Source: Radio New Zealand
“With the wastewater catastrophe ongoing, the Moa Point treatment plant continues to be cleaned. But what was raw sewage pouring into the water is now screened wastewater,” Newstalk ZB’s Wellington newsreader Max Towle told listeners last Monday.
Better news? Only a little.
“Mayor Andrew Little said there’ll be a terrible stench in areas as crews try to rectify the situation,” said Towle.
“That solid waste has been lying around for a couple of three days, so the odour will be apparent,” Little warned.
And 30 minutes later, ZB News was back with news of a fresh sewage leak.
“Crews over the weekend had to respond to overflow from a manhole near Mana Esplanade after pumps backed off and went off-sequence,” Towle told weary Wellington listeners.
It never rains, but it pours… out into the sea and even out of manholes in Mana, further denting the mana of greater Wellington.
“We’ll see more of these sorts of things happening. All our pumps and our pipes need replacing – and it’s just more infrastructure spending,” Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told Newstalk ZB.
And she wasn’t the only one saying that lately.
Nationwide pipe problem
“These are long-run assets that last 50, 70 years,” Prime Minister Christopher said on RNZ’s Morning Report soon after, making the point that the soiled state of the nation’s capital is part of a national problem.
“Wellington Water in particular had a hybrid model that really hasn’t worked, where each council had to chip in cash to band-aid over solutions and problems as they’ve emerged rather than [have] a consistent long-term, strategic plan for managing what are strategic assets,” he said.
Noting that Canterbury swimming spots were also closed after wastewater was discharged into Canterbury Harbour, the Herald‘s editorial on Monday called it “a rude reminder.”
“It might be another town next month, but we will all need to cut the crap and invest in the future of this country.”
Cutting the crap out of the south coast outfall ASAP is the priority in the capital, but it also echoed what Sunday Star-Times editor Tracy Watkins had said in her paper last weekend. Under the headline Should we wait till we are down to our last pipe? she also pointed the finger at all of us on the electoral roll.
“We – the voters – are the real culprits. We are repeat hip-pocket offenders who keep getting sucked in by politicians who milk our prejudices while avoiding the hard choices,” Watkins said.
But another of her colleagues with a weekly column in the paper, Luke Malpass, pointed the finger at politicians.
He reckoned Labour squandered a chance to sort it out with Three Waters, and now rate-capping under National will lock in underinvestment.
“This is about political choices. Leadership matters. So does making the case and accepting that projects are expensive, unpopular during construction and guaranteed to attract critics – at least until they’re finished.”
But once they’re finished, they also need to keep working – unlike Moa Point right now.
Blame game
The focus of blame also narrowed to Wellington’s local politicians.
On the Breaking Views blog of the right-leaning think tank NZCPR, Peter Bassett – described as an “observer… writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny” claimed “the WCC voted for cycleways but not for sewage protection”.
He cited a single Long-Term Plan Committee meeting five years ago at which a $400m wastewater renewals proposal was not adopted, but a cycleways option was.
He described Green councillors as “zealous apostles for cycling” driven by “climate justice philosophy”, and said the media failed to question former Greens councillor and current Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul.
His article was widely shared online this week and aired on Newstalk ZB by Kerre Woodham.
It also prompted Ryan Bridge on his Herald Now show to ask her: “What’s more important – flushing the toilet or riding a bike?”
Paul pointed out that no amendment was proposed at the time that would have boosted Moa Point, and that spending on water infrastructure during the two council terms from 2017 was substantially higher than in previous ones. That was true.
But is it also true that councillors with skewed priorities made a fateful choice in 2021 that exacerbated the current disaster?
In the Weekend Post on Saturday, Sean Rush – an energy and infrastructure lawyer – said funding was “not diverted from wastewater to cycleways” and was not the reason for the failure at Moa Point.
The proposed plan for wastewater in 2021 would have bumped rates up by almost 6 percent on its own – and Moa Point wasn’t the focus of it.
Accelerating the cycleways would only boost rates by just over half a percent more than the existing plan, he claimed.
On the front page of The Post this weekend, national affairs editor Andrea Vance detailed a startling series of faults and financial blowouts that really did contribute to the failure at Moa Point.
She and her Post colleagues – include long-serving Wellington reporter Tom Hunt – have reported daily since the disaster, as well as documenting wastewater problems before it.
Post readers have learned a lot more from their paper than from media recycling retrospective opinion pieces that seem to have an axe to grind about the Greens and narratives in the media.
Bring on the gas
While Wellington struggled with its sewage solids and liquids, the government made a bold move on gas this week – a terminal for LNG to take the edge off future power shortages.
