Rotary Club of Christchurch South

Wednesday 11 February 2004

The state of the city-state of Christchurch........

If Christchurch was a country it would be one of the economic success stories of the developed world. Along with Canterbury we have now enjoyed many continuous quarters of growth. It has been a boom time for the record books.

It has been a time when building and business activity have all hit new records for sustained growth. Normally it is the North Island cities that have major peaks and troughs in their property markets but it has been a time when our normally staid and stable property market has got very excited.

For small children it has been a golden age. Can any of you ever remember seeing as many diggers, bulldozers and trucks working around our city streets?

We have also matured as a city. Opening the new Art Gallery last year was a once in a lifetime experience that also marked the maturing of Christchurch culturally and as a major city. It was an artistic leap forward at a time when happily our economic cake bakers have never been quite so busy.

On the crucial hip pocket front, for many people things have never been better. We have record low unemployment. In fact, we are having to try and train people fast to help our businesses work their way through some major skill shortages.

Most of the problems Christchurch faces are the problems of growth. As the refugees from the Auckland pressure cooker increase, as the outskirts of our city show signs of turning into one vast building site, as the $100 million plus spent in the inner city increases, our biggest problem is working out where to go with all this.

If Christchurch was a club the members would be starting to mutter about just how big they want to get. One of the big questions for us as a city is - how big do we want to be? How big can we become before we lose what makes us uniquely Christchurch?

It’s an issue I've spent a lot of time exploring in the last couple of years.
 
As the evidence of our popularity piles up it is vital we work out just what it is that draws people here. As I said to the Virgin Blue executives late last year, you'll have no trouble moving staff here, but you'll have a hell of a job trying to move them out again!

Christchurch has become the biggest high-tech centre in New Zealand because of what the city offers those who choose to move here. They call those workers the gold collar workers. Not white collar, nor blue, but gold.

That's because the money they can make is huge. What drives them is not cash, but lifestyle. They choose Christchurch because the lifestyle they can leverage is amongst the best in the world.

One of my biggest projects, to ensure we hold onto our best qualities, has been in developing a scheme I call Prosperous Christchurch, the basis of which is that we all enjoy great prosperity here in terms of lifestyle, environment, social cohesion and size. We need to ensure that everyone shares an appreciation of these qualities and a commitment to build on them.

(EXPLAIN PROSPEROUS CHRISTCHURCH)

To keep the best of what we have, we also need to be prepared to retain and improve our natural environment. That’s why Counci has adopted a triple bottom line approach to decision making. That means we have to measure the economic, social and environmental impacts of every major decision.

(EXPLAIN TRIPLE BOTTOM ISSUES)

To steer the city forward we also need to come up with major circuit breakers for some of our core problems. Auckland has traffic. We have air pollution and cold homes.

(EXPLAIN CLEAN AIR PLAN)

Finally, to get these things done we need a leaner, cleaner system for running the city. That's why I pushed to cut the number of councillors from 21 to 16. It's also why we have put in a new Chief Executive, Dr Lesley McTurk, who in turn has made changes to the top tier of managers at the Council.

The new Local Government Act gives Councils more power and more responsibility. It is the biggest change in local government since the abolition of provincial Governments in the 19th Century. We are now becoming ready to meet these new challenges. We have become used to being a very good city, the challenge ahead is to how to move on to being a great city.