John McLean: Waste, Waste Everywhere.....

Defund Da Sewerage. The Albatross around New Zealand’s neck

Untreated human waste continues to gush from the failed Moa Point treatment plant into the sea off the South Coast of Wellington. Pat Dougherty, the chief executive of Wellington Water, initially blamed the catastrophic failure on “under‑investment over a long period”. Wellington Water has now claimed that it cannot comment on the disaster because there’s an inquiry. Which is a lie. No inquiry, governmental or otherwise, has been initiated.

Dougherty’s assessment could be accurate, but only in a superficial sense. Even if the immediate cause is indeed under-investment (it seems no-one really knows), the far more fundamental cause of Wellington’s human waste disposal disaster is this. It’s massive wastage and misallocation of public money - ratepayer money that could and should have been spent on properly running and maintaining the Moa Point plant.

Wellington City Council has wasted vast sums of ratepayers’ money on virtue projecting, vanity projects. By ultra-conservative estimates, WCC has spent over a hundred million dollars on Wellington City cycle lanes over the last decade; over-engineered lanes that almost no-one, including most Wellington cyclists (of which I’m one), voted for or wanted.

WCC spent $180 million on constructing its Tākina conference centre, a facility that loses – and is therefore ratepayer subsidized to the tune of - more than $10 million per year. WCC has spent $330 million (and rising) on earthquake strengthening of the Town Hall, a building that should’ve been demolished long ago. Over half a million dollars on one single bike rack and its immediate surrounds.

$2.3 million on a single block of Rainbow-lit public toilets. Half a million dollars for each Rainbow-coloured pedestrian crossing in Wellington. And so on and so forth. All mired in uncontested contracts and probably much worse public/private mischief and malfeasance.

All of this wasted money could certainly have been spent on better maintaining and running the Moa Point treatment plant. Wellington Water pays multinational “wastewater” company Veolia $17 million dollars a year to operate, staff and otherwise pay the bills for (i.e., power, chemicals and other consumables, routine maintenance, monitoring) four Wellington regional wastewater plants, including Moa Point. That amount seems to me to be extremely moderate. Quite simply, Wellington’s local authorities have deliberately chosen to spend money on things other than absolute essentials like waste water treatment.

Less than five years ago, on 27 May 2021, Wellington’s City Councillors met and expressly rejected a provision in the Council’s proposed long-term plan for increased expenditure ($391 million) on improving Wellington’s long term waste water treatment, including the Moa Point facility. Current Green Party MP Tamatha Paul was the then Councillor who proposed the rejection. The nine Councillors who voted to reject that waste water expenditure provision were the following individuals:

• Tamatha Paul

• Sarah Free (Deputy Mayor)

• Fleur Fitzsimons (current President of the Public Service Association union)

• Iona Pannett

• Andy Matthews

• Jill Day (current President of the Labour Party)

• Jenny Condie

• Tory Whanau (then Wellington Mayor-in-waiting)

• Brian Dawson

Those same nine Councillors, again at the instigation of Tamatha Paul, voted in favour of an amendment to the long term plan to increase expenditure on Wellington cycle ways to $226 million over 10 years. That cycle ways expenditure was included in the approved long term plan.

LITTLE ON OFFER
John McLean 14 April 2025

Andrew Little is considering standing to be Mayor of Wellington, in the upcoming October 2025 local body election. Little is a former leader of the Labour Party and Labour Government Minister.
Read full story

Wellington Mayor Andrew Little is desperately trying to deflect blame away from his ideological colleagues’ diversion of Wellington ratepayer funds from waste water treatment to cycle ways. Little’s attempted deflection has entailed him calling for a Government Inquiry into the cause of the Moa Point debacle. Government inquiries of course take years, go nowhere and would never lay the blame where it obviously lies – with Tabatha Paul and her fellow waste water de-funders. As a Green Party Member of Parliament, Tabatha is naturally an outspoken fan of the Black Lives Matter idealization of defunding da Police.

If nothing else, Green Wellington Councillors’ opposition to increased sewage treatment funding proves how completely New Zealand’s Green movement has divorced itself from legitimate environmental concerns.

New Zealanders are incessantly told that our Court system is overwhelmed. If there’s a scintilla of truth in that notion, then that situation is overwhelmingly self-inflicted. Let’s take a couple of examples of New Zealand Court system wastage of public resources, time and money.

Mosques mass killer Brenton Tarrant is currently in New Zealand’s second highest court, the Court of Appeal. At the week-long hearing, his State (“legal aid”)-funded lawyers are arguing that, because prison was allegedly tough for him while he was awaiting trial, his guilty pleas should be overturned (“vacated”). For laypeople, it’s beyond belief that Tarrant can have been allowed to waste the Court’s time with this crazy, narcissistic nonsense.

The fact that Tarrant’s even in solitary confinement, at a cost of over a million dollars a year, is a damning indictment of the New Zealand “justice” system. He should be in Australia or Hell. Pure and simple. The Court has afforded his lawyers name suppression. New Zealand’s Court system money train rolls on, and on, and on.

In another carriage of the gravy train, we await the Court’s decision on a claim by a South Island Maori tribe for de facto control of all of the South Island’s fresh water. The tribe, Ngai Tahu, is claiming co-governance i.e., exploitable veto rights over how the South Island’s fresh water is used and otherwise administered. Quisling Quis Finlayson KC is naturally repwesenting Ngai Tahu.

Ngai Tahu’s Court proceedings began in 2020. The last hearing concluded on 4 April 2025 and the judge, Justice Melanie Harland, has yet to issue her judgement. The Crown, at colossal taxpayers’ expense, has ostensibly opposed Ngai Tahu’s claim. Unfortunately, given Critical Race Theorist Una Jagose has been Solicitor-General and Crown Law chief executive for the entire duration of Ngai Tahu’s claim, it’s not clear whether any genuine opposition has been put up.

If the judgement upholds Ngai Tahu’s claim, the Government must immediately pass legislation to overturn it and restore South Island’s fresh water to exclusive public ownership and control - just as ex-Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark legislated away Maori claims to all New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed.

What can we make of all this unproductive waste and directionless wheel-spinning? It seems to me that, as a collective, New Zealanders are living in an illusion of phantom prosperity. We generally believe we’re driving an affordable Ferrari, when we’re actually driving a barely serviceable Dunger. I’m reminded of the following, from the great English comedian Peter Cook.

Click to view

Rent seeking corporates (Gentailer power companies, the supermarket duopoly, Air New Zealand, banks, carbon credit corporate pine foresters), together with the central and local Government Blob and hordes of race hustlers and grifters, are sucking the life out New Zealand. Our once plucky and productive nation’s resources continue to be squandered on myriad aimless sideshows of the sort that I’ve highlighted in this Substack.

The cold, hard reality is that New Zealand is in severe danger of squandering its legacy through gross misallocation of its severely limited resources.

The coronial inquiry into Brenton Tarrant’s massacre, which began in 2021 (more than two years after the massacre) grinds on, with absolutely no end in sight. The State-funded lawyers’ fee clocks just keep ticking away.

Mindless, unaffordable waste is the Albatross around New Zealand’s neck.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced