Back to school in happy town

How are you feeling?

If you’re in Christchurch, CERA thinks you’re doing really well. A media release cheerily announced that ‘Wellbeing Survey reveals positive outlook‘.

Conducted for CERA by Nielsen Research from August to October, 2012, “2,381 residents completed questionnaires [of whom] 1,156 were from Christchurch, 618 from the Selwyn district and 607 from the Waimakariri district“.

Drill down a bit further – beyond the media release – and the ‘take away’ is not quite so rosy:

Residents of Christchurch rate their quality of life less positively than residents of Selwyn and Waimakariri districts.

Higher proportions of Christchurch residents have experienced a strong negative impact on their everyday lives as a result of the earthquakes.

Nearly three-quarters of greater Christchurch residents rate their quality of life positively, and 7% believe it to be poor. However more than half believe that their quality of life has deteriorated since the earthquakes.

97% of residents have experienced stress at least some time in the past year. Nearly a quarter indicate they have been living with this type of stress for most or all of the time over the past year.

Drill down even further and things start to get very revealing.

From the ‘Executive Summary’:

Well, those “people carping and moaning” aside, isn’t it still true that, as The Press headlined its report on the survey, “Cantabrians happier, more positive “?

‘Happier’, ‘more positive’ … OK, but happier than when, exactly? This survey was the first in a series that will end in 2014 so it can’t be referring to the results of an earlier CERA Wellbeing survey of Christchurch residents.

Maybe the headline is ambiguous. Perhaps ‘Cantabrians’ are not meant to include residents of the metropolis of Christchurch? As the article itself notes early in the piece, “Selwyn and Waimakariri residents are happier than their Christchurch neighbours“.

But, surely, Christchurch residents are still ‘Cantabrians’? So what change in wellbeing has happened since the 22 February, 2011 earthquake?

As luck would have it, a ‘Quality of Life Survey‘ was carried out in 2010 – by the self-same Neilsen Research (note the extremely similar formatting) – and it included Christchurch, amongst eight New Zealand cities.

Even better, it occurred between the September 4, 2010 earthquake and the 22 February, 2011 earthquake so it neatly indicates (and can be used to discount) the effect of the first earthquake. Importantly, the 2010 survey was of Christchurch City only (not Waimakariri or Selwyn).

So, what do we find?

I have no idea where The Press got the impression that the CERA Wellbeing Survey, 2012 showed how Christchurch people were ‘happier’ and ‘more positive’ than they were (when?), or how Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker saw in the findings “a ‘changing tide‘ in the city, where people had shaken off a very ‘tough winter’ to embrace the positive things that were happening”. Or, for that matter, how Gerry Brownlee and CERA could claim that (Greater) Christchurch people had a “positive outlook“.

Between the pre-22 February, 2011 summer and August-October 2012 rates of self-reported quality of life had plummeted in Christchurch City from 95% describing their lives as ‘extremely good’ or ‘good’ to 72% using the same terms to categorise their lives. What is more, only 12% saw it as ‘extremely good’ in 2012 compared to 30% in 2010 (after the first major earthquake).

In other words, an extra 23% – almost 1 in four – Cantabrians no longer see their quality of life positively.

And an extra 1 in 20 Cantabrians (5%) have moved into describing their quality of life as ‘poor’ with 1 in 100 desperately describing their circumstances as ‘extremely poor’ (0% previously).

This reveals many things but one thing it does not reveal is a ‘positive outlook’. What were Gerry Brownlee and CERA thinking when they framed that media release so positively two days before the second anniversary of the 22 February, 2011 earthquake?

Is it now politically incorrect to face facts? Is it seen as some sort of public duty to jolly the populace along? Does CERA now see itself as a branch office of Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency that told us all during the 1990s to ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative’?

Is this all part of Peter Townsend’s suggested feel good tsunami that would “drown naysayers in positivity” (mentioned in this earlier post)?

That 72% figure is not a reason to celebrate – it is a glaring, flashing red light that says “do something!”

But do what?

Here’s a clue. In the last sentence of the abstract (full article beyond the paywall) for their study titled “The Good Life of the Powerful: The Experience of Power and Authenticity Enhances Wellbeing“, Kifer et al. (2013) conclude,

Although striving for power lowers well-being, these results demonstrate the pervasive positive psychological effects of having power, and indicate the importance of spreading power to enhance collective well-being.

“[T]he importance of spreading power to enhance collective well-being“.

Well, there’s a novel thought: If we were truly concerned about Cantabrians’ wellbeing how about giving residents of Christchurch and Canterbury greater power over their destinies (both personal and collective)?

How about giving them a say over what happens in the red zones, the TC3 land, the hills? How about returning their voice to the Regional Council and giving their City Council more of a role in the recovery? How about letting residents determine the reform of the school system? How about ‘levelling the playing field’ between insurers (EQC and private) and the insured?

Joining the dots a bit shows that the main reason Christchurch residents have a radically lower level of collective well-being stems from a lack of power and control.

Here’s part of Table 7.2 from the CERA Wellbeing Survey (p. 20) that lists the negative experiences that have had a moderate or major effect on respondents’ lives. (I’ve only included the top 11 for space reasons – and, sorry about the blurring! I need lessons ).

It goes without saying that aftershocks are beyond a person’s control – but look at the other factors: ‘Dealing’ with EQC/insurance claims; ‘Loss’ of leisure facilities; ‘surrounded’ by construction work; ‘Uncertainty’ about the future; ‘Making decisions’ about damage, repairs, relocations; ‘Additional work pressures’; ‘Additional financial burdens’; ‘Loss’ of access to natural environment; ‘Loss’ of sport and recreation facilities; ‘Living day to day’ in damaged homes.

All of these are about circumstances, environments and processes that ordinary people feel they can do little about and that they had endured, by the time of the survey, for over 18 months.

On the other side of that ‘power’ coin are the agencies that are actually making the decisions: CERA, the three Councils, and ECAN.

On pages 61-66, the CERA Wellbeing Survey 2012 Report tabulates the levels of confidence respondents had that agencies are making decisions in the best interests of ‘Greater Christchurch’ (interestingly, that isn’t quite a question about motives but it does come very close to it, I imagine, in many people’s minds).

The Survey found that 39% of Christchurch City residents had confidence (‘very confident’ or ‘confident’) that CERA was making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch while 29% did not and 28% were neutral.

A stunning 41% of Christchurch residents lacked confidence that the Christchurch City Council (CCC) was making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch, while 29% had confidence.

This finding actually begs the question of the decision making power of the CCC. After all, it has no say over the central city (and, hence, over its budget given the vast sums it has been or will be loaded with to make the grand plan real), over infrastructure recovery in Greater Christchurch (given that CERA is in charge of that and, further, given a secret meeting between the CCC and Minister Brownlee in December, 2012 over a “blowout” in infrastructure repair costs and, therefore, how it will be paid for) or, now, over planning for the next ten years (yet another secret – or ‘private’ – meeting between the Council and Minister Brownlee).

It may be that Tony Marryatt’s $68,000 pay rise, announced in December, 2011, was still ‘front of mind’ for many Christchurch residents.

Whatever the reasons, the levels of lack of confidence in CERA and the Council (and, ‘overall’ as mentioned earlier in this post) also represent Christchurch residents’ sense of lack of control over what is happening around them and to their city.

In a word, it reveals a pervasive sense of powerlessness.

There is one bright patch, however. In every case, the Survey findings report that there is one group that is repeatedly the most likely to express confidence that the agencies are making decisions in the best interests of Greater Christchurch. It is also the group that is more likely to express greatest confidence in those decisions ‘overall’.