The roots of the dysfunction at Wellington City Council – which has triggered the decision to appoint a crown observer – reach deep beneath the streets of the capital and back into its past: ancient layers of incompetence and idiocy lie piled atop each other like geological strata.
The decision to underfund the maintenance of the city’s antiquated water infrastructure goes back at least 15 years. In 2013, a moderate earthquake damaged the town hall, which hosted council offices, mayoral chambers and a concert venue.
Despite questions about the cost, the council decided to salvage the building instead of knocking it down and replacing it. Since then, the budget has escalated from $43 million to $329m. Six years later, it made an identical mistake with the library: the rebuild cost currently sits at nearly $200m.
Instead of properly funding the repair of its pipes – which suffered serious damage in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake and now routinely flood the central streets, send sewage gushing into the harbour and cause water outages over summer – the city has elected to spend on other projects. It is spending $180m on a convention centre that runs at a loss, $240m redeveloping the civic square, $160m on cycleways and $139m pedestrianising its shopping precinct, hilariously known as “the golden mile”, but which increasingly consists of empty shopfronts. Their doorways are occupied by the coolest little capital’s rapidly expanding homeless population.
Falling apart
In 2019, the city elected long-time conservative councillor Andy Foster as mayor. Foster attempted to run the council by fiat, which is not remotely how Wellington’s mayoralty works. A cabal of Labour and Green local politicians – aghast that a right-wing candidate had taken power in their city – successfully fought him to a standstill on nearly every issue. The city was falling apart and its local government was visibly paralysed.
Solving the triple problems of decay, dysfunction and deadlock was the premise of Tory Whanau’s successful mayoral campaign in 2022. A former senior parliamentary staffer for the Greens, Whanau allowed her party membership to lapse so she could function as an independent broker between the council’s warring factions.
She knew how politics worked, she could get things done and she could work with central government to deliver a positive and unifying vision. She was the perfect solution to the capital’s problems.
Unfortunately, all of these priceless qualities evaporated on contact with reality, transmuted into dust from the city’s endless roadworks. When the coalition government won the election, Whanau defiantly announced that she would press ahead with contracts for her transport plans before the incoming Transport Minister – Simeon Brown, also the incoming Local Government Minister – could cancel them.
She failed to accomplish this, pointlessly spoiling her relationship with the new minister before it had begun.
When five members of her council publicly disagreed with her proposal to spend $32m buying the land under an earthquake-damaged cinema – the infamous Reading deal – she brought in an independent lawyer at ratepayer expense to prosecute a code of conduct complaint against her ideological adversaries.
The investigation was justified on the basis of claims made by an anonymous whistleblower, who was eventually revealed as Whanau’s chief of staff. It was textbook dirty politics and it earned Whanau the undying enmity of councillors who should have been her allies in subsequent debates. The deal itself failed after the financial details became public.
All of this took place against a backdrop of councillors across the political divide becoming increasingly sceptical of the aggressive role senior officials played in their organisation’s wildly disordered decision-making process. Staff withheld vital legal and financial information from the council until immediately before voting, so it was impossible to verify or explore alternatives to the options presented to them.
Knowledge lacking
On assuming the mayoralty, Whanau’s understanding of local government proved to be non-existent. Because of her naivety, she is perceived to have easily been captured by the organisation’s unelected executives. Politically, she’s even more isolated than her hapless predecessor.
The coalition government loves this. The spectacle of a city experiencing an epidemic of local business collapses and critical infrastructure failures while Labour and Green councillors scream at each other about te tiriti lets them say everything they want to say about their political opponents.
Before Brown announced his intention to appoint an observer, the decision was teased in the media for a week, and National’s Wellington MPs Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop publicly lacerated the council’s decision to revoke its long-term plan. Sending in an observer is the perfect way to humiliate the mayor and highlight the dysfunction without owning any of it politically.
Hopefully, this is more than just a political stunt. Brown’s decision was justified on advice from the Department of Internal Affairs, which found the council’s decision to fund water infrastructure through rates rather than borrowing would overcharge residents by more than $700m over 10 years. (Infrastructure is almost always funded by borrowing, but some councillors are sceptical of this claim and want to see the numbers behind this advice.)
Brown has also expressed concerns about allegations of senior council staff withholding information and “acting like politicians”. If Wellington wants to elect incompetent local representatives, it is the city’s democratic right to do so. But many of these issues predate the current government, the incumbent mayor and most of the sitting councillors.
The long sequence of horrible decisions suggests profound problems with the culture and performance of the organisation itself, which elected leaders seem powerless to solve. If Brown’s observer can dig deep enough and excavate the cracks in the foundations, the seismic fault lines beneath the civic infrastructure, National could find itself revitalising the capital city it holds in such contempt.
