A good start to the year
Mayor's column
It was great start to the year to see Christchurch in the Consumer magazine survey of councils as the only major metropolitan city to get voted five stars by the public.
The voter-driven survey only handed out stars in specific categories to councils that were rated as significantly better than average. The survey covered five categories - household services, community services, community facilities, staff and public relations.
Christchurch was the only major city council to score highly across all five categories. Other five star councils tended to be the smaller cities and rural councils.
These included Napier, Upper Hutt, Timaru, Matamata-Piako and Waipa. Interestingly enough, in the next level down (the four-star category), two other South Island councils featured - Ashburton and Invercargill.It was really interesting to see that we appear to have kept the positive satisfaction levels of small-town New Zealand while turning into a major city that now rates as the second in New Zealand.
That's both a pat on the back for all of us and a challenge for the future. It's not my intention to dwell in too much depth on the survey results. They join a fairly long line of positive responses about Christchurch that have piled up over recent years, both from within and without.
The overwhelming impression I get from my Friday sessions with the public in Cathedral Square is that most people are very proud of Christchurch as a city.People seem to me to have a huge sense of pride in Christchurch. Most folk I meet informally in the Square make a point of telling me how much they love the place before sometimes moving on to talk about where they think we could further improve things.
I'm left not with a sense of complacency about Christchurch, but a very real sense of active pride in our city. It's the same impression that crops up in our annual resident surveys where over the years the trend has been for well over 90 per cent of residents to be very pleased with Christchurch as a place to live.
Sometimes you also get votes of confidence from the wider world that are worth noting. A few years ago now the American Governing magazine turned Christchurch into an international pin-up star amongst cities by running a front-page feature on Christchurch as the Best Run City in the World.
It was remarkable tribute from a magazine that at that stage had only ever done two stories about anything in local government outside of the United States. It was made all the more impressive by the fact that originally they had started out planning to cover all New Zealand's major cities. Instead, they rapidly concluded that Christchurch was so good it was the story.
Sadly they chose to pay us this remarkable compliment during an election campaign, which meant the story was herded away from the headlines under suspicion of being what the media like to call "spin." It wasn't. What it was, and is, was a profound reminder that Christchurch has serious grounds for some real civic pride.
The challenge for us all is to find a way to shed some of the more extreme modesty of our past in a way that lets us show our pride without losing some of our magic as a city along the way.
One of the great ironies is that in some ways we were better at this pride business way back in time than we are now. Recently, while looking for some historical facts for a speech, I came on this modest description of Christchurch from the illustrated Guide to Christchurch and Picturesque Canterbury, published in 1914 (price, one shilling). Long before we were judged the world's best Garden City this publication had this to say about our climate:
"In no part of this country is found a more congenial, delightful and health-giving succession of weather conditions than obtains in the City of the Plains. Sunshine and rain in due proportion make summer and winter enjoyable, and the sky of Italy at its best can hardly surpass that of Canterbury, whilst the clear dry air of the more inland districts cannot be surpassed by any country in the world."
Christchurch is 43 and a half degrees south of the equator. The city, therefore, is in the same temperate latitude in the Southern Hemisphere as is the Riviera in the Northern Hemisphere.
"Welcome to the Riviera of the Southern hemisphere. A city I would love to see more of us show some very open and public pride about.
Mayor of Christchurch
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