Peter Bassett: When cycleways and rainbow toilets take over, the pipes rot

There are moments in public life when irony does not merely tap you on the shoulder but smacks you in the face with a dripping length of sewer pipe. One such moment arrived this week when Julie Anne Genter, Wellington’s most indefatigable apostle of cycleways, emerged solemnly to inform us that the Moa Point sewage disaster was “a terrible reminder of the importance of investing in our infrastructure”.

You could almost hear the violins tuning up.

This, remember, is the same Julie Anne Genter who has spent the better part of a decade arguing — loudly, piously, and with missionary zeal — that Wellington’s overriding problem is not pipes, pumps, or power, but the insufficiently enthusiastic application of green paint to roads. Now, standing amid the rhetorical effluent, she promises to “ask hard questions” once the immediate problem is fixed.

Genter’s promise to “ask hard questions” about Wellington’s sewage disaster carries a faintly comic edge — it is a rare conversion that arrives only after the pipes have failed and the articles of faith have begun to smell.

One is tempted to ask whether those hard questions might include: which infrastructure, exactly — and at whose expense?

But let us not be unfair. Irony, like sewage, has a way of spreading everywhere regardless of intent.

Shock. Horror. Raw sewage.

If you have read The Post, RNZ, or the Herald this week, you will know that Wellington is apparently experiencing an ecological catastrophe of near-biblical proportions. Seventy million litres of untreated sewage a day, beaches closed, surfers bereft, marine biologists “very concerned”, kelp forests trembling, and the city collectively rediscovering that wastewater does not, in fact, magically spirit itself away.

The tone is familiar: catastrophic, devastating, shocking, unprecedented. The adjectives pile up like sandbags against a rising tide of effluent. And yet, amid all the alarm, something crucial is missing.

Not once — not once — do any of these stories seriously interrogate the most basic question of all: How did we get here, financially?

A failure foretold (and filed away)

Buried deep in the coverage — usually after the third scroll — is the inconvenient truth that this failure was not sudden, freakish, or unforeseeable.

The Moa Point plant has been non-compliant month after month. Equipment has been described, in official reports, as obsolete, outdated, and prone to failure. Bypasses of partially treated wastewater were not rare emergencies but increasingly normalised events. Staff shortages, monitoring gaps, and asset-management failures were flagged years ago.

In other words, this was not a bolt from the blue. It was the slow, grinding consequence of deferred maintenance, ageing assets, and a political culture that treats water infrastructure as something to be worried about later.

Much later, as it turns out — ideally after the ribbon has been cut somewhere else.

Wellington’s real infrastructure hierarchy

To understand why Moa Point failed, you need to understand how Wellington has chosen to spend not just its money, but its attention.

Over roughly the past decade, Wellington City Council and its associated programmes have poured somewhere between $150 million and $250 million into cycle infrastructure. The precise figure depends on how one counts shared funding and regional programmes, but the order of magnitude is beyond dispute.

That money bought kilometres of separated cycle lanes, endless design consultations, traffic modelling, road reconfigurations, planters, bollards, and branded cones. It also bought political virtue. Every cycleway is visible, photographable, and morally freighted. Each one signals progress, climate seriousness, and the correct set of values.

By contrast, what does serious investment in wastewater infrastructure buy you?

Nothing you can Instagram.

Wellington has not been short of money. It has been short of interest in the dull, expensive, unlovely work of keeping essential systems functioning.

While pipes aged and pumps limped along, the council found the time and money for multi-million-dollar rainbow public toilets, boutique streetscape treatments, and urban design flourishes justified as placemaking. Individually, these projects can be defended. Collectively, they reveal a pattern.

You do not install designer fittings while the foundations are cracking.

Yet that is precisely what Wellington did.

Maintenance: the infrastructure nobody campaigns for

Maintenance does not fail spectacularly. It fails slowly. And because it fails slowly, it is easy to ignore.

Every Long-Term Plan contains a version of the same caveat: deferring renewals increases long-term cost and risk. That is not a secret. It is written down, repeatedly.

But deferral is politically convenient. It keeps rates lower today. It pushes consequences into the future. And it allows councillors to fund projects that voters can see, use, and argue about.

The pipes, meanwhile, wait.

Transport as moral crusade

This is where the contrast becomes impossible to ignore.

Transport investment in Wellington has not been framed as a technical necessity, but as a moral imperative. It is urgent. It is transformational. It is tied to climate commitments, equity narratives, and generational justice.

As then Wellington mayor Andy Foster put it in September 2021, when approving the bike network plan, rolling out a fully connected network of safer routes “will help set the city up for a more sustainable, lower-carbon future”.

