City Care is a Christchurch City Council-controlled trading organisation (which started off as its humble works department). According to its Website, “City Care is a leading provider of construction, maintenance and management services across New Zealand's built environment. We work around the clock - building, maintaining and managing our nation's parks, gardens, sports fields and cemeteries, waterways and coastal areas, buildings and public facilities, roading networks and water, wastewater and stormwater networks”.

The Christchurch City Council voted in June 2017 to restore City Care to its strategic assets list. This is the culmination of a long back down by the Council which had announced, in 2015, that it planned to sell City Care as the first step in an assets sale process supposedly necessitated by the need to raise capital to clear debts incurred by quake rebuild costs and obligations. Keep Our Assets Canterbury (KOA – of which CAFCA is a key part, and of which I’m the Convenor) tackled the Council head on about this. We said that the debt claim was bunk and that the figures for the debt were manufactured.

We said that the decision to sell assets was a perfect illustration of Government-led disaster capitalism or shock doctrine, motivated solely by ideology i.e. to take advantage of the shock of disaster to ram home a privatisation policy. We opposed the whole assets sale policy. And we very actively opposed the specific proposal to sell City Care, campaigning tirelessly on the streets and in the Council Chamber throughout 2015 and 2016 and into 2017, under the slogan of “Save City Care”.

KOA’s campaign included running John Minto as our Christchurch Mayoral candidate in 2016 (John’s article about his Mayoral campaign is in Watchdog 143, December 2016, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/43/01.html. That same issue has an article about CAFCA’s role in the Mayoral campaign, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/43/02.html).

The Council started to see sense in 2016, when it announced that it would not sell City Care. But it still did not have the protection of being restored to the Council's strategic assets list (meaning that it can't be sold without public consultation). Finally, it came to a debate and vote at the Council's June 20th meeting. What the debate was about was the motion by Mayor Lianne Dalziel to not restore City Care to the strategic assets list.

That was defeated and replaced by a motion to restore City Care to the list. That was passed, with only Councillors David East and Jamie Gough voting against it. Even the Mayor turned around and voted in support of it. Here is the video clip of the debate http://councillive.ccc.govt.nz/video/6992 (if you want to cut straight to the vote, it's around 23 minutes in).

It is well worth watching, for example, to hear Councillor Vicki Buck (a former long-serving Mayor) explain why she changed her mind after previously voting to sell City Care. KOA claims victory, as City Care has been saved and we have been proven right on all points. And we note the point made by Councillor Andrew Turner in the debate - that Red Bus is now the only one of the Council's trading assets under the aegis of Christchurch City Holdings Ltd not to be on the strategic assets list. It also needs to be restored to that list ASAP.

But it must be noted, with bitter regret, that the City Council – New Zealand’s second biggest landlord, behind only the State – has very recently allowed itself to be hoodwinked/bullied by the Government into giving up total ownership and control of its very large portfolio of social housing, which is now in the hands of a housing trust (in which the Council is just a partner). This is a major asset which has been partially removed from ownership by the people of Christchurch. Swings and roundabouts.