The government's second offer to owners of uninsured property and bare land in Christchurch's 'red zone' was also unlawful, the Court of Appeal has ruled, although it wants to chew over more information before determining how to remedy the situation.
Justices Christine French, Forrest Miller, and Helen Winkelmann today ruled in favour of the 16 Christchurch property owners known as the Quake Outcasts, setting aside former Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee's second offer after the original was deemed to be unlawful in the Supreme Court.
The Quake Outcasts, originally 46 property owners, and developer Fowler Developments challenged the lawfulness of the Crown's offers, saying they weren't in accordance with the act and breached their human rights. At the heart of the dispute was that insured property owners were offered 100 per cent of the 2007 value, something not open to bare land owners which can't be insured, or the uninsured property owners who fell outside the net for various reasons.
After the Supreme Court ruling in 2015, the Outcasts landowners all accepted the newer offer "saying they had no other option after all this time and seeking to reserve rights," the judgment said.
The appeal court bench deemed the second offer to be unreasonable in that "the insistence on making an area-wide offer limited the government's ability to discriminate among owners". That meant the minister couldn't rely on the moral hazard of creating an incentive not to insure by removing individual circumstances of each property owner, and was therefore unfair.