Just over a month into my recently renewed radio career, it's dawning on me that things quake-related are going to be the sole topic of conversation for some time to come.
From time to time we try to introduce a different topic of conversation. Honestly, we do. Every morning I'm prepping I rack my brains and scour the news for something, anything that won't somehow snake its way back to the 'e' word. But just the way it does at the hairdresser, the supermarket, coffee with friends, the makeshift gym, Saturday morning sports, the quakes somehow manage to find relevance in the most far flung topical places.
And so we talk. And we talk. And we talk.
Yesterday's talk was focused mostly on The Forgotten Ones - those people who still live in third world conditions, three and a half months on, still without basic sanitation and the things that the rest of us now take for granted again.
A feisty woman from somewhere over in the east, Beverley, got so fed up with what she said were fob offs and platitudes from those who should have been sorting things out, she did the only thing that seems to work any more. She called a TV current affairs show.
Astonishingly, the response from the authorities was deafening in its silence. Come 10.30 yesterday morning when we caught up with her on the wireless, a full 16 hours after her Campbell Live appearance, Beverley had yet to receive a single phone call from anyone but an opposition MP.
Hello? God only knows how much money the council spends every year on 'professional development' for its communications people, but somebody needs to spend a little more to send them back to PR 101. It takes neither a high level communications strategist nor a post grad degree to work out what needs to be done about Beverley: somebody needs to pick up the phone and call her. Not a call center somebody, not a PR somebody, not a pat-her-on-the-head-and-empathise somebody. A somebody who can make stuff happen in creative and pragmatic ways. A shower truck in her area, maybe. A communal kitchen and laundry facility in a portacomm. Lord only knows, I am just one simple ratepayer, but it doesn't seem that complex to me. Yes, yes we accept it's a complicated job and it's going to go on forever etc etc, but that's no excuse to throw our hands up as a community and say 'too hard'. Since when was that the Canterbury way?
The 'PR' issues in this extraordinarily long, drawn out and unprecedented situation we find ourselves in are mostly not PR issues at all. They're reality issues. Spin it any way you want to, sewage on your back lawn, toilets that don't flush, blocked drains and the inability to undertake basic household tasks are what they are. The big question is: when will we stop talking and start doing something about them?
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