Shamelessly stolen from our favourite wind bag column writer, Joel MacManus.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Te Upoko o te Ika a Māui / Wellington
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Was it a political push from Whanau (seems to have started with the previous mayor) or is this just the point where everything was collapsing so we had no choice?
It's been chronically underfunded. A few years ago, I read that the estimated cost to bring Wellington's sewage and water infrastructure up to snuff was around $12B. Wellington has recently had fountains of crap springing up around town.
I moved away and I'm not really in touch with local politics there anymore, but I would guess they are forced to spend on it. I heard that it's not politically popular to spend money on maintaining infrastructure. Short term limits mean it's always more convenient for local politicians to kick the can down the road.
I moved from Wellington to Hastings which was in the middle of a massive pipe fix due to the fallout from the issues that impacted Havelock North's water supply. I've heard rumours (not bothered to dig into it because not my council) that Napier City Council has held rate rises low for years on the back of not investing in their 3 waters infrastructure as well. So its not an individual council problem as much as a systemic issue for the whole of NZ. If only we had some kind of national plan to resolve it.
Yeah, we really need a long term strategy. When you want to get elected, you make promises. When you get elected, you need to fulfil (some of) those promises. When people promise new spending and keeping rates rises to a minimum, your only real option it to kick these cans down the road and cut funding for pre-emptive maintenance.
Despite all the controversy, something like Three Waters was really needed.
Three Waters would have easily passed without the co-governance aspect, it wasn't 3w itself that was the problem.
The co-governance aspect was clearly a huge sticking point, and I agree Three Waters would have passed under the previous government without it. But this government has been very vocal about staying out of local government (except when they don't like something a council did...) so a reformulated Three Waters seems very unlikely to pass in the current climate even without a co-governance aspect.
There were also councils quite against Three Waters in general, which as far as I saw were the ones doing a good job on their own. Kind of like how only people in flood zones want flood insurance, I guess.
Yeah, there was a somewhat justified feeling that areas that had kept on top of their infrastructure would end up subsidising the fuckups, it was a major sticking point in the super city proposal falling through as well.