 The Council's offices on The Terrace are bleak, but is what's going on inside them far bleaker? An audience of bored but pissed off trade unionists at a city council meeting is a tough crowd, but Tory Whanau really managed to bring the house down last month.
After an attempt to raise an amendment around council plans to privatise Wellington Airport was begrudgingly accepted by administrative staff as something that technically should be allowed to be put to a vote, darling of the progressive green left, Tory Whanau, personally intervened and ruled it out before a vote could be had. “THIS IS DEMOCRACY” she snapped, as left-wing councillors challenged her move to silence dissent. We’d been told both by council staff and Unions Wellington organisers to be quiet and respectful, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. The whole gallery burst out laughing. Having practically yelled across the table at Councillor Nīkau Wi Neera, Whanau now turned her attention to us. Then, after we—just like everyone else who’d dared to not align 100% with her agenda—had been well and truly told to shut up, came the icing on the cake: “We are to have respect in this room for everyone else in this room.” Comedy elevated to an art form. A razor-sharp ironic wit. Poetry. It’s fitting. The Airport Privatisation debacle has been a miserable joke every step of the way. That final, perfect, snarl dismissing an attempt not even to block the sale of one of our city’s very, very few remaining major public assets, but merely to request a proper conversation and consideration process ahead of it, summed up the theme of the ordeal completely. “This is democracy” indeed. To go over some old news for context, at time of writing, Wellington City Council has a 34% share in the Wellington Airport. What Wellington City Council doesn’t have is a good insurance plan in the event of a 1 in 1000 year natural disaster. With climate change on the rise–and in a place that’s meant to have been overdue for a city-levelling earthquake for quite some time now–a 1 in 1000 year event probably should be insured for to some degree. Sure. Where the fight’s started is that the proposed solution backed by the Mayor comes in the form of hilarious Neoliberal moon logic: “What if,” asks the dementia-addled, near brain-dead ghost of Ronald Reagan, “You sold the airport shares for a few hundred million…and put that money into a magical ‘✨Green Investment Fund✨’”. That this ‘✨Green Investment Fund✨’ would need to turn what the council’s documentation claims is around $500 million in shares, but even sources arguing for the sale admit is probably much closer to $321 million, into a jaw-dropping TWO POINT SIX BILLION DOLLARS to solve the insurance problem…isn’t really talked about. Besides the utter stupidity and failure-on-its-own-terms of the free market death cult thinking that’s got us here, there’s the obvious point that privatising the last public shares left in our airport is obviously a terrible idea to anyone to the left of Milton Friedman. A piece of major public infrastructure like the airport of a capital city really, really ought to remain in public hands. Even as an obnoxious far-left ideologue who’s very used to having to argue that one essential service or another shouldn’t be the purview of private capital, I’m pretty astonished that this is a conversation anybody needs to be having. From the huge number of people it employs, to climate issues that will never be addressed through the profit motive, to the simple fact that an enormous and inherently monopolistic piece of transport infrastructure shouldn’t be owned outright by Infratil, there is not a single point for which privatising Wellington’s share in the Airport makes any sense whatsoever. This is something that’s apparently very obvious to the average Wellingtonian. Per Unions Wellington’s polling, an astonishing 74% of people in our city want the shares to remain in public ownership. It’s obviously a good thing for the council to own. Which is why it seems a bit odd that, cheered on by the likes of the Act Party and following in the footsteps of arch-neoliberal Jenny Shipley (whose government sold it out of state hands in 1998), Tory Whanau has become the standard bearer in a campaign to sell it. It’s a campaign which has so far proved successful (albeit narrowly so) with a vote on the sale from the council passing by only a single vote from deputy mayor Laurie Foon (who walked back on her promises to Unions and her 84% anti-privatisation council ward that she would be voting “keep”). We wanted to get a better understanding of this whole mess, so Partisan sat down for a chat with the three dissident left-wing councillors who’ve dared to do the unthinkable: stand by their principles and election promises and refuse to privatise publicly-owned assets. We asked them what was