Christchurch, a well connected city.

Address by the Mayor of Christchurch to the inaugural Council meeting 27 October 2004.

Firstly, today I would like to congratulate you all on your successfully being elected to this great council. To all of your families I thank you for putting up with those of us who want to change the world and to make this a better place. For those candidates who were unsuccessful at the polls our thanks for your participation in the democratic process and I wish you well for the future.

I wasn't sure how to start this speech. Then I went to speak at the Beckenham Baptist Church a few Sundays ago. They were celebrating the 75 th anniversary of the Boy's Brigade in their parish. As I listened to the history of this Boy' Brigade I tuned into part of this city's history. The parish was an activist one when the Boy's Brigade was formed. The founder of the Brigade was a prominent trade unionist. The chaplain was the Rev JK Archer and he was to become the first Labour Mayor of this city. They connected with Harry Ell who had a dream for the Port Hills and they created a public works scheme in the hills building roads and buildings (the Sign of the Takahe etc) and this council was part of preventing the food riots which occurred in every other city in NZ, bar Christchurch.

A pragmatic approach to social activism and partnerships were put into place which assisted the residents of this city to face international winds blowing through our economy. I'll come back to this story later.

My second story involved a dinner Pam and I attended last Saturday evening. It was called the “Class of 69” and was the reunion of the graduates of the Civil Engineering School, in 1969. The group have now been in practice as engineers for 35 years. Two from the class work for our Council. It suddenly struck me that here was another message for my speech. These people could trace the genesis of their successful lives to their training at Canterbury University and to the bonds and friendships which they had built up together in this City. They now work, literally, around the globe and they are a potential global network for this city which we are not currently capitalising on.

Joining these two stories together and I have decided that the theme of my address to you this afternoon is “Christchurch, the well connected city”.

Connections are what the Local Government Act 2002 expects of us. We are required by the Act to sustain and connect our Environment, our Community and our Economy. Throughout each of these sub sets we have the issue of “culture” running through all of our deliberations. Under the Act every sector in our community, Central and Local Government, NGOs and the Private Sector all have to contribute to our big challenges in a collaborative way. Gone is the reinforcement of silos for each of the sectors. We are all in this and we are in it together.

Let's start with the term “sustainable”. My understanding of this term is that it implies “systemic change”. If we are to address issues as a Council then we need to be looking at them in fresh ways, together, and with all sectors being prepared to change how we do things to achieve a sustainable environment, community and economy.

If we turn our minds to a sustainable environment we must start from the point that we hold this city in trust for our children's children. Think of the J.K. Archer story I just told. We must hand it on in a better state than we inherited it.

The first challenge for our environment is what is our city's energy policy? With oil at $55US a barrel our world will never be the same again. How will we respond to this and other energy challenges?

The second environmental challenge is to address better ways of dealing with our waste, human and solid.

• Should we continue to use the same water to flush our toilets as we use to drink?
• Should we continue to use it once?
• Should we accept that our streams and waterways are polluted and that we've got to do something about them? Fish swim up our rivers and don't swim back. This is certainly not sustainable.

Our next environmental challenge is with our continuing to expand housing across the Canterbury Plains the way we are. Do we call a halt to this behaviour? Our city's growth into Selwyn and Waimakariri districts is unfettered and we need to address it quickly. The pressures on infrastructure in the forms of roading, water and sewage through the sort of developments which are occurring at the moment and large amounts in our forward budgets for roading projects and we need to plan for these projects in collaboration with all our surrounding Councils. Our residents expect us to be well connected in our planning and the carrying out of our plans. Our planning is being driven by developers. Future generations will not thank us if what is happening at the moment continues unchecked.

A huge environmental issue in Christchurch is the state of our air. Our sister Council Environment Canterbury must get it right over how to address the matter of clean air. Christchurch City Council has given them the solution on a plate with the loans scheme for the retrofitting of homes in this city. We must keep the pressure on Ecan to work with us in partnership to support and deliver on this scheme as part of the solution to this problem.

