Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Wellingtonians should be angry about this

Here’s a question for you: Was your first reaction to the news of sewage pumping into Wellington’s water something along the lines of, “Oh well, these things happen”?

I ask because I’ve spent the past 24 hours fighting the urge to wave this away as one of those unfortunate, unforeseen things that just happen from time to time. You know — mistakes happen.

I’m glad I resisted that urge, because the latest information actually makes the situation far more concerning.
The Moa Point facility is run by a private contractor, Veolia, and there have been years of warnings that it was non-compliant. Since January 2024 — two years ago — it has failed to meet compliance every single month except for two. That’s a pretty poor record. The issues have included inappropriate discharges, odour problems, and repeated problems involving faecal bacteria.

A review three years ago looked across all four water‑treatment plants Veolia runs in the Wellington region and found understaffing, inexperienced operators, and frontline teams being left to handle complex problems without executive support.

Now, we don’t yet know exactly what went wrong with the pipe yesterday. We don’t know whether the long-running warnings had anything to do with the incident — whether, had the warnings been acted on, this might not have happened. We simply don’t know.

But what we do know is that what was happening at that facility wasn’t good enough.

And that brings me to our default reaction — mine, yours, everyone’s — which seems to be giving councils a free pass. I don’t know why we do that. Maybe it’s because we’re fair-minded people and try to be accommodating of others’ mistakes. Maybe it’s because councils are monopolies; if we don’t like what they do, we have nowhere else to turn, so what’s the point getting upset?

So we end up lowering our standards to match the councils’ low standards.

But we shouldn’t.

Wellingtonians should be angry about this — just as Christchurch residents should be angry about the Bromley stench that has dragged on for years.

Voting for “more competent” people probably won’t fix it. It never does. What Wellingtonians, and everyone else, can do — and what the media can do — is get angry, get vocal, and shame the councils and their contractors into doing better.

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