New Zealand, should your home be damaged by some natural event — tsunami, for example, or flood or quake — the cost of repairs up to a cap of $100,000 plus GST, and for contents up to the value of $20,000 is met by a government entity, the Earthquake Commission — EQC. Beyond that figure, should your home be more severely damaged, you negotiate with your private insurer.
EQC began as a source of reassurance in a very different kind of calamity. Back in 1941, New Zealand was at war. Hundreds of its young men were thousands of miles away, men like my dad in their brown baggy shorts, fighting Hitler in the Egyptian desert. But closer to home, Japan was clearly preparing to join the mêlée. In October, just two months before those Mitsubishi Zeros screamed down on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, Peter Fraser’s wartime government set up an insurance scheme. The War Damage Act established a scheme that would help New Zealanders to repair their homes, should they be damaged by bombing and enemy action. A levy of 5 shillings per £100 would be charged on the value of every residential property in the country based on its existing value for fire insurance. Commercial property would continue to be handled by private insurers.
In this manner, a fund would be established and risk would be shared equally from one end of the country to the other, no matter where the bombs fell. For, as Walter Nash put it in promoting the legislation, ‘The loss is a national loss and those people who might be affected subscribe toward a fund to meet losses that might come to any one of them.’ Any surplus in the fund, he added, could be set asi
de to meet the cost of other disasters: a quake, for example. Hawke’s Bay was still vivid in the memory.
Pieces of legislation do not usually touch the heart. But there is something so courageous here, so understanding of the power of government to affect the mood of the people, in the suggestion to a nation witnessing the devastation of London on the cinema newsreels, that should something similar happen here — as everyone knew it could — a viable regime would survive. Householders would receive their insurance payout in an orderly, unfussy fashion. Their homes would be rebuilt. They would keep calm and life would carry on.
By 1944, as the threat of war was receding in the Pacific, the brief was formally extended to cover damage consequent on earthquakes, because it was logical to do so. ‘From an insurance point of view, the risk of loss or damage through enemy action in wartime has many aspects in common with the risk of loss through earthquake. Neither the locality where the risk is greatest, nor the extent of loss, can be predicted, and the individual is relatively powerless to protect himself.’ It was a ‘logical development of the principal of collective responsibility for a calamity loss’.
In 1949, other natural disasters made the cut: landslip, tsunami, volcanic explosion, flood, storm, a whole Biblical line-up of potential catastrophe in this jumpy place.
INSURANCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a strange amalgam of Judeo-Christian philosophy with gambling and taking a chance. When Nicholas Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damn’d Barebon established the first ‘Insurance Office for Houses on the Backside of the Royal Exchange’ in 1681, not long after the Great Fire of London, he was onto a likely winner: a scheme in which individuals recently traumatised by the abrupt destruction of a vast area of the city would contribute to a fund that would pay out a pre-arranged sum in the event of loss by fire.
Barebon, as his second name suggests, was a good Protestant and a clever man. His company lasted thirty years before liquidation, but by then others had seized on his idea. The Sun Fire, the Union, the Royal Exchange and others spotted a chance to do good, while securing from a multitude of small premiums a healthy sum of capital for speculative investment. Thousands of London houses bore the little metal plaques issued by each company, guaranteeing rescue by their individual private troupes of firefighters, like the Sun Fire’s promised ‘30 lusty, able-bodied firemen clothed in blue liveries’, who almost make rescue from a flaming building sound like something to be longed for. Insurance combined the Biblical injunction to be one’s brother’s keeper with the strong probability of a good dividend.
The Earthquake and War Damage Commission was also devised by men who believed in Christian brotherhood, or its secular twin, socialism. Faith and political philosophy found common expression. The premiums were collected, the fund established and the sum invested within New Zealand, generally in Government Stock.
In the 1980s, a new faith and a new philosophy began to gain real momentum. I remember its arrival. A teacher at a high school where I was working returned from a conference in 1987. ‘They were talking about “learning output centres”,’ he said. ‘They meant us! Teachers!’ We laughed at the sheer nonsense of it. Then one of the teachers left to join a new department at the university dedicated to teaching business studies. They had a department with a professorship in real estate. Real estate? What on Earth could you say about selling property that would warrant a professorial chair? Wasn’t it just a matter of asking as much as you could if you were the seller, and paying as little as you could if you were the buyer? It wasn’t exactly nuclear physics.
But the business studies buildings began to swell and a new language began to be spoken. The words took hold like a virus. Sick people used to be called ‘patients’, an old word of great dignity meaning ‘to bear or endure evil with composure’. Now in public documents they were referred to as ‘health consumers’, as if they had a choice, like people shopping for shoes. They could choose to purchase good health, or they could decline to become well. It was all an act of individual will. They would ‘consume’ health services, and in the word alone there is the spark of burning, destroying by fire or decomposition. There is the taint of wastefulness and reckless squandering, of using something up entirely. Buildings are ‘consumed’ by fire. Curled in the word’s DNA lay a rebuke: these people lying in their hospital beds were using up the hard-earned cash of those who had paid for their free healthcare. They were burning their way through the common fund. They were no longer exhibiting dignified composure in the face of ill fortune, but consuming a finite resource.