The final point I will make on environmental issues today is waste. Some candidates during the election campaign focused on whether or not we have 52 or 26 rubbish bags. I'd like to see this debate put to bed early as this Council's decision has been a genuine opportunity for this institution to lead our community and to create a culture change. If we continue to dispose of rubbish in the volumes we are at present then the wasteful way we are living will create such a burden on this planet that it will not be able to continue to cope. How we expand the amount we take from the waste stream is a continuing challenge. Preventing waste at source is the biggest challenge in front of us. One issue I would like us to address as a Council is the matter of disposable nappies. Why don't we set a challenge as a city that this will be the city where there was a market failure for the sale of disposable nappies. Pam and I have been blessed with four children. We used cloth nappies and it staggers me that this has become old fashioned in one generation. It takes a cup of oil to follow each disposable nappy through its life cycle. It is estimated that it will take 60 years for each nappy to break down in our rubbish dumps. Is this sustainable? I doubt it. The solution is a societal one. We must bring about a systemic change.

Let me turn now to the matter of a Sustainable Community. This is something we do well as a city. This is something which doesn't happen by chance. We all have to work on it. Every person who watches a sporting event, goes to the library, attends a festival, walks in the hills with a friend, visits a friend, takes their kids to a park or for a swim all adds to this being a sustainable community.

I'd like to add some behags. These are “Big Hairy Audatious Goals”. They are the sort of things which our community would expect us to be addressing. This list is certainly not comprehensive.

I'd like to give the young and the old some guarantees.

To our young people I'd like to guarantee that:

• That they will be living in a city where every child is loved. That's impossible, I hear you say? We couldn't do that. Why not? There's an old African saying that it takes a village to raise a child. This is just acknowledging this saying. Families cannot bring up children on their own. We all need the assistance of the teachers, grandparents, uncle and aunties, friends, whanau, social service agencies; everyone. If we all commit in our own small way to assisting in the healthy raising of our children they will know the meaning of the word love and they will learn it here in the city of Christchurch. Then they will spread the message around the world, I was taught how to love myself and my family in the city of Christchurch. What a great goal.
• If you look at our prisons and at those who are not in high paid jobs, often the issue is that these people cannot read or count properly. I'd like to give another guarantee to our kids that in this city they will get to certain levels of literacy and numeracy. If you can read and count then you've got a very good start in life. This, however, cannot be undertaken by our schools on their own. There are squads of retired people out there who could really spend some of their time teaching one of our future ratepayers how to read and how to count.
• To our older people, I'd like to say to every older person in this city that this is where they will feel safe. There's nothing worse for anyone to feel vulnerable or unsafe. When you are older this gets worse. This matter is one for each of us. How do we make our homes, our streets and our suburbs feel safe? This requires us all to work on the solutions.

I could go on and on about sustainable communities but it's something we have to say as a connected city we need to keep working on our relationships with each other. A sustainable community continues to provide pools, libraries, bowling greens, golf courses, netball courts, rugby fields, large parts of the Port Hills in public ownership for the health and well being of its residents. These will all be nurtured and expanded for the good of our well connected community by this Council.

A sustainable economy is another big challenge. Aren't things going well right now, I hear you say. Well they are, but why are our sights set so low in the wage stakes? We have to emulate Singapore which has set a target of being a high paid economy within a decade. This means collaboration between sectors. It is only possible to pay high wage rates when the exporters are earning high incomes. To get into the high income stakes we must support and nurture the sectors which earn us high international dollars. These sectors are already known to us and we have the infrastructure to grow them. The role of our Tertiary Institutions and the Crown Research Institutes will be critical for our new high value sectors. A highly educated workforce means that we all have a chance in sharing the growth in wealth in our economy.

I am an incurable egalitarian. I believe that it is essential that everybody has an equal right to opportunity. If they chose to squander that right then that's their problem. Our job in Local Government is to ensure that the barriers to participation are not there in our city. All sectors share in this challenge. Our job is to get all of them around the table committed to our economy.

I consider that an early task for our city to adopt is to accept the sort of target which has been set by the Mayor's Taskforce for Jobs that one of our society goals must be that everybody in our city under 25 is doing something. This means that all of our young people will either be in work, or in training. This target on its own will stimulate our economy. As employers complain that they cannot get good labour as a city we must ensure that our young people are getting the jobs which are already there.

