Bob Edlin: After 12 years in Parliament, Mayor Little may have been conditioned to taking a dip in unsavoury waters

Wellington mayor Andrew Little made headlines around the world after he took an afternoon dip last week, hoping to assuage public fears after a breakdown at a local waste water treatment plant pumped raw sewage into the ocean and faecal matter was sprayed on coastal homes.

Millions of litres of raw sewage have flowed into the waters off Wellington’s picturesque south coast beaches since the breakdown of the Moa Point facility on February 4.

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.