Vital or bonkers? asked an RNZ headline, reflecting the views of supporters and opponents.
Bridge offered the not-so-helpful opinion that “depending on who you ask, this is either brilliant or batshit.” (Partial success or failure was apparently not an option.)
Other hosts on the opinion-heavy radio network – including Woodham, Mike Hosking and John McDonald – all fell in behind the idea, insisting that sustainable sources of energy were too unreliable. But the estimated billion-dollar-plus bill for it quickly became the focus too, and whether it was a “tax”, a “levy” or a “charge”.
“By the end of the day, the only sort of clarity that we have is it’s very, very clear the government totally botched the comms on this big time,” Stuff’s Jenna Lynch told ThreeNews viewers, after reporting on the political semantics.
Other reporters focused on whether it would be popular with the public.
“Auckland Central has more than 55,000 votes for grabs – and voters we spoke to today shared a common concern – the rising cost of living,” said ThreeNews reporter Zane Small, opening his report on Tuesday.
“Campaigning on energy security for tomorrow may be a tough sell to voters today,” he concluded.
But whether the plan can deliver more and cheaper power in future was the key point.
The Herald‘s veteran correspondent Audrey Young said the promise that power bills will be lower was “wild” – and fine print in the Cabinet paper had warnings.
“The costings provided by respondents through the procurement process all include significant caveats, so should be considered indicative only,” the paper said.
Several pundits noted that when the previous government called things a “levy”. National in Opposition had condemned them as “taxes”, and now the boot’s on the other foot.
“Time will tell if it’s just a divisionary tactic to keep the government on its toes or a sign that Labour has a properly different energy policy to bring to the table. Until then, I guess we’ll just argue about whether it’s a tax or not,” Henry Cooke concluded in The Post.
Been here before
Three years ago, Chris Hipkins was the prime minister when Cyclone Gabrielle showed that our transport, telecoms and emergency systems were not resilient enough.
“We can’t continue the way that we have been going. We’re going to have to look very closely at how we make sure we’ve got as resilient an infrastructure as possible,” he said in 2023.
“These storms are reminding everybody that governments actually have big problems to deal with. And we are back talking about infrastructure, for god’s sake,” an exasperated Kathryn Ryan told Nine to Noon listeners in February 2023.
The Cook Strait ferries had been conking out over that summer, too, and the government was backing away from Three Waters, and the Infrastructure Commission claimed $78b had been committed to infrastructure projects already underway.
Three years on, infrastructure anxiety is back in the headlines – in the year of an election to be fought by the same political leaders.
Are media focusing too heavily on the political debates again, rather than the big picture of infrastructure deficit?
“Yes, but this is an old chestnut which has come up every election for decades. We now have a positive chance of success through the National Infrastructure Commission,” Mike Bishara – publisher of the magazine, Infrastructure Asia Pacific, and the website InfrastructureNews.co.nz – told Mediawatch.
“It’s almost as if a mandated infrastructure pipeline for the next 30 years is too important to leave in the hands of partisan politicians. In fairness, our ridiculous three-year election cycle gives them little chance of being anything else,” said Bishara, whose article in the recently published 2026 Infrastructure Yearbook asks: ‘Can the infrastructure pipeline survive politics?’
“Daily news reporters are doing their job pretty well. They don’t have a lot of time for questions to evasive ministers when they’ve got a deadline looming in an hour or so. As long as the issue is clearly out there in the public domain, we can feel that we’ve done our job.”
Bishara is frustrated by some media reporting that is preoccupied with the total cost of projects and who might bear the cost.
His 2026 yearbook points to the Draft National Infrastructure Plan, finding that our infrastructure spending per capita is high by world standards, but the returns are among the lowest in the OECD.
“Productivity is the key. That’s the root cause of all our problems. There’s not a great deal of urgency put on that. [Politicians] are far more comfortable dealing with sound bites about problems and hoping that the media just concentrate on that.”
When the election rolls around, will these issues be put forward in the media? Or drowned out by the general cost-of-living issues the media focus on a lot?
“I think the issues will be well aired. The daily reporting that we see on TV is well-balanced and researched. We have excellent publications around, like NBR. We’ve got commentators who do address these issues directly.”
“What we have to have is… a commitment across all political parties to hold sacrosanct mandated infrastructure necessities.”
“Media can help with that, but it requires cooperation from politicians themselves. No matter how good a journalist is, if you keep asking the same question and getting the same answer, it’s very hard. That leaves people who have the time and capacity to investigate the statements.”
“The media remain pivotal in its reportage of the election.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand