Paul Holmes: Quake victims' anger bought off - for now

Tracy Carlyle is one of thousandsof homeowners in the doomed red zone. Photo / Mark Mitchell

We are a funny old country. On the one hand we're terribly violent, especially to children, as Deborah Coddington tells us, and especially to kids with names like Serendippitty-Sky and Shiloh-Samantha and Sherille-Apple who always end up at Starship with their heads crushed in.

Yet, I was thinking this week, we are not these days an angry country.

We're pretty free and easy. Well, we are at the moment. We were an angry outfit, bitterly so, in the 90s if any of the readers of this column can recall that period.

These days, I constantly have to ask myself if the person I'm talking to is old enough to remember an event or a person I'm talking about. I ran into my old friend John Banks the other day and we had a good catch-up. He tells me he's worried about the country. "But it's not about you and me, Holmsey. We're old men."

God Almighty, I thought. How did it come to this? The 90s was the Bolger premiership, the betrayal of the superannuation surcharge promise, Ruth Richardson's Budget and Jenny Shipley's benefit or "entitlement" cuts. Current affairs could be poisonous. By hook or by crook the Government was determined to drag us to reform.

Then came Labour and the anger went away as the Government started throwing money round and even bought an election - that of 2005 - with the offer of interest-free student loans. Then we got sick of being strangled and told what's best for us.

So what am I getting at?

Simply this. The perception has been clear that anger was starting to build in Christchurch. It had been since February and it began to boil over after the big aftershocks of last Monday. You had people pointing the finger at the Government, at the Earthquake Commission, at assessors walking round with clipboards, at the liquefaction filth and, I suppose, the cold.

The constant aftershocks all conspired to create misery and the people had had enough. And the news media in the north were hearing the grumbling and reflecting it in their questioning. It and the pressure were starting to tell on Gerry Brownlee and the team.

So Thursday comes and John Key and Gerry face the microphones in Christchurch and announce what they're going to do.

The city is now in four zones. The lost zone is coloured red, and doomed. So the Government is going to buy everyone's homes for their rateable value at September 2007. Pretty damn generous, I'd say.

Right now those properties are worth nothing. Suddenly the Government is handing out free money to the tune of just under a billion dollars.

So I watched this knowing, as my commentator mates know, that it's reached a state where politics might soon be a factor in Christchurch, last thing the Government needs.

And once again, Key did the business. He announced the buy-up programme. And once again explained the sheer size of this disaster in terms of our economy and the sheer scale of the damage in terms of its physical magnitude.

Then we crossed live to Lorilei in an Irish pub. The customers: elderly, many of them, working class people - red zone people, they said - and every single one was happy at what they'd just heard. So that was them sorted. My point being, any anger that might have been building simply evaporated.

The niggle will come from the uncertainty of people in the orange area, where 10,000 homes are questionable, as winter takes over.

Gerry Brownlee says the boundaries between the areas are robust. I thought it a curious remark. Presumably it means if I'm on one side of the street in a very munted house, and I look across the road at you in a completely munted house with the Government handing over $300,000, I won't be resentful.

There have already been exasperated comments from people in such situations on the newspaper websites. One fellow wrote that over the road from him is red zone yet he, the writer, had more liquefaction at his place, which was green zone. Still, the rain has to stop somewhere.

As for Alasdair Thompson - poor sod. He's been a panellist several times on Q+A, always very pleasant. But he's made a terrible error. I don't know if what he said about work and women's menstrual cycle is right or not - and he represents northern employers and manufacturers, so presumably he might know - but he made the mistake of saying one of the things men can't say. Certainly no male reporter will be going out of his way to research this one.

He shouldn't have reacted to the reporter's taunting, which it was. She taunted him, it was sport. But getting up and walking round and raising your voice is a gift to a reporter.

He made two terrible and salutary mistakes. First, to assume he was off the record because he'd decided he was. And second, to assume that the camera had been turned off.

One thing's for sure. Mr Thompson will be having a weekend with a lot of noise in his head.