Fifteen years ago today, Gerry Brownlee was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. On February 22, New Zealand's Energy and Resources Minister was due to attend the International Energy Forum meeting, where a landmark charter was to be signed, bringing some much-needed calm to Western economies confounded by the volatile oil prices since the Arab Spring. About two o’clock that morning, the phone in Brownlee's hotel room rang. It was his advisor, a young staffer named Chris Bishop, on the other end. ‘There's been a big earthquake in Christchurch’, Bishop said. ‘Oh yeah’, said Brownlee. ‘How big?’ ‘6.3’, said Bishop. Brownlee was unimpressed. Since the previous September, when an even bigger earthquake struck west of Christchurch and badly damaged parts of the city, he had found himself with the new portfolio, earthquake recovery. This particular aftershock didn't sound too bad.

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‘The last one was 7.2’, Brownlee said. ‘Should be all right’. ‘Nah’, said Bishop. ‘Have a look on your T. Brownlee turned on the BBC to find it carrying the Three News feed from New Zealand. It was very soon after the earthquake and Christchurch was in chaos. The reporter had dust all over him, Brownlee recalls, 15 years on, and he was clearly himself wondering what the f…'s going on? ‘So, yeah, we made a quick 18-hour dash back here’. There would be no International Energy Forum meeting. Brownlee's new portfolio was about to consume his professional life. For the next five years, he would preside over a government ministry entirely concerned with rebuilding a broken city. As its head, figurehead, and very personification, he, more than anyone, would be the individual onto whom a febrile populace would project its misgivings, frustrations, and unfiltered rage.

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Fifteen years and a couple of changes of government later, Brownlee is now the Speaker of the House. Far cry from the maelstrom of post-quake Christchurch. Have we forgotten that fevered time yet? Part of the rationale for approaching the former minister for a decade and a half retrospective was the palpable sense of progress in the city. Something of a national love-in is being lavished on Christchurch with its amenities, its shiny CBD and objective superiority over strung out Auckland and coming apart at the dirtiest possible seams, Wellington. The tide after an interminable ebb is in. So what does the former earthquake recovery minister think? ‘Pretty pleased’, he says, given the dire predictions that were made for the city at the time. ‘And I think it's a tribute to the people who did stay here, those who did reinvest capital here, and to everybody who made an effort during that time, because literally tens of thousands of people did’. So far, so humble. The Speaker would never be so vulgar as to say, I told you so, even if that is what he thought, which genuinely seems like he doesn't.

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In any case, the history of Christchurch's earthquake recovery is far too complicated for anyone to claim it as a victory, certainly not someone who attracted as much ire as the forthright former minister. On this he has not changed. For more than an hour one day earlier this month, Brownlee was in the mood to reminisce but not reflect, and certainly not to regret. ‘If he comes to a position, he'll have thought through it a lot’, one of his advisors from the time once told The Press. ‘To change him from that position is not necessarily easy’. Brownlee couldn't have put it better himself.

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Red zone decisions

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Recalling the first days after February 22, 2011: ‘The one thing that stuck in my head was - make decisions. Consider how you get to a decision, but make the decision and stick to it … They've got to be well considered and you've got to be able to back them up. Secondly, create as much choice as possible for people in difficult circumstances, which is not easy.’ It wasn't. It was clear even before February that the devastating September 2010 earthquake was going to render some land irreparable for housing, just not as much. Days before February 22, authorities were discussing quaint ideas like shoring up the banks of the Avon River. Eventually, nearly 8,500 properties were red -zoned. Here, one regret. I’'ll never use colours again,’ Brownlee said. ‘I didn't want to at the time. I remember having an argument, not an argument, a discussion with my group of officials and they said, “Well, we'll go for grey, green, orange and red”. And I said, “Look, colour's not good. It's better to actually have something that said what it is”. So they said, “They're all technical categories, 1 through 4. You just think, “Yeah, OK”. Fair enough. But the ‘TC4 zone doesn't have the same ring as red zone even if it does somewhat reflect the monumental work that went into such an assignation. All the land had to be assessed before it could be written off, which took longer than could be easily explained. Then the private insurers had to agree to the Crown offers that resulted, which, Brownlee said, they didn't want to. ‘They weren't smelling the roses really. I remember meeting with them in Auckland, their whole body, there's about 12 to 14 of them there, and they put it to me that no, the options weren't applicable. So I sat there quietly listening to this, and then I said, “Well, here's the first thing. We've just given you massive information about the ground condition there. We're not charging you for that. Second, no one has to do anything … but bear in mind that some of those properties require piling down as much as 20 meters before you get to solid ground. So if you want to rebuild a house, that's $400,000 on top, but spend a million dollars getting the foundation for it. It's your choice’, I said, ‘I'll leave that with you’. And I left the meeting somewhat dramatically, I must say. On the way to the airport, he got a call the insurers were in. He was happiest talking about insurance. The industry, he said, fascinated him.

