It is now easy to understand the motivation as to why Dann would spin the survey results to his make a political point that would damage CERA and the government. James is entitled to his opinion but he needs to be up-front about his political affiliations that inform his biases. That the NZ Herald journalists were utterly incurious as to this vital point comes as no surprise. This was typical lefty leaning lazy cut and paste ambush journalism. No wonder the Herald’s parent company in Australia is struggling.

When we bugged out from South Brighton three days after the quake for a house in Wigram, it felt like we’d moved to another country. I think it was Peter Hyde who’d said there were three cities post-quake: Rescue City, Refugee City, and Shower City. Nobody’s put it better before or after.

You’re right that Dann’s wrong on the weighting.

But I answered that survey. And I remember putting in my street address. And if you look at the Neilson report, they have that as an appendix: street addresses being taken so they could see if there were any differences across different parts of town.

If Lianne Dalziel is not an idiot, she will be doing OIA requests for the data broken down by region. And she will then very likely be able to show that the quake response in the East has been utterly unsatisfactory as viewed by the residents there.

There is potentially massive cross-Christchurch heterogeneity that is masked in the report. They’ve the data to back out regional variation – they requested it specifically for that purpose. And there’s zero reporting of anything broken down by region. Maybe it’s because everybody gave the same answers so regional variation was uninteresting. Or maybe it was a hassle to aggregate up from street addresses to regions. Or maybe things looked completely and utterly horrible in the East, with a lot of us ready to head out with pitchforks and torches.

Of course they meant the Bob Barker, but that’s the Herald for you – assuming Christchurch’s mayor wasn’t actually in the Southern Ocean. I could be wrong, in which case I apologise.