Agree on the information disclosure front, although the unspoken variable thus far in a fraught field (no pun) is levels: whether all residential units will be at grade or stacked (multilevel). The ~143 units per hectare is pretty impossible if all are to be at grade. The design solution has to be be AKA apartments.

In would be essential that in any national discourse with or without Sir Geoffrey's initiative for a written, by degrees entrenched, constitution, the clinical comparison between the status quo constitutional fragments and any proposed content with its change decision coding, is clear. This has not been a signal feature of the discourse to date, as the focus has been constantly diverted to the Treaty, the degrees of entrenchment of any rights, and the decision mechanisms and thresholds for changing.

The value of Sir Geoffrey's start is an enunciation of the bundles of rights and responsibilities applying to all and to "Maori" or "iwi". Don't become too diverted or cute in the diversions to colour the written value of the overall thing.

The message behind the messages assembled by Barnaby Bennett is that the actions and decisions (including not to act) of the government, its servant agencies, the opposition, the insurance market, and various individual friends of these actors placed in positions of public responsibility, have each and together variously failed at the highest governance levels in New Zealand over Christchurch's recovery. Notice though that neither Barnaby nor I list the CCC as that institution has faced intractable difficulties in responding and acting, in the face of the situations and the government's approaches. The keenest need as hinted is to capture and expose the learnings from these various failings, from a community-centred reality. These events will recur, and the worst result is to ignore or take no action about the governance needs in the next disaster response and recovery attempts. The truth about New Zealand's physical and social future is likely to be way grimmer than Christchurch, even over human generational learning cycles; hazard risks will roll over the country both of climate and earth process origins, as they have done forever in the past, but with threats to our integrity as a civil and viable society simply because we inhabit the wee land. The learned literature uses community [or national] resilience as the idea for getting through, but to activate this social survival quality, requires learning from past mistakes. This posting by Bennett is a huge start. A wider transmission and reception of this social reflection is paramount.

I chainsawed, watered the stock and ran for an hour and talked to my wife and chooks.