As we prepare for an even more sustainable economy I think it is fundamental that we as a city develop our own immigration policy. Too often we hear bad stories of people arriving here and not receiving the support which we would expect them to receive. We need to think through how we attract people to this city and how we find them work and how their families are integrated into our communities.

A small group of us have met over the past two years and have set some challenges for our economy. We have called it “Prosperous Christchurch”. Over the next few months you will be hearing lots about our challenges for our city and its economy. The big challenge is for us to “export to thrive”. This will involve us being seriously connected to the world on a level we could have only dreamed about in the past, and, we are all in it together. All sectors.

We have a huge investment in Christchurch City Holidings Ltd. Since I became a Councillor 12 years ago our investments have increased in value from $350 million to $1 billion. We have received $600 million in dividends leaving this city in a net debt free situation. Our part toward our sustainable economy is to grow CCHL, maybe to aim at it being worth $2 billion, to keep the support of the business sector by our companies remaining commercially smart. A big reason why there has been such good support for CCHL is we have kept the companies at arms length, and there has been no political interference in their governance structures. This must continue.

Let me get back to my original stories.

We have to continue to give a wholehearted commitment to the values which established our city originally. There were the original inhabitants, Ngai Tahu and then there were the latest immigrants. We still have this scenario. We are a successful bi-cultural society which is based on the Treaty of Waitangi and from this treaty we have embraced the multi-cultural society we have become. With over 150 different cultures in our city now we have huge challenges to greet our visitors and newcomers; to integrate; and to support. We have helped establish the Inter Cultural Assembly and I look forward to us working even more closely with this grouping to improve the cause of multiculturalism in our city.

Throughout history this city has stood out from the crowd and been impressively passionate about the people in this city who were missing out. We have kept the dreams of our forebears and have done whatever was the right thing to do for the people of Christchurch, even if we were rubbished for doing it. Remember the fact we didn't have the food riots because the Council became involved in public works in the 1920s and ‘30s. Remember being called the “People's Republic of Christchurch. Let us continue the history of this city being adventurous with social issues. We must ensure, to the best of our ability, that the residents of this city remain well connected with each other.

One of the tasks I have set myself in the first year of this term is to get our minds around just what we stand for as a city. We are not “Absolutely Positively whatever”; nor are we “it's alright here”. I feel that the “Garden City” is a sub-theme, and that what we present to the world is our big challenge. Another challenge for us to be a well connected city.

Let us reflect on that group of young fresh faced graduates, who are certainly not fresh-faced now, who left Canterbury University to face the world in 1969. Our city nurtured them. We watched as they set up their personal and professional lives based on the stability which this city offered them and now we need to tap into them and the thousands of graduates who have been trained in this city and to who could be our opportunity to be well connected internationally. They could be the key to the door which raises the opportunities to be a high earning city. We must now put in place the structures which would make this happen.

Councillors, we are sitting in a room of the last building the Christchurch City Council built for itself. If you look at Scott's statue on the way out that is where the Council yard was. This term we will have to locate a site for our new civic office, our second purpose built building. Our current offices were a perfectly good department store in 1937. It has outlived its current life. The new building will be constructed in very different times and for very different ways of operating. The new building will have to function in a way which enables us to perform in a manner expected by the Local Government Act 2002. This is our challenge on all fronts.

There are many other topics which need to be mentioned but I will touch on them but lightly. One huge challenge will be how the poll goes in Banks Peninsula, and, if it occurs,  how will we handle the transition. Another is how as a Peace City can we do our bit toward world peace.

Today I have spoken about some of the challenges facing us under the Local Government Act. Our job as elected representatives and staff is to rise to the challenges of this Act. We will have to lead in a way that people come with us. We have to open doors, hold hands with those unsure of where we are headed, guide, encourage and participate in debate, be courageous with our decisions and inspire the people of Christchurch to see that local government is exciting, that our city is well connected, that it's inspiring and that we are inspired by it and that it is leading the action where it is needed.

Then we will be living up to the challenges of the Local Government Act 2002. Councillors, community board members and staff – let's get on with it.

Thank you.