Although there are those who would disagree, natural disasters are probably not motivated by politics, but neither are they immune to it. far from there The actions of human actors undoubtedly affect the prevention, mitigation and damage of natural disasters and their aftermath.
The ‘shock’ refers to the natural act itself, for example, the earthquake. The ‘reply’ comes later. After the 2010-2012 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Earthquake Commission, the Canterbury Earthquake Authority, Christchurch City Council and the Government of the day equate to the net impact of the ‘aftershock’ on the population: the ‘disaster physical’ is far from the entire event. It is also made up of those shocking post-disaster events such as delayed insurance payments, authoritative top-down decisions, professional body ineptitude, evidence of corruption in the post-earthquake city, and the list goes on…
Although governments are supposed to care about the social welfare of their citizens, they also have an interest in maximizing government revenue, and although governments spend both on preventive and palliative measures to lessen the impact of a possible natural shock, they also use natural disasters. natural resources to redistribute power through political effect, for example by favoring disaster spending in regions politically aligned with the party in power. Extreme circumstances give rapacious governments a greater ability to increase their level of theft and hide it. Disasters can be used as a blunt policy instrument to target or reward populations and to enrich a government and the ‘corporate classes’.
Also interesting is the fact that a time of crisis can dramatically increase the amount of information a population has about current or incumbent politicians and their style of government and outcomes. This is because the disaster produces a highly informative environment where voters continuously debate and experience the performance and merits of the operators in power, be it a Prime Minister or a City Council. It is in these high-information environments that voters learn enough to allow them to consider making the decision to replace political incumbents.
For example, certain incumbents in Christchurch are currently responsible for rebuilding a city’s infrastructure and restoring the lives of affected communities to a semblance of order. During normal times, there is usually little information about how well the incumbent did or is doing the job, but during an earthquake or hurricane, voters quickly learn much more about whether the incumbent has done a good job and who these people are in reality. When there is so much information out there, performance information can become informative enough to overcome a voter’s initial tendency to support an incumbent. Therefore, his chance of re-election by people in the affected area has the potential to ‘take a hammer blow’. And the truth is, as voters, we often understand little beyond our own or our local community’s pain and pleasure… Pleasure. Governments also rely on the disinterest (or control) of the national media to ensure that populations outside the affected area hear little of their manipulations within the area.
Educated voters are totally rational, and research shows that re-election rates are lower for incumbents after natural disasters. The mechanism is informative. A rational voter votes retrospectively, that is, based on what they perceive to be the incumbent’s past performance, but does so only because that past performance is informative about expected future performance.
Confidence in a country’s disaster preparedness depends on confidence in its government’s ability and willingness to mandate and monitor standards of decency and fairness as well as the efficiency of reconstruction. The dilemmas facing the city of Christchurch require a constant balance between rebuilding faster, rebuilding cheaper, rebuilding safer and rebuilding better. To achieve the right ends, government will need to address many of the elements of local and private businesses that have been and still are putting profits before community interests, including having the most important conversations with insurance providers. and address the claims settlement gridlock and dubious processes employed to minimize the cost of valid claims. These are all examples of potential failures by the central government to take responsibility and control for regulation and enforcement in the long-term planning process, which is arguably motivated by an entrenched culture of corporatism that favors corrupt deals. and the search for hidden agendas. Markets have no inherent moral character, so it is up to the government to decide how to run them.
Declaring a disaster a ‘national emergency’ has profound political implications. In the wake of emergency management and rescue efforts, it is virtually inevitable that further politicization of the event will increase as the affected community moves from emergency response to recovery and reconstruction phases. The immediate emergency response by any government is quite predictable, as it should be, but, from a political standpoint, the fallout has proven to be uncharted territory, highly susceptible to the opportunities of circumstance and political values and agendas. . of the day The way in which a government perceives its political mandate, or is given the opportunity to define it, is never more critical than in a recovery phase.
Markets have no inherent moral character, and therefore it is arguable that the role of government is to decide how to run them. In particular, after a major disaster, markets must be regulated ‘under emergency’ to ensure that they are working to the benefit of the recovery of the majority of citizens. A non-interference political system only serves to amplify the voice of wealthy corporations and does not protect ordinary citizens from corporate abuse. Money talks in politics as it does in the market. Any recovery system must have rules and regulations that operate within a legal framework. In a modern economy, the government has a responsibility on behalf of its people to set and enforce the rules of the game in the marketplace. This is especially true in the case of a major disaster where the government makes the decision to participate in the recovery process. In the absence of genuine government support, the extent to which a population can recover after a disaster is likely to be seriously questioned. What has characterized the recovery in Christchurch is that political decision-making has been in favor of corporate and government stakeholders: the insurance industry and the construction industry. The policy of non-interference in the market has been the cause of a slow and painful recovery. The consequences of this approach have been painful and visibly felt by the affected population.
