The highly anticipated independent review of the Auckland Anniversary flood response was published mid-April, laying bare challenges in communication, leadership and responsiveness.
One of the key issues Mike Bush identified - disconnection from the front-line - resonated strongly with my experience that fortnight between the flooding and Cyclone Gabrielle.
This was as basic as a central repository of places where people could receive or offer help, which after asking Council and Civil Defence for multiple times to no avail, my team and I hit the phones and created ourselves.
There are 17 recommendations in the report and all of them need to be urgently implemented. We can do more than just prepare better for the next unpredictable emergency, though.
We can and must fix the business as usual decision-making systems, which see political leaders presented with information and choices artificially constrained by assumptions about which voices, experiences and outcomes matter.
We can break down the chains of command that see slow movement of critical information and systemic inertia; where no one person can ever be responsible for anything going wrong, because there’s ironically also no space for anyone to take the initiative to ensure something goes right.
That recalibration starts as simply as picking up the phone and talking to the people doing the job at the coalface, bypassing gatekeeping of information (intentional or not).
That’s the approach I’m taking to very serious concerns about the safety and operation of our Central City Fire Station. With asbestos discovered in the building towards the end of last month, our firefighters and equipment have been redistributed throughout the city.
While Fire and Emergency New Zealand tell me not to worry about response times, front-line firefighters paint a more straight-up concerning picture about the ten plus years they’ve tried to get the asbestos issue looked into, long-term underinvestment in the station and their gear, and frequent dismissal from the layers of bureaucracy. I will continue to work with them on solutions in the short and long term.
Across the road, our local St Johns face similar challenges with long-term underinvestment.
I had the privilege of going out with the team on a busy Friday night a few weeks ago and saw first-hand what ‘ramping’ really means - holding patients in ambulances while our hospital emergency rooms are under the pump.
Paramedics told me that alcohol continues to generate many of the situations they’re called out to. Poisoning is one thing, but the association to 26% of suicides (as Otago University research found last year), the fights and injury are another entirely.
Successive governments have commissioned research on what to do about alcohol harm, only to subsequently ignore the politically inconvenient findings.
Criminal prohibition of substances doesn’t work, which, ironically, most of the Western world learnt from the failure of alcohol prohibition. People didn’t stop drinking and alcohol didn’t stop being made; it went underground, where it was unregulated, generating harm, crime and violence.
This is why the answer is sensible regulation. You don’t get that by handing over too much power to commercial industry, enabling normalisation and glamorisation and excessive consumption.
You get sensible regulation through the likes of interventions proposed by my Alcohol Harm Minimisation Bill, which was backed by an extensive list of NGOs and councils that represented more than half of the country’s population.
Unfortunately, partisan politics proved the winner during its First Reading and Parliament has once again kicked the can down the road.
That said, our advocacy and campaign forced the Government to introduce its own Bill to ensure greater community participation around the control of off-licences, effectively adopting the first half of my Member’s Bill.
The advocacy continues for Auckland Central, for drug harm reduction, a fairer economy, healthy public services and a flourishing environment. As always, these columns couldn’t hope to contain all the mahi, so please reach out if you’re keen to get involved, raise an issue, or need support. (Chlöe SWARBRICK)
Chlöe Swarbrick, T: 09 378 4810, E: chloe.swarbrick@parliament.govt.nz
www.greens.org.nz/chloe_swarbrick
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PUBLISHED 5 MAY 2023