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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The immediate cause of the failure appears to have been a blocked pipe. The inside of the facility was flooded, badly damaging the plant. Longer term, underinvestment made an incident like this almost inevitable. It was a question of ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ But so far, most commentary has focussed more on blame than understanding why this is so. Former city councillor Simon Woolf blamed the disaster on a 2021 Council vote on Wellington’s long-term plan. He framed it as a choice between spending on critical infrastructure and spending on cycleways. At the meeting, Woolf argued that sewerage and water infrastructure should be prioritised. He and a handful of other councillors voted against increasing cycleway funding from $120 million to $226 million over ten years. They lost that vote. The same meeting rejected an option to allocate $391 million to a wastewater renewal project. Wellington Central Green MP Tamatha Paul was also a councillor at the time. She moved the proposal to increase spending on cycleways. New Zealand Herald reporter Ryan Bridge put Woolf’s argument to Paul. Paul pushed back. She claimed that Wellington Water lacked the capacity to deliver the $391 million project. Another former Councillor, Sean Rush, thinks Paul has a point. He noted that the decisions on wastewater and cycleways were “financially and procedurally separate,” and that the proposed wastewater project didn’t even focus on the Moa Point facility. So technically, Paul is right. The 2021 Council meeting on the long-term plan did not make a simple choice between spending on cycleways and spending on wastewater. But while Woolf’s analysis may be wrong technically, it is not wrong in essence. Cycleways are a ‘nice-to-have’ in a city struggling to manage the basics. And as Bryce Edwards of The Democracy Project has pointed out, cycleways are not the only vanity project to be championed by Wellington’s local politicians. The convention centre, Tākina, cost a cool $180 million. The Town Hall restoration project is budgeted at $330 million and climbing. The Moa Point disaster cannot be attributed to one Council meeting in 2021. It is much worse than that. For years, councils have prioritised glamour projects over maintenance of essential infrastructure. |
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| Dr Eric Crampton | Chief Economist | eric.crampton@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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In engineering, a fail-safe is a design feature that, when something goes wrong, forces the system toward a safer state. Getting everything right in a new resource management system, and all the national direction that follows from it, seems impossible. The job is too big. Why not consider some fail-safes in the legislation? Resource management reform deliberately took a thin-framework approach leaving a lot of detail to later in the process. There are principled reasons for it. But it increases risk. Change the Minister or government and national direction can shift sharply. Even without politics, councils can get zoning maps wrong at the outset. And conditions can change more quickly than zoning plans. Under the old resource management system, Section 32 at least gestured toward cost-benefit assessment. The new one does not even do that. It risks imposing restrictions whose private costs exceed any public benefits. Although the legislation provides some “regulatory relief”, it is far from comprehensive. Two fail-safes, set in primary legislation, could limit the harm. If too little land is zoned for a particular use, that artificial scarcity shows up in inflated prices where zoning is too tight. A persistent price difference between otherwise-similar properties on either side of a zoning boundary would provide that signal. Primary legislation could require councils to approve private plan changes extending the boundary when that price signal is strong, after factoring in infrastructure costs. Ideally, ample zoning would make this provision redundant. But if zoning created too much scarcity, there would be a fail-safe. A second fail-safe could ensure cost-benefit thinking. Under the legislation, some kinds of costly restrictions imposed by the new planning system trigger “regulatory relief” for owners. But many such restrictions are not covered, and the relief provided could be inadequate. British planning rules allow property owners to serve purchase notices on the council: If restrictions make it too hard to use the land, the owner can require council to purchase it. A stronger version of that provision could be an excellent fail-safe. It is impossible to get zoning “right”. Fail-safes do not eliminate mistakes. But they do make those mistakes less costly. Good ones can even discourage mistakes from happening in the first place. The Select Committee should consider these kinds of fail-safes. |
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| Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The day exists to promote social justice at national, regional and international levels. It sounds splendid – until you try to work out what it actually means. The UN’s websites are not much help. This year’s theme is “Renewed Commitment to Social Development and Social Justice.” Renewed from what? Did an old commitment lapse? We are not told. UN Habitat, the UN’s agency for urban development, explains that the day “requires a holistic approach that weaves environmental sustainability with social justice.” If you can picture what that means in practice, you are doing better than we are. Elsewhere, you may find references to “multi-stakeholder collaboration” and “leveraging the Global Coalition for Social Justice.” There may be meaning in there, but, if so, seventeen years of searching have not revealed it. But it doesn’t matter. After all, who could possibly be against social justice? Nobody! (Except Friedrich Hayek, who devoted an entire book to calling it a ‘mirage.’ But economists have never been popular at parties.) The phrase has been stretched so wide that it covers everything from climate policy to labour rights to indigenous land disputes. When a term means everything, it means nothing. None of this has dampened the UN’s enthusiasm. Every year since 2009 has brought a new theme and fresh jargon, though nobody can point to a single practical outcome the day has achieved. Maybe results were never really their aim. The UN now maintains 218 international days spread across the year. The calendar is so crowded that 21 March alone hosts five separate observances. Last year, the General Assembly voted unanimously to create the International Day of the Markhor, a Central Asian mountain goat. The goat itself was apparently not consulted. The World Day of Social Justice fits right in. It is another occasion for panels, concept notes and communiques that nobody outside the UN will ever read. The world does get fairer, sometimes. But that tends to happen when specific people make specific decisions in specific places, not through holistic weaving. But give the UN its due. It has spent nearly two decades celebrating something nobody can define, in language nobody can decipher, for an audience that never really existed. And, next year, they will cheerfully do it all again. |
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