Karl du Fresne: The sad, ignoble decline of Frog City

On a recent Monday morning, my wife and I had breakfast at Bordeaux Bakery on Thorndon Quay, Wellington. I expressed surprise that the place was empty. A couple of years ago it would have been humming.We sat by the window with a view over the street. What we saw was a forest of traffic cones and red-and-white posts designating the cycle lanes that have spread like a cancer all over the city (a city, it should be noted, whose topography makes it singularly unsuited to cycling because many of its main thoroughfares are narrow and winding).

Cyclists rode past in dribs and drabs on their way to work but there were no cars outside because there were no parking spaces. One guy took his chances, stopping illegally for a few minutes while he came in for a takeaway coffee. Other than that, it was just my wife and me.

I felt sorry for the staff. Working in a business with no customers must be demoralising.

It was no surprise, then, to read the depressing announcement only days later that the three Bordeaux cafés around the city were closing, causing the loss of 40 jobs. The owner of the company was blunt about the primary reason: “Everyone keeps telling us how hard it is to get to us,” he told the NZ Herald.

And so continues the slow, torturous death of a city that 20 years ago was buzzing with vitality, ideas and promise. Wellington today is a hostile, alien environment, unfriendly and often bewildering even to its own residents, to say nothing of hapless outsiders trying to navigate streets that resemble obstacle courses. I spent most of my working life in Wellington but sometimes barely recognise the moribund city it has become.

Who’s to blame? The decay began in 2010 when Wellington voted out the last in a long run of capable mayors and perversely allowed itself to be persuaded its future lay with a Greenie blow-in from Britain. Three more useless mayors and Left-dominated councils later, the city has become so terminally dysfunctional that government intervention looks both likely and necessary.

But while it’s easy to pin the blame on ideologically driven zealots at the council table and the tone-deaf, unelected commissars and planners who really run the show, not to mention their media enablers (the Dom Post, under a former editor, harangued its readers almost daily with lectures on the virtues of cycling), it has to be said that the citizens and voters of Wellington can’t entirely escape responsibility.

It’s an old cliché that people get the governments they deserve and the same can be said of councils. New Zealanders en masse tend to be passive, complacent and apathetic. The late Gordon McLauchlan, in his book The Passionless People, called us smiling zombies. We gormlessly stand by while stupid and dangerous things happen, then shriek with indignation when the damage has been done.

We’re all familiar with the parable about the frogs in a pot of water that heats so gradually they don’t realise they’re being cooked alive. By the time the temperature reaches boiling point, it’s too late to reverse the process. The scientific veracity of the analogy has been challenged but it’s apt nonetheless. The city's steady decline, so obvious to occasional visitors, may not seem so apparent to the people who actually live there.

In this case, the frogs are the people of Wellington who allowed a clique of barmy activists to take over their once-proud city. My good friend Neil Harrap points out in a letter in The Post today that Wellingtonians who voted in the last local government elections were far outnumbered by those who couldn’t be bothered. There’s the problem, right there.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. His blog can be found at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.