Wellington is experiencing economic decline, with empty streets and struggling hospitality sectors.
The All Blacks have a poor record in Wellington, raising questions about future matches there.
New Zealand Rugby is considering consolidating its two offices in Wellington and Auckland for cost-saving reasons.
There’s a dystopian feel to Wellington these days – signs everywhere that it is a city on the retreat.
Shopping trolleys litter the once buzzing streets of Courtenay Place and doorways of recently popular hospitality institutions are now occupied by rough sleepers.
Around the corner on Cuba Stit’s much the same, and if a test match in the capital was once an opportunity to showcase all that is good about New Zealand, what it does now is stand as a monument to why there was a net migration loss of 30,000 Kiwis to Australia last year.
Wellington is fast becoming a ghost-city, and certainly it’s a place where the All Blacks feel they have been haunted in recent years.
New Zealand Rugby House in Wellington is one of two offices run by the sport's governing body. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Their record in the capital has been dire since 2017: catastrophically out of alignment with their legacy of prolonged success.
They have won just two of their last eight tests at the Cake Tin, and the loss to Argentina last year is one that head coach Scott Robertson still lies awake at night replaying in his head, endlessly pondering how on earth it happened.
Everyone insists it’s not rational to be talking about the capital being cursed, but so much has happened in Wellington in the past eight years that it’s perhaps not rational to not consider it.
Ever since Sonny Bill Williams lost the run of himself in the second test against the British and Irish Lions and was red-carded midway through the first half for a reckless shoulder charge, the All Blacks have endured multiple unexplainable phenomena when playing in the capital.
In 2018, they lost to the Springboks when they couldn’t stop conceding soft tries or work out how to drop a goal at the death.
In 2020, they drew with the Wallabies after Rieko Ioane inexplicably dropped the ball over the line in the act of scoring when no one was near him.
In 2022, somehow Irish prop Andrew Porter was only yellow-carded midway through the second half for breaking Brodie Retallick’s cheekbone. Last year, the All Blacks contrived to blow the game by throwing two consecutive wild passes that saw them retreat 50 metres and hand Argentina an attacking scrum from which they scored.
Maybe, then, the capital is cursed – but certainly there is a growing sense it’s not just an unhappy place for civil servants, but that rugby is also re-evaluating and considering its relationship with the capital.
That state-of the-art facility is now their dedicated training base whenever they play in Wellington, and the team only decamped into town on Thursday night.
An aerial view of the NZCIS Sports Hub in Trentham, Upper Hutt. Photo / NZCIS
And then there is the question of how often the All Blacks will play in the capital in the coming years.
There will only be four home tests in 2026 and three in 2027, and with the new, roofed stadium in Christchurch set to open next year, the unloved Cake Tin won’t be kicked off the rotation, but it will inevitably struggle to be allocated as many tests as it currently is.
But there is an even bigger question under consideration, which relates to whether New Zealand Rugby (NZR) should continue to be headquartered in Wellington, or even have any office presence at all in the capital.
The national body is in the midst of a major cost-saving review and the feedback from the consultancy running the rule over the organisation has asked whether NZR needs to have significant offices in both Auckland and Wellington as it currently does.
NZR has historically been based in Wellington, but in the past 15 years or so has built a growing presence in Auckland – basing most of its commercial staff there as well as (departing in December) chief executive Mark Robinson.
Auckland is the country’s economic powerhouse, a magnet for new migrants, and arguably the most likely destination in which the yet-to-be-found new chief executive is going to want to be based.
It would be hard for NZR to sell the merits of Wellington to applicants for the chief executive role while the city is suffering a slow and painful economic death caused by civil servant job cuts and the consequential collapse of the service and hospitality sectors so dependent on the Government’s administrative workforce.
In a work-from-home digital world, it seems archaic to be talking about office locations, but the lease on NZR’s Wellington and Auckland properties both expire at the end of 2027, and a decision has to be made on whether to renew both, rationalise to just one city or relocate the headquarters entirely.
NZR is considering establishing an office for high-performance staff and other employees at the NZCIS facility in Upper Hutt.
The Hurricanes are based there, the All Blacks are likely to start training there more regularly even when they are not playing in the capital, and it’s a natural fit for NZR’s high-performance team to operate out of there.
But this will inevitably weaken the rationale for NZR to retain a base in Wellington post-2027.
New Zealand Rugby House on Molesworth St, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
No decision will be made until NZR’s board has seen a detailed cost-benefit analysis that will tell them the financial impacts of operating out of just one city and the potential impact – financial and staff retention – of being based in either just Auckland or just Wellington.
Given Auckland is the country’s commercial epicentre, it’s difficult to see how any review would produce an evidential base for NZR to shut up shop there, and really the question being asked is whether the national body can justify keeping a base in Wellington.
Maybe it will ultimately make financial sense for NZR to stay in the capital, but the occupied doorways, prevalence of sleeping bags on public benches and closed, darkened units where flat whites no longer flow suggest the city is not New Zealand’s – nor rugby’s – future.
