On February 3, the timer counting down Labour’s first hundred days will pop. There’s been a lot of urgency about pushing through important parts of Labour’s election manifesto before that hundred-day timer runs out.

Maybe when it clears, we can turn a bit of attention to another countdown clock. It is at least as important, but it doesn’t feel as urgent. And that is a shame, because problems that are important but not urgent risk being pushed back until it’s suddenly too late.

Nobody knows when the Alpine Fault will let go, when Wellington will get its long-overdue big one, or whether natural disaster will strike elsewhere first. But we do know that New Zealand policy was not really ready for the Christchurch earthquakes.

We have learned some important lessons from Christchurch. Bryce Wilkinson and I provided our take on those lessons in a report released by The New Zealand Initiative this week.

The overarching lesson: Regulatory and policy uncertainty is terrible for disaster recovery. Avoiding compounding a natural disaster with a policy-induced disaster takes prior preparation.

That work is desperately important.

Broken-home limbo
After the Christchurch earthquakes, families were locked in broken-home limbo waiting for assessment by the Earthquake Commission, contesting those assessments, and sorting out disputes between EQC and their private insurers.

Treasury has recommended that private insurers lead insurance assessments rather than EQC. We agree. That system was trialled after the Kaikoura earthquakes and should be formalised for the next one – barring unforeseen hiccups in Kaikoura.

But insurance was only part of the problem.

For years, downtown Christchurch sat in limbo while successions of planners agonised over revised city plans. Even after the ground stopped shaking and insurance was lined up, if your property sat under a new precinct designation, it would be difficult to figure out just what you were allowed to do with it.

Hotels wanting to rebuild wanted to know whether there would be a new convention centre and where it would be. And owners sitting under compulsory acquisition notices for a stadium that might or might not ever be built faced their own limbo.

Meanwhile, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Agency struggled to build its own governance and financial systems while trying to coordinate the recovery.

And Christchurch Council proved unable to make small changes to city plans that could have made a big difference in easing the post-quake housing crisis.


Worst time
After a disaster is the worst time for trying to sort out many of these problems. Council staff will be dealing with their own broken homes and frazzled families. Fortunately, we can plan ahead.

Central government should establish a framework now for any post-disaster recovery agency, so off-the-shelf plans are available for use after the next one. It should move ahead with the necessary changes to EQC. And it should signal its readiness to fund post-earthquake test cases to more quickly resolve contractual uncertainties.

Council long-term plans should provide disaster contingencies.

Rules that might be defensible during normal times can unduly hinder recovery from disaster. Fewer people would have been stuck sleeping in garages on the east side of Christchurch after the earthquake had homeowners in less damaged areas been allowed to build secondary units. These kinds of rules should be identified ahead of time, and automatically be suspended or amended after a disaster.

And if a Council has long wanted a grand urban redesign, it should provide for those contingencies in the long-term plans with appropriate democratic participation long before any earthquake. The alternative puts a city’s recovery on hold for years.


Contingency plan
If that disaster contingency plan includes large new public facilities that would require central government co-funding, central government agreement should be sought early.

It is not a coincidence that Christchurch’s recovery has been most obvious in the areas outside of the downtown’s zone of policy uncertainty.

Where policy change might have been more difficult for National, who had to defend both the good and the bad parts of its response to the Christchurch earthquakes, the Labour coalition is not so-constrained.

It also helps that Labour’s contingent of Christchurch MPs represent the areas harder hit both by the earthquakes, and by the policy mistakes that followed.

But just as the government’s civil defence announcements remind all of us to be prepared for the next earthquake and not to leave it until it is too late, we need to remind government to prioritise its own disaster preparedness.

The hundred-day timer has almost run out, but the more important timer still ticks quietly to its own unknowable deadline. Let’s be ready for it.