That same moral framing was pushed even harder by councillors championing accelerated delivery. As once a councillor and now a greens list MP Tamatha Paul argued at the time, people needed to “get outraged about the irresponsible decision-making and the lack of urgency” around climate issues — language that elevated cycleway funding from traffic management to existential politics.

Once spending is framed that way, the rest follows naturally. Budgets are front-loaded. Projects are accelerated. Cost overruns are tolerated as the price of ambition.

Water infrastructure, by contrast, is described in the same documents not as transformational, but as a challenge.

Words matter.

The Bike Network as case study

The Bike Network Programme is the clearest example of this mindset made concrete.

By the early 2020s, the council had committed — on paper — to spending well over $200 million of its own money on cycle infrastructure over a ten-year horizon, with the full network costed far higher once co-funding and programme costs were included.

This was not renewal. This was entirely new infrastructure layered onto an already stressed city.

At the same time, water infrastructure renewals were being staged, delayed, or pushed into the out-years to manage affordability.

Wellington was willing to tolerate visible disruption to roads and neighbourhoods for cycleways, but not visible disruption to its balance sheet for pipes and pumps.

“Underinvestment” as euphemism

Listen carefully to how the current crisis is being described.

We are told this is the result of “decades of underinvestment”.

That phrase does a remarkable amount of work. It implies absence rather than choice. It suggests neglect rather than preference. It turns deliberate trade-offs into a vague historical failure for which no one in particular is responsible.

But Wellington did invest. Substantially. Just not where it mattered most.

The sewage in Cook Strait is not the product of ignorance. It is the product of priorities.

Wellington is not short of money. It is drowning in debt. The city is now carrying well over a billion dollars on its books, with net debt projected to climb toward $2 billion and beyond under successive Long-Term Plans. Measured properly, the position is stark: Wellington’s debt sits at around 298 percent of operating revenue — meaning the council owes nearly three dollars for every dollar it earns in ordinary income. This is not emergency borrowing to keep essential services running. It is structural borrowing to sustain an ambitious capital programme while keeping today’s rates increases just tolerable enough to pass.

Servicing that debt is no longer background noise. Interest and financing costs now absorb a large and growing share of rates revenue, locking in future rate rises before a single pipe is renewed or pump replaced. Debt hardens priorities. It narrows choices. And in Wellington’s case it has entrenched a model where visible, politically fashionable projects are financed on the never-never, while basic maintenance competes for what is left. By the time the pipes failed at Moa Point, the money had already been promised elsewhere.

The media’s missing ledger

What makes this episode especially revealing is not the failure itself but how it is being covered.

We have marine biologists speculating about kelp. Surfers recalling “turds in the waves”. Ministers promising inquiries. Councillors expressing disbelief.

What we do not have is a single reporter asking:

• what annual maintenance budget Moa Point should have had,

• how much renewal was deferred,

• what projects were funded instead,

• or whether those choices increased systemic risk.

This is not an oversight. It is a habit.

New Zealand journalism is increasingly comfortable with emotion and profoundly uncomfortable with arithmetic.

The Genter paradox

Which brings us back to Julie Anne Genter and her promise to “ask hard questions”.

The hardest question has already been answered — in the council’s own documents.

Wellington knew its water infrastructure was fragile.

Wellington knew maintenance was being deferred.

Wellington chose, repeatedly, to prioritise other things.

Genter’s statement is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.

Infrastructure is not a monolith. Every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar not spent on another. Prioritisation is the whole game.

For years, she and others argued that visible transport transformation deserved urgency and moral primacy. Critics were not merely mistaken but backward. Objections were framed as ideological resistance rather than legitimate fiscal concern.

Now, confronted with the consequences of long-term neglect elsewhere, she steps forward as if she were a detached observer rather than a participant in shaping the culture that produced this outcome.

This was not an accident

The sewage pouring into Cook Strait is not merely waste. It is a physical manifestation of political choice.

Wellington did not forget to maintain its wastewater system. It chose, repeatedly, to place other things ahead of it — things that were shinier, louder, and more electorally rewarding.

The pipes did not fail because nobody cared. They failed because caring about them brought no applause.

The question that matters

When the inquiry is held — and there will be one — the most important question will not be technical.

It will be this:

What did Wellington choose to fund, and what did it choose not to?

Until that question is asked honestly — with numbers, not adjectives — nothing will change. The city will fix Moa Point, issue solemn statements, and then return to business as usual.

And somewhere, quietly, another essential system will continue to age — waiting patiently for its turn to become “catastrophic”.

One must wonder when councils will ever realise that when vibes collide with facts, sewage tends to win.

Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.