Peter Bassett: From Sewage to Sovereignty: How a Tidy Idea Picks Up Extra Luggage

When Wellington’s pipes start bursting in public and sewage plants break down big-time, it’s only a matter of time before someone reaches for a constitutional solution.

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.

Peter Bassett: Where Water Has a Life Force, Whales Are People — and the Sewage Escapes

In New Zealand, an unelected list MP from the Green Party is drafting legislation — a Member’s Bill — to make whales legal persons.

Not protected species.

Not culturally significant symbols.

People — in law — with rights, standing, and representation.

Peter Bassett: Wellington’s Sewage Crisis Wasn’t an Accident. It Was a Vote — and Everyone’s Pretending Not to Remember

When Wellington Mayor Andrew Little announced he would raise the city’s “catastrophic” sewage failure with the Prime Minister and senior ministers, he struck the solemn tone of a man confronting an unforeseeable calamity.

That tone would be more convincing if the cause of the calamity were not already sitting, neatly itemised, in Wellington City Council’s own records.

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”.

Peter Bassett: When the world is declared ‘water bankrupt’, reach for your wallet — and your scepticism

The phrase lands with a thud. Water bankruptcy. Not scarcity. Not stress. Bankruptcy — a word borrowed from finance, freighted with guilt, failure and finality. It suggests recklessness, mismanagement, and the need for an external administrator to step in and take control.

That is the language used in a new United Nations–backed report warning that parts of the world are approaching irreversible water collapse.

Peter Bassett: Knocking on Doors, Pretending Not to Notice the Stairwell Is on Fire

Chlöe Swarbrick wants the Greens out knocking on doors.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Imagine her pounding the streets of Auckland Central, her home electorate — clipboard in hand, optimism applied like a hi-vis vest.

Peter Bassett: Effecting Treaty principles into immigration: When Footnotes Decide the Verdict

Modern activist legal writing has a sound of its own: the rustle of footnotes doing work they were never meant to do. Elizabeth Rabiyan’s essay claiming that New Zealand immigration law has “failed to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi” is a near-perfect specimen.

Peter Bassett: Understanding Te Tiriti — Or Just Selling an Anointed Version?

If the Treaty of Waitangi now governs schools, hospitals, councils and community life, there is one small problem: it doesn’t say so.

That gap — between what the Treaty actually says and what is now claimed in its name — is where Roimata Smail’s Understanding Te Tiriti operates, quietly turning modern policy choices into historical inevitabilities.

Peter Bassett: MPs’ Travel Bills - what The Post reported and what it didn’t

The Post’s report on MPs’ travel costs looks, at first glance, like accountability journalism. It is full of numbers, tables, quarterly breakdowns and party responses. What it lacks is judgement — and more importantly, curiosity.

The headline figure is that MPs spent $3.4 million on domestic travel in the nine months to September 2025, with ministers adding another $1.86 million.

Readers are told this works out at “more than $1 million every three months”, but the figures are scattered across so many paragraphs that no one ever sees the full cost in one place.

Peter Bassett: Headline promises a lot but delivers little.

If you survey people who are still standing, don’t be surprised when most say they haven’t fallen.

That’s the problem with the New Zealand Herald’s headline this week that a “Majority of NZ drug and alcohol users experience no negative effects, survey shows”. 

That’s a headline that is technically defensible, politically useful — and profoundly overreaching.

Peter Bassett: The Greens Discover the Internet Is Mean

The Green Party has made a troubling discovery.

The internet, once a kindly meadow where progressive ideas fluttered freely from phone to phone, has become — according to its co-leaders — an outrage-generating machine.

This revelation comes via an end-of-year Newsroom chat in which Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson explain that their biggest fears are now found online. Not climate change. Not emissions. Not biodiversity loss. But nasty algorithms.

Peter Bassett: From Impartiality to Instruction - How Journalism Rewrote Its Own Rules

For most of the 20th century, journalism operated on a simple but demanding premise: tell the public what is known, what is disputed, and who is arguing what — then step back. Readers were treated as adults, capable of weighing evidence and reaching their own conclusions.

That settlement has quietly collapsed.