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.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Wellingtonians should be angry about this

Here’s a question for you: Was your first reaction to the news of sewage pumping into Wellington’s water something along the lines of, “Oh well, these things happen”?

I ask because I’ve spent the past 24 hours fighting the urge to wave this away as one of those unfortunate, unforeseen things that just happen from time to time. You know — mistakes happen.

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”.