Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Did Andrew Little save Wellington Council?

Tell me something: does what’s just happened with the Golden Mile upgrade in Wellington restore your faith in the possibility that councils can actually be run properly?

Because that thing - I don’t know if you’ve been following it over the years - but the Golden Mile upgrade has been an albatross around the necks of Wellington business owners and ratepayers since probably about 2016.

Bob Edlin: Bishop aims to trim outdated laws from the statute books....

Bishop aims to trim outdated laws from the statute books – but won’t this permit sales of watery stuff as “milk”?

This rates among the more bemusing headlines to attract the attention of the PoO team this week:

Bob Edlin: Yes, CAB will have to cut its services.....

Yes, CAB will have to cut its services, but does it begrudge the capital the benefits that flow from blessing ceremonies?

A picture of Wellington Mayor Andrew Little, splendidly decked out with his chain of office and brandishing his trusty rate-trimming scissors, features today on The Post’s page of letters to the editor.

The picture illustrates a grouch from a reader about the extravagance – extravagances, if you care to include all library costs and the functions to open the city’s new library – about a blessing ceremony.

Bob Edlin: Big bucks are paid for council’s Chief Maori Officer (and his staff).....

Big bucks are paid for council’s Chief Maori Officer (and his staff) – and more are paid for advice on library blessings

The Wellington City Council’s veneration of the Treaty of Waitangi comes at a cost for ratepayers.

It has resulted in the council:

Ryan Bridge: Wellington's endless spending on pen-pushers and reviews

You can't escape bureaucrats in Wellington; it's an occupational hazard.

Despite the bad press they get, they're not all useless.

But it depends on how you use them, and how often.

Take the Golden Mile disaster in Wellington, as just one example.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Wellington Council's been caught keeping secrets from ratepayers again

Now, you would have thought that after all the publicity Wellington City Council has been getting - and the paid staff have been getting - for being caught doing things behind the backs of elected councillors, they probably wouldn’t do it again.

And yet, here we are. They’ve been caught doing it again.

Dr Michael Johnston: A question of priorities

It is more than two weeks since the catastrophic failure of Wellington’s sewage treatment plant at Moa Point. Massive quantities of raw sewage continue to flow into Cook Strait. Many of Wellington’s beaches will likely be closed for months.

The immediate cause of the failure appears to have been a blocked pipe. The inside of the facility was flooded, badly damaging the plant.

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”.

Bob Edlin: Public bodies in NZ embrace karakia.....

Paganism has been enshrined in Latvian law – but public bodies in NZ embrace karakia without being mandated by Parliament

Our Cambridge Dictionary defines the word “pagan” as


… a person who belongs to a religion that worships many gods, especially one that existed before the main world religions:

We checked the meaning of “pagan” after reading an article in The Critic headed

The return of the strong gods?

Mike's Minute: Get some expertise around the council tables

Lindsay McKenzie is still busy at work.

You will have forgotten the name because like so much news these days, it's hot stuff until it isn't.

Lindsay is the bloke that was appointed to watch over Wellington Council because of their dysfunction.

Barry Soper: How did Tory Whanau get the Wellington mayoralty?

If you have wondered how someone like Tory Whanau could win the mayoralty of our country's capital city, then wonder no more.

It's the same reason why one of the country's most revered mayors in recent years, Dame Kerry Prendergast, lost her nine-year grip on the city's mayoralty to another unfathomable choice, Celia Wade-Brown.

It's not because both Whanau and Wade-Brown are Greens and it's not because both of them love cycleways, despite vocal ratepayer opposition to the amount of money being spent on Wellington cycleways.

Glenn Inwood: Democracy crashes into Wellington City Councillor

The following opinion article was offered first to The Post. They declined to publish, for reasons not given. It’s their call on what they put in their newspaper. We consider the points we raise in relation to Councillor Nikau Wi Neera’s stance on the Airport share sale requires discussion and is something that all Wellingtonians need to understand.

Party Ideology has no part in Local Government

It is any surprise that public confidence in the Wellington City Council is at an all-time low when considering the debacle around the sale of the ratepayer-owned shares in Wellington airport? The flip-flopping of councillors illustrates the point.

Barrie Davis: Wellington City Council Flying High

There have been various reports of problems with Councils and we have had our fair share in Wellington. A recent issue has been whether to sell our remaining one third share of the Wellington airport and the way things are going it seems that we will by one vote. Here, I will just summarize the reported facts for you; it doesn’t need embellishment from me. I am, however, astonished – gobsmacked at the humbug and machinations.

On 30 May this year a Wellington City Council committee voted by 10 votes to 8 to sell 34% of our shares worth about $278 million in the Wellington Airport to set up, they said, an insurance fund to help the city after a natural disaster (The Post, 31 May 2024, here).

The council has 16 voting members including the Mayor and 15 Councilors, plus two appointed Maori representatives (mana whenua) who can only vote on committees.

David Farrar: WCC gets more divided

The Post reports:

Green councillor Nīkau Wi Neera and Labour councillors Nureddin Abdurahman and Ben McNulty will no longer commit to voting with the mayor’s policies.

The vote to sell the airport shares, spearheaded by Whanau in the Wellington City Council’s long-term plan meeting two weeks ago, was the final straw.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Some rare good news for Wellingtonians

A bit of rare good news for Wellingtonians, they've escaped having the water restrictions ratcheted up on them this week.

That decision was taken today, it’s taken every week at the moment, and at the moment they’re staying in level 2- for now.

But the case against Wellington City Council as the bad guys is building fast. I would argue it’s becoming more and more obvious that they have neglected to fix the pipes when they knew they should've.

Michael Johnston: Heritage pipes

The Wellington City Council is juggling a few financial priorities at the moment.

The top priority is to clear as many curb-side parking places as possible, to make way for bike lanes. This is a pressing issue. Some of the new lanes accommodate as many as four cyclists per day.

Then there’s the project to strengthen the old Town Hall. Initially estimated at a paltry $40 million back in 2013, the projected cost has increased slightly to somewhere between $250 and $329 million.

Alistair Boyce: After the Goldrush - “A Dying City”

The demise of Wellington as a modern vibrant growing city has fast come to an end. A perfect storm involving central and local government actions and inactions have culminated in myopic, self-serving bureaucracy, economic stagnancy and contraction spreading from the CBD heart arterially out to the immediate suburbs, and it is about to get worse.

Over the last decade the Wellington City Council (WCC) has been captured by a ‘Greens’ led socialist left-wing rump that has dominated the decision-making with an ‘alarmist’ climate change agenda, seeking to turn Wellington into the ‘greenest’ capital city in the world. Unfortunately, this is it at any expense with little fiscal restraint and is actively aided and abetted by the ‘goldrush’ from the 6^th Labour government. The city’s infrastructure is subjugated as the all-consuming priority is the ‘rapid rollout’ of carbon reducing strategies spearheaded by the cycleways projects of ‘Let’s Get Wellington Moving’(LGWM).

Point of Order: Enhancing numeracy skills will enable students to work out taxpayers’ share of compensation offer

Taxpayers and Wellington ratepayers will be picking up the tab for yet another political decision that has resulted from the breakdown of law and order and the surrendering of the grounds around Parliament to protesters for three weeks.

Wellington City Council and the Government have agreed to support inner-city Wellington businesses which lost significant revenue during what they described as “the illegal occupation at Parliament grounds” with a $1.2 million business relief fund.