Ailing Wellington Needs More Than Frothy Talk

DUNNE’S WEEKLY

Back in 2013 then Prime Minister Sir John Key raised the ire of Wellingtonians when he told a Takapuna business audience that “Wellington is dying, and we don't know how to turn it around. All you have there is government, Victoria University and Weta Workshop.” His comments provoked such outrage in the capital that he was quickly forced to “unreservedly apologise” for any offence he had caused, adding “Wellington's an extremely vibrant place; there's lots of things happening here, lots of activity “and “I should have chosen my words better.”

This week, as more and more hospitality and downtown Wellington businesses close their doors, blaming public sector job cuts, the cost-of-living and more people working from home, the current National-led government has been adamant the city is not dying. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has insisted that “there is so much entrepreneurship and excitement still in Wellington … we have vibrant exciting businesses; they are Wellington's future.”

A similar tone is being reflected by Wellington’s newspaper, The Post. It has been running a series of comments from local people in recent issues extolling the advantages of living in Wellington and why they live there, even including the weird comment from a local MP that he regularly swims in the harbour, unbothered by pollution or sewage discharge warnings.

These upbeat comments are all very well – no doubt the besieged people of Kiev will be doing likewise at present – but they do nothing to overcome the basic problem Wellington is facing. According to Kiwibank’s Regional Insights 2024, most New Zealand regional economies are performing better than last year and are projected to improve again next year. Wellington, however, is the exception – it has been the worst performing region since 2022 and that is not expected to change any time soon.

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The easy answer is to blame Wellington’s recession on the current government’s public sector funding and redundancies, but that overlooks the long-term nature of the city’s decline. After its halcyon days from the 1980s through to the late 1990s (remember Absolutely Positively Wellington?), Wellington has been in steady economic decline since the early 2000s. Attempts by successive city councils to revitalise the city have been unsuccessful, with the current dysfunctional council’s disastrous Reading Centre redevelopment plan and inner-city transport proposals reeking of incompetence and making Wellington a national laughing stock.

The one potential bright light on the horizon is the current government’s still developing plans for region and city specific development deals. However, the dismissive attitude of the Minister of Local Government to anything emanating from the Wellington City Council and the Mayor’s seeming loathing of everything the Minister stands for are major stumbling blocks to local progress. Both are equally intransigent, ignoring what each has to say, as they continually talk past each other.

While that mutual antagonism continues, there will be little progress, and Wellington looks set to be well down the queue for negotiating a regional deal with the government. And, in the meantime, the city’s slow but steady economic and social decline will continue, no matter how many pro-Wellington articles The Post runs.

A circuit breaker is clearly needed. Wellington’s future is bigger than the egos of the Minister of Local Government and the Mayor. Unfortunately, Wellington lacks a champion at the national level – its three local MPs (two Greens, one Labour) are not part of the government and are therefore largely unheard and ineffectual. The Minister of Regional Development, who blusters about so many other parts of the country, does not appear to even know the city exists, and the two former Wellington Mayors who are now regional list MPs (one Green, one New Zealand First) have disappeared from public view altogether.

Given her earlier comments, Wellington’s best hope at the national level might now be Nicola Willis. As a regional list MP, she certainly fully understands Wellington’s problems, and as Minister of Finance is well-placed to do something about them. While her Ministerial workload will almost certainly preclude her from taking on singlehandedly the herculean task of sorting out Wellington and restoring some sanity into its management, she might be just the person to bring her colleague the Minister of Local Government and the Mayor together and knock some sense into their working relationship.

When I first went into Parliament in the early 1980s, there was in place something called the capital city planning committee, which comprised the local MPs, the Mayor and senior councillors, and relevant government and council officials to work together on issues affecting the city and its development. Major projects like the development of Te Papa, the centralisation of the Courts near to Parliament and the redevelopment of the Wellington waterfront, which contributed so much to Wellington’s growth in the late 1980s and 1990s, all had their genesis in discussions in this committee. Unfortunately, it fell into disuse in the 1990s, after the Ministry of Works and Development, which serviced it, was abolished.

But perhaps now is the time to re-establish a similar body and for Nicola Willis to play the broker’s role in bringing it together. Without a move in this direction, current circumstances mean there is little prospect of effective collaboration between the government and Wellington on important issues of common interest.

Something clearly must give. Carrying on the same way as the last few years will do nothing to arrest Wellington’s decline. Rather than throwing rocks at each other – the way the Prime Minister when he spoke at the recent Local Government conference and criticised the venue, Wellington’s new convention centre, Takina, as “lavish” – the government and the city’s civic leaders must start working together, if the ailing capital is to be revived.

Unfortunately, “mood-lifting” frothy newspaper articles will not do it.

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