Gerry Brownlee is the minister in charge of EQC. He may not work for EQC, but he definitely deserves to be mentioned as one of the EQC Royals.
Gerry has a colourful background. He played rugby growing up and was a school bully when he went to St Bede’s. He also bullied a disabled student that was much smaller than him.
Gerry eventually managed to teach woodworking at St Bede’s. A student of Gerry’s says, “Gerry was very lazy and dumb. He was supposed to know woodworking, but he was clueless.”
Another student says, “Gerry used to order pizzas to class. The rubbish bins also had empty beer bottles.”
Most people don’t know about Gerry the alcoholic. One man says, “I went to work one morning and I saw Gerry Brownlee outside the pub, hung over, and just making a fool of himself”.
Gerry is an angry drunk. Some people are drunk and funny, but Gerry is drunk and violent.
Back in 1999, Gerry Brownlee assaulted a man named Neil Able, a forest conservation campaigner. Brownlee threatened to throw the small man down a staircase. A judge eventually awarded Able $8,500 in civil damages.
What most people don’t know was that Gerry tried to get the taxpayer to pay his $48,000 legal bill in that case under a programme that allows MPs to claim legal fee reimbursements when they have to pay legal bills through their work as MPs. Parliament declined to pay the money because the activity happened when Brownlee was campaigning for office not in his official role as an MP. Still, Brownlee is a cheap bastard that wants others to pay for his lunch.
Most people in NZ are afraid of Gerry, including me. If you criticise Gerry, he will find a way to sabotage you.
Gerry shows his corruption in other ways. He was a director of NZ Casino Services Ltd, a company that defrauded investors of more than $3 million dollars. Not only was he a director, he was a founding director of that company. Gerry’s excuse is that “I didn’t do my research at all.”
Despite being corrupt, John Key put him in charge of the rebuild. Some people think the real reason was that John Key wanted to get rid of a rival. He knew that Gerry was incompetent, so the best way to taint him politically was to put the lazy bugger in charge of the rebuild and watch him fail.
Other people believe that John Key never wanted to pay people their just entitlement because it would put an end to his dreams of a budget surplus in 2014-2015. These people think that John Key put Gerry in charge because he needed a strongman to cheat people out of their claims. Gerry was a bully and the NZ government needed a bully to cut the claims payout by stalling claims and exhausting people into taking a lower payout.
Gerry was not competent or very intelligent. “He’s barely functionally literate”, said one man. “He is lazy and thick”, says another.
Reid Stiven and Barry Searle convinced Gerry to have Fletchers do repairs to houses instead of cash settling claims the way EQC had always done. Gerry knew nothing about public policy or EQC because Bill English was the previous EQC minister. However, Gerry did want to get money flowing to the right people. National have a cosy relationship with Fletchers, so he was happy to grease the hands of his friends at Fletchers.
Gerry did pressure Fletchers into prioritising repairs for those in his district in time for the 2011 elections. Gerry knew that the east of Christchurch always votes for Labour, so he didn’t care if those people were stuck waiting.
EQC was also happy to help pad the numbers and focus on the easier repairs. EQC could say that they were doing a good job and Gerry could sell the idea that EQC were making progress to the rest of New Zealand. Meanwhile, people in TC3 and so on were stuck waiting.
Gerry also was keen to Red Zone, but his reasons were more sinister. Gerry figured the Crown could buy the land and houses cheaply and eventually sell them to the right people at a major profit. Many of the houses in the Red Zone were worth more than their rateable value, so central government will eventually get a profit.
One person also reports that Gerry has been using the names of his wife and children to buy properties in TC3. He then gets Fletchers to prioritise the repairs and sells the properties at a profit. The person that says this did not want to include his name because he was afraid of retaliation.
Gerry is a corrupt bastard. The only way to get rid of him is to vote him out of office next year.
The EQC Royal Family 