Wellington rages as litres of raw sewage pour into ocean
theguardian.comDC had a major wastewater pipe collapse recently too. Quarter billion gallons dumped into the Potomac river. Seems somehow not as bad as this; the river carries it out some? Bad shit. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/18/dc-sew...
Any New Zealanders here, to comment on the root causes of this mess?
My impression (mostly from British news sites) is that self-serving failure has long been the norm for Kiwi political leaders.
Yes. Local government has long failed to focus on its core mandate of base infrastructure, instead opting for vanity and ego projects like stadiums and convention centers.
Wellington in particular has had a string of divisive mayors. Simply google the previous Mayor "Tory Whanau" for a never-ending list of controversy, incompetence and failure.
Previous socialist central government attempted to strip assets off the regional bodies and centralize them under a common scheme. Would have been successful, however a lot of race-based ideology was peripherally injected into the process which gave asset management an unaccountable and ultimately undemocratic race-based overlay which basically killed the idea (central govt were voted out).
Central Government also has a fairly miserable history of asset management before privatisation. It's a multi-decade process of slow erosion and precendent.
The intrusion of government and intrusion of identity politics seems to be the core issue. Failure to provide core services, failure to be competent but the conversation is almost always re-directed towards "racism" and identity as the root attributes. We had no trouble producing high quality functional and well managed assets before the arrival of modern identity politics. Bait and switch IMO.
Background: for decades the water management was handled by local govt, disastrously. Previous govt. (Ardern) fought like hell to wrestle this back to national govt, pushed it through as more systems were found to be on the verge of collapse. The trumpkins that got elected next rolled this back immediately (“big bad central govt!”) and so now these water systems are collapsing, and the right wing is doing the GOP-style “oh yeah WE are FINALLY going to fix this”. Thanks Luxon you f’ing idiot.