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A few months after the quake, he led a delegation to a conference in Monte Carlo. Reinsurers in particular needed to hear how Christchurch was recovering and how the city and all of New Zealand was still a viable risk. But more important, Brownlee said, were the meetings with risk assessors themselves. ‘We went to their presentation. What they were saying was pretty pessimistic about Christchurch and about New Zealand, in fact. So I used the question time from the floor to challenge a couple of things they'd said. They were very open about it. It wasn't aggressive. They invited [GNS Principal Scientist] Dr. Kelvin Berryman, to talk about how GNS saw it. He was able to do that. And we then, on the way back, decided to take an extra two days and went to meet this crowd in San Francisco. Because every insurer in the world would buy information off these guys, so they've got to have the right stuff. Little things like that. They're hard to explain, but they're very important’.

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Being open

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He was unhappiest talking about the media. or rather he talked about his dislike of much of the media coverage of the recovery, particularly by this newspaper. which he once called the ‘enemy’ of the recovery, with more than a little vigour. The Press was appalling, he said. I'm sorry to say that. The newspaper was not alone. He singled out Campbell Live’s. quake coverage as well, but he has not wavered from his position at the time that the media were merchants of doom who did no one in Christchurch any favours banging on about how bad everything was, even themselves. What was interesting is a former editor of The Press conceded to then Prime Minister John Key that whenever they had a negative earthquake story on the front page, the over-the -counter sales dropped, he said. It's odd that they were aware that some of that stuff didn't fly well with the general public.

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And hearing that, I was sort of thinking, yeah, well, that tells you people just want to get on with things. They want to do things. They don't want to be mired by what's bad all the time. The Press checked with our former editor, now managing director of Stuff Masthead Publishing, Joanna Norris. She didn't recall making that exact comment to Key, but said the facts fitted. Brownlee, though, may have missed the point. Plenty of Press readers might have wanted to move on, but thousands of others felt powerless and voiceless. ‘This second group relied on The Press to draw attention to the challenges and hardship people were experiencing’, Norris said. ‘We were acutely aware of this divide in the post-quake years, and while some of the stories may not have sold well, we knew we had an obligation to continue to tell these stories fairly and accurately, even if some people didn't want to hear them … We were holding the powerful to account for the experience of all people in the city, not just those who were fortunate enough to be able to move on or even gloss over the experience of others. In his whole time as Minister, Brownlee recalled just one instance where one of those ‘others’ accosted him personally. ‘At Christchurch Airport,’ he said, ‘by a guy who was losing it. It turned out he was from Dunedin and he'd just been visiting from the weekend and had relatives in Bexley and they were waiting for decision on the land. So you knew it was driven out of emotional response to an individual circumstance’.

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Today, unburdened by doubt, he can confidently endorse Christchurch in whatever role he might have played in its recovery. Where there could have been more introspection, there has at least been candour. For years, when The Press asked, he would always call back, if only to berate us for being wrong. Weekly media briefings continued for four years after 2011. ‘I was of the view that should be as open as possible’, he said, on everything, more or less: ‘The only thing is that it was pretty clear right from the start that this was not going to be an overnight fix. It was going to take quite a long time. And so whenever I was asked, “When do you think the covery will be complete?” I would go into a thing where I was saying, well, look, we're likely to see all sorts of change in the city. And so there'll always be renewal going on, as there has been for many decades. You sort of fudge it. If I'd gone out and said, oh, it's going to be 20 years, that would have been very depressing for a lot of people’. But if someone had pinned him down way back in 2013 or so, that would have been the answer? ‘I think it would have been’, he said. ‘but I was never actually directly asked’.

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Interview reproduced from The Press, 21 February 2026.

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