Do you have confidence in the answers given to Cr Pauline Cotter in this video?

Does this all sound like the undelivered pledges that we’ve all heard about the cathedral? Does this sound like more of the rhetoric we have been hearing from the Christchurch Foundation, that there is this magical pool of high value international donors who want to give massive amounts of money to Christchurch?

This past week we have all read about Cr James Gough having yet to hand over tens of thousands of directors fees to the Mayor’s Welfare Fund.

Has the world moved on from the nineteen hundreds where people wanted to leave a legacy by putting their name on a building? In the past, putting your family name on something was important. It was a way to keep your family name in public light for the benefit of your family moving forward. Today it’s easy to build a profile. It’s easy to use social media to push past main stream media who may or may not platform you.

Do you have confidence in what you’re hearing in this video when you hear that they simply don’t have conditional contracts signed for donations?

Listening to the whole video, it seems that no one really wants this project. Two minor councils seem to be hedging a beat that the rest will let them off the hook by saying no.

The government is not in. It hasn’t given a contract to say they’ll pay if the councils and high worth donors do.

Is this project like the cathedral and in need of a massive rescoping exercise to bring it back to reality? The cathedral dumped the idea of base isolation, a café and a visitors center. Why didn’t they have even a single donor signed for a single exhibit space?

Last week we heard that the stadium not only has a major sponsor but also has food and beverage sponsors now signed up.I accept that the donors money isn’t in the bank but it’s also not in contracts subject to either completion or government and council support.

If we agree to council funding to complete the next stage, how can we have confidence that the new argument won’t simply become “you have a finished shell but you have to understand that due to tough times we can’t get donors”?

Sounds a lot like the same drum that the Christchurch Foundation is beating.