In the new language, health was referred to as an ‘industry’, as was education. Even the loud girls hailing cars on Manchester Street were now overtly tradeable commodities in something called ‘the sex industry’.
If you would rule a people, first invade their mouths. Teach them a new language.
In 1986, a Labour government, imbued with the new faith, commissioned a review of EQC. Minet, Burn and Roche obliged with the general opinion that ‘the government might be able to withdraw from its earthquake insurance commitments … for fire and special perils we feel that freemarket forces should prevail’. Labour drafted the legislation and a National government completed the process in 1993.
EQC was now a Crown entity, administered by a board of five to nine individuals appointed by the Minister of Finance. They were responsible for the Natural Disaster Fund, to which every householder in the country would automatically contribute a levy of 15 cents per $100 of premium when they paid their fire insurance to a commercial insurer. By 2010, after a relatively quiet time, tectonically speaking, the fund stood at $5.93 billion, an amount the chairman, in his annual report for 2009, considered adequate to meet the cost of the most likely catastrophe — ‘the maximum probable liability’ — a 7.5 earthquake in Wellington.
A 1999 study had suggested a 20–25 per cent chance of such a quake within the next fifty years sparking an estimated 150,000 claims. It seemed prudent, therefore, to plan to outsource the servicing of those claims to more stable Australia. The government had entered into a contract with an international claims management company, Gallagher Bassett Services, head office a shiny tower in Itasca, Illinois. With 100 offices worldwide, their focus, as their own publicity put it, was ‘refreshingly simple’. They managed insurance claims on behalf of insurers, brokers, government bodies and self-insured organisations. They promised such clients to ‘aggressively investigate and manage claims, not just process them; control costs through an experienced adjusting staff and develop risk control programs that will save your organisation money’.
In 2010, their Brisbane office’s focus in Australia was managing workplace injury claims. Their intention was to expand that side of the business in New Zealand, where they had, as one of the managers put it, ‘a strong spiritual if not physical presence’ and many large employers keen to use their services. Since 1974, New Zealand had had a universal no-fault insurance system, the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC), established by the Kirk government and administered directly by the Crown. It provided cover for workplace injury, funded by compulsory levies from employees and employers. It also removed the legal basis for suing, other than exemplary damages, for malpractice.
During the 90s, the system had come under attack, with moves by the National government to open this field of insurance to competition, moves countered by Labour when it held power between 2000 and 2008 and, in another bounce of the seesaw, resurrected in 2008 when National returned to the Beehive. In early 2009, Gallagher Bassett was taking part, at the government’s invitation, in a conference reviewing ACC — in the new language, now the Accident Compensation Corporation. In panel discussion, Gallagher Bassett outlined different approaches to workplace injury insurance and made the case for ‘introducing competition’. (At the time of writing, in spring 2014, they are firmly part of the ACC Partnership Programme, charged with handling injury claims for 40,000 New Zealand employees and undertaking as their leading objective to ‘deliver
earlier return-to-work outcomes’. That ‘spiritual presence’ has taken on a definite corporeal reality.)
When it was Christchurch and not Wellington that bucked into life in September 2010, EQC had twenty-two core staff and twenty-seven assessors in New Zealand. Within a few weeks, following two major quakes and thousands of aftershocks, 450,000 insurance claims had been lodged with EQC and those twenty-two staff had expanded to over 1000, including personnel from Gallagher Basset.
It was their staff in Brisbane who most often answered the phones. It was another Queensland company, Verifact, contracted by Gallagher Bassett, who supplied the assessors. Founded by ‘former Wallaby and detective, Dan Crowley’, Verifact specialises in testing claims for Australian workplace injuries. In the spring of 2010, the residential streets of the city began to fill with their personnel. Aussie ex-cops for the most part, armed with clipboards and paper forms, arrived on the doorstep. They took a quick look around, ticked the boxes, and off they went to the next job, in a flurry of mates-across-the-Tasman goodwill, all in the Anzac spirit.
On the residential streets of the city, homeowners were now engaged in individual negotiation. Should the assessors have determined that the damage to your home would cost less than $15,000 to repair, you moved directly to dealing with EQC, who would possibly give you a cash settlement to pay for repairs yourself. Should the damage to your home be assessed to cost between $15,000 and $100,000, you would deal with EQC and the company they had contracted to manage repairs in that bracket: Fletchers EQR, a division of New Zealand’s largest construction company. They would manage your repairs, using their accredited builders and tradespeople. You could choose to opt out of this system and organise repairs yourself: should further damage be discovered in the process of repair, you would have to pay the difference it would cost to make it right.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 7
