Source: Radio New Zealand
An overhaul of emergency management legislation has reached the crucial stage of submissions to a parliamentary select committee. RNZ
Transpower is questioning why early warning systems during disasters do not rate as essential infrastructure under an overhaul of emergency management legislation.
The overhaul has reached the crucial stage of submissions to a parliamentary select committee, in a years-long one-step-forward-and-another-back effort to replace a 24-year-old Civil Defence Act that multiple inquiries have poked holes in.
Submitters said they broadly backed the push but questioned where was the likes of decisionmaking power for Māori, who so often stepped into the breach amid storms, where was alignment with climate change policies, and where was the money to make real change happen.
“The core question for us is straightforward,” Christchurch City Council’s Civil Defence manager Brendan Winder told the MPs, “If Parliament wants higher and more consistent capability across the country, who will fund that uplift?”
‘Brutally tied to best endeavours’
Transpower asked where flood protection services and early warning and monitoring systems were at.
The bill would set up a new schedule of emergency infrastructure providers with new obligations to protect things like celltowers, power lines and emergency broadcasting.
“We consider that the failure to include ‘flood protection services’ and ‘early warning system services’ in Schedule 3 from the outset would have potential negative implications, effects, and costs,” said its written submission.
The lack of warning of rampaging floodwaters that swept people away in Esk Valley near Napier has trigger repeated angry calls by locals for change.
When the Esk River burst its banks during Cyclone Gabrielle, floodwaters filled the entire valley. Supplied
“All of those warning systems are not hard-coded or identified anywhere in any legislation as being important,” Transpower’s senior principal engineer Andrew Renton told the committee this week.
“And therefore councils and everybody else are brutally tied to best endeavours.”
Transpower made its own efforts, including under other laws and regulations that already demanded this: flood protection services had reduced the risks for its Edgecumbe Substation, while monitoring of the Poorman Valley Stream had cut it for its Stoke Substation.
‘New ways to be punished’
Cyclone Gabrielle was a nadir among several low points over two decades of emergency responses marked by individual heroism and systemic failings, with inquiries later on calling for urgent changes.
However, the government has maintained that since Gabrielle local responses had improved a lot.
It scrapped an earlier, drawnout approach by the previous government to overhaul Civil Defence.
The size of the stick wielded under the new law – going as far as criminal offences with fines or imprisonment – had Engineering NZ (ENZ) worried.
“We are concerned the bill adds new ways to be punished during emergencies,” it said in its written submission.
It would give a Director-General of Emergency Management the power to issue compliance orders and duties, then crack down.
“For councils and essential service providers already stretched, penalties could pull money and people away from response and recovery,” ENZ said.
Warnings and guidance would be better, it said.
A broken water pipe in Gisborne following Cyclone Gabrielle. Supplied/Gisborne District Council
‘Without new funding mechanisms’
Hamilton City Council was among those that said they backed the intent of the bill, but threw in a ‘but’.
“As it’s written new statutory duties are being introduced without new funding mechanisms,” said mayor Tim Macindoe.
Tougher still, this coincided with a government move to cap rate rises.
Winder from Christchurch made a similar point, and added the new bill had little to say about reducing the risks and readiness, though these mattered most and cost the least at local level.
“The bill gives little weight to these two areas. It leans heavily towards response and recovery,” said Winder.
“That misses the chance to prevent the very outcomes that drove these reforms.”
Long plans on high shelves would make little difference, he added, and it was people at ground level the legislation had to empower.
Kiri Allan for the National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Take Ahuarangi said Māori had never been embedded in the legislation before and the bill went a long way to correcting that.
Yet it still did not deliver the essential decisionmaking power, she said.
“Time and time again” disaster inquiry reports had found Māori were crucial in the aftermath – even down to the micro-level of fixing dips in a road that flooded and isolated homes – but were “often not seen”, and though they were included in operational groups they were excluded from decision-making, Allan added.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand