One such suggestion, made recently by a former mayor turned regular commentator, is to take Wellington out of local government entirely and rehouse it as a national capital district — Canberra-style, Washington-style, with central government holding the reins.
It sounds bold. Even tidy.
But tidy ideas have a habit of hiding untidy details.
The missing arithmetic
Changing the governance badge on a city doesn’t make the costs disappear. Pipes still need replacing. Treatment plants still fail. Debt still has to be serviced.
Unless the proposal involves abolishing rates altogether — which it doesn’t — Wellington residents remain on the hook. A national capital district might change who manages infrastructure, but it doesn’t, by itself, loosen the chain around the ratepayer’s neck.
That missing step matters. Because if the point of the exercise is to relieve residents, the column never quite explains how.
And it’s right about here — where the sums should be shown — that the argument changes register.
From governance to legacy
Having settled on a federal-style destination, the column detours into sewerage history.
We’re told that: “Early urban development in the region happened without Māori partnership and in direct conflict with Māori environmental values.”
That sewage systems were shaped by “colonial capitalism-driven engineering logic, where waste was moved away from the city as cheaply as possible and discharged into the harbour and coastal waters.”
And that “From this perspective, Moa Point is not just a technical failure. It’s a legacy of decisions made in the absence of kaitiakitanga.”
That last sentence is the entirety of it.
Kaitiakitanga appears once in the column. It isn’t defined. It isn’t returned to. It isn’t translated into design choices, funding decisions, or governance mechanics.
For a concept doing that much moral work, it’s remarkably fleeting.
Why that detour is there
Read quickly, the sewerage section feels bolted on. Read more carefully, it makes sense.
The column begins by arguing for a national capital district. It then pauses to explain why the old system failed — not just administratively, but morally.
The implication sits there quietly: whatever replaces the current arrangements must not repeat that mistake.
In other words, national control is fine — provided it is culturally re-engineered.
The pipes are doing symbolic duty. They set the conditions under which a new governance model would be considered legitimate. By the time the argument returns to its destination, those terms have already been supplied.
Nothing needs to be said outright.
We’ve seen this move before
The same manoeuvre appeared in an earlier column on marae and storm response — a piece already carefully taken apart elsewhere.
There, emergency generosity became something more than generosity. Shelter and food slid into civilisational proof. Community action acquired ethno-political meaning. Praise shaded into prescription.
Different subject. Same technique.
The “hit-and-run”
This is the constantly-employed manoeuvre worth noticing.
A policy argument that could stand on its own is advanced.
A cultural explanation is dropped in — late, and with moral weight.
It isn’t unpacked.
It’s not tested.
And before anyone can ask what it’s doing there, the column moves on.
Infrastructure failure becomes cultural legacy.
Governance reform acquires a moral precondition.
The rates bill, meanwhile, is still sitting on the kitchen table.
Why it matters
None of this is about dismissing Maori values or denying generosity in a crisis.
It’s about honesty in argument.
If Maori values are being offered as the corrective to past failure, they deserve to be taken seriously — which means being explained, costed, and argued through. If a national capital district is the answer, its financial mechanics need to be faced, not floated past.
What doesn’t help is atmosphere standing in for arithmetic.
Mood music doesn’t repair pipes.
And governance models don’t become fairer or cheaper just because the cultural terms have been quietly rewritten along the way.
A final thought
The most telling thing is how unnecessary the move is.
The case for central government involvement could be made — and debated — on its own terms.
Which makes the cultural detour all the more noticeable.
A passenger boards the argument early on.
By the time the destination is reached, its presence feels inevitable.
And only afterwards do you wonder when it got there.
Funny, that.
Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.
3 comments:
We had a solution on the table and the public said no. They want sewage on the beaches. And they’re getting it. I think it’s a terrible failing, but hey, dEmOCrAcy is in tact even if the three waters are all blended into one and served on the island’s doorstep for our families’ enjoyment.
I see Anon @ 6.48am is at it again; trying to tell us that Moa Point wouldn't have shat itself had Nanaia's 3Waters reform been adopted. There's just no helping some people...
Anon at 6:48 — it appears you’re repeating a well-used trope: if people reject a particular reform package, they must therefore favour the worst possible outcome.
Rejecting your solution is not the same thing as endorsing failure. People are allowed to say no to a proposal without being blamed for gravity, weather, or broken pipes.
People didn’t reject nanaia mahuta’s Three Waters because they wanted sewage on beaches.
They rejected it for specific, documented reasons.
Polling and public submissions consistently showed three main objections.
First, loss of local control. Ratepayers were being asked to hand over assets they paid for — pipes, treatment plants, land — to large, distant bodies they couldn’t vote out.
Second, governance rules that treated voters differently. The model hard-wired Maori representation into decision-making in a way many people felt overrode the basic idea of one person, one vote. For a lot of voters, that wasn’t a plumbing issue. It was a question of who gets to decide.
Third, a lack of trust. Costs were uncertain, the transition was unclear, and long-term pricing relied heavily on “trust us” assurances. After years of mixed results from central government, that wasn’t enough.
You can argue those concerns were misplaced. You can still believe Three Waters was the best option on offer. But pretending the public rejected it because they enjoy pollution is just moral blackmail.
People said no to that model.
They didn’t vote for failure.
They voted against being told there was only one acceptable answer.
That’s not vandalism.
That’s democracy working exactly as it should.
—PB
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