going on, how we got here and what they thought it meant for the direction of the city. As councillors Nureddin Abdurahman, Ben McNulty and the aforementioned Nīkau Wi Neera describe it, the sale isn’t happening in a vacuum, and it’s exposing something pretty worrying about the entire way Wellington City Council operates. See, if you voted in the last local election, you might have thought the people you were electing would be making the decisions around local governance. After all, this is democracy, right? That’s not really been the case, though. The council buildings by the waterfront might need earthquake strengthening, but the temporary replacement building on The Terrace has an infestation problem. It’s teeming with a kind of man-made modern scientific horror. A sticky, pinkish, living goo grown in vats and extruded into chequered tweed trousers and office casual shirts like mince into a sausage casing: Council Advisors. These faceless feckless footsoldiers of fiduciary responsibility might claim to be there to help the mayor and the council properly enact the policies and values they were elected on the back of with sound advice and technical know-how, but, as Councillor Wi Neera alleges: “What you see time and time again throughout this whole process is certain people in the Mayor’s office acting as fixers for the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy basically says ‘this is something that has to be done. Go out and convince the elected officials.’ And then certain un-elected members of the Mayor’s office have really run their wheels off wrangling politicians with lies.” It’s a picture that all three paint vividly. It’s not one of a shadowy deep-state (well, deep-municipality) conspiracy plotted out in dark backrooms, just an example of the purpose of a system being the thing that it does. There’s no secret society, just a host of mundanely dreadful, grey-souled consultants and advisors with lanyards and deeply bleak personal lives. The back rooms they meet in are reasonably well-lit, too, albeit with that kind of neon office light that triggers migraines. What’s happened, each of the three says, is that the council bureaucracy are pursuing an independent political aim well above and beyond merely helping democratically elected officials do the things they were elected to do, and they’ve found an astonishingly willing figurehead in the Mayor. Nureddin Abdurahman tells us, “[the airport sale] wasn’t the long term plan of the Mayor. She didn’t start the discussion, but she bought it, she ran with it…the bureaucracy says ‘jump’ and the mayor says ‘how high?’”. Of some councillors voting in favour of the privatisation, he says “they rely 100% on what officials are saying. [The councillors believe] Anything that is coming from the bureaucracy’s side is the right thing and they know what is right for the city.” Wi Neera adds to this, alleging some pretty shady behaviour from this “bureaucracy”– “They will say anything to get votes. It doesn’t even have to be true! They’ll tell the right wingers ‘oh yeah, we’ll cut dead headroom if you sell the airport. We’ll give you Khandallah pool if you sell the airport.’ Those were lies, the right wingers did not get what they paid for!... They tell [the left wingers] ‘oh the commissioners are definitely going to come in if you don’t sell this.’ That’s a lie–Simeon Brown went on national radio and said ‘no, there’s a pretty high bar for commissioners, I'm probably not gonna do that’–it’s a lie! They said ‘this will solve the insurance problem and we can just give it to iwi’ That was a lie! Both of those things are not true!” The apparently utterly false backroom promises to sell to mana whenua are an example which Wi Neera–the councillor for Te Whanganui-a-Tara Māori ward, who has spoken out publicly on the need for radical “constitutional transformation” with regards to Māori sovereignty and the settler colonial state–seems pretty clearly pissed off about. He tells us a pretty shocking story about how his own vote–which was initially in favour of a sale on these grounds–was in his words “bought”, a first-hand account of the way our councillors are being manipulated into representing an unelected staff of professional neoliberals instead of the people: “I was sitting in the mayor's office and a member of the mayor’s staff asked me ‘will you support this?’” he recalls, “A matter of minutes later, the phone rang. On the other end of the phone was a certain high-ranking member of a certain local iwi who said ‘yeah. We’ll buy it off you.’ After that phone call was concluded, [the mayor’s staffer] told me ‘oh yeah. Iwi want to buy this’... I thought ‘OK. Well that’s a scenario in which I’m happy to consult.” However, the councillor says, it wasn’t a scenario that turned out to be true. “It didn’t sit easily with me…so I raised an amendment that tried to guarantee sale to mana whenua. On the morning of, the same member of the mayor’s office came up to me and said ‘by the way, we can’t really promise to sell it to mana whenua, but don’t worry about it. Tory won’t vote for it in any other case’... I made the decision to trust that person. That was a mistake.” When it comes to looking back on the whole process, Wi Neera doesn’t mince words: “I subsequently found out that the whole basis for the way they bought my vote, basically…was just nonsense. It was a con.” This approach of ‘saying anything to get votes’ seems to be working pretty well. When they’re not promising good stuff–sales to mana whenua, promising financial returns and the rest of it–the councillors alledge the bureaucracy turns to what appear to amount to threats. We’ve already heard a bit about those worries that, if fights around the inclusion of the Airport sale in the Council’s Long Term Plan dragged on Wellington might get “commissionered” (Nīkau’s word)–that is, that the National party’s thoroughly right wing little twerp of a Minister for Local Government Simeon Brown might call in some openly unelected and right wing government workers to take over proceedings. This is an eventuality Brown himself–who one can only imagine would be pretty keen to try something if he thought he could get away with it–dismissed, as Wi Neera noted above. In addition, elsewhere in the country, we’ve seen the Carterton district council actually fail to pass their Long Term Plan without a single commissioner or observer in sight. And yet supposedly left wing councillors like Labour’s Teri O’Neill–who had voted to keep the airport, but has since changed tune, voting in line with the Mayor even in that “this is democracy” ruling-out of dissent–are now apparently terrified of this deeply unlikely possibility. A more astonishing example described to us by the councillors of an outright threat, rather than one done through mere allusion and speculation, came just one week before a vote on the sale. Unions Wellington and other socialist and progressive voices had fought a commendable grassroots battle to get councillors to commit to keep the airport and, just as it looked like elected officials might be about to vote in line with the people who elected them, as Ben McNulty tells it, in a portion of a council meeting which the public were excluded from witnessing, advisors told councillors, in his words: “If you don’t vote to sell the airport you could be collectively fiscally liable for your decisions, as well as individually”. He points out that this “scare tactic one week before the vote” from bureaucrats–which was framed to councillors as damning legal advice that should decide their vote, and which was key in highlighting the supposed ‘financial risk’ that Deputy Mayor Laurie Foon cited her promise-breaking, deciding vote to privatise to have been swayed by–wasn’t really backed up by anything. During that oh-so-conspicuously public-excluded briefing where councillors were told they risked fines and prosecution if they didn’t vote to sell the shares, councillors were never actually shown the so-called ‘legal advice’ that suggested that. “After the vote at the end of May, I asked our officers, our staff: ‘can I please have that legal advice?’”. McNulty tells us he thinks this was a reasonable request–if the situation had been deemed so dire and the legal ramifications so severe then surely, there would be strongly-argued documentation to support this and the city’s staff of helpful, reliable advisors, officers and experts would be more than willing to show it to councillors, right? Wrong. McNulty recalls “I was declined that legal advice.” He tells us how it took a genuine fight–including Official Information requests which which were flatly declined by council staff, and eventually even comments to the press by, of all people, Simeon Brown–to even be allowed to hear the legal advice that a few short weeks ago had been raised as though it were some kind of existential threat. Once councillors were finally allowed to see it, the advice turned out to be–to use McNulty’s word–”Nothingburger”. Per McNulty’s description, one can really see why the officers didn’t want the advice to be seen, to be fair. As he describes it, it was barely even advice. Officers were discussing a completely different aspect of the sale when “The advice around legal risk and legal liability was volunteered–this is officers’ words, ‘volunteered’–by the third party lawyer in the room. It was never documented.” All of the threats of collective and individual liability and even potential prosecution –which, remember, may have had a hand in deciding the entire outcome of the vote–were based on what was effectively an off-hand comment and documentation was never provided for them. It’s as if the officers were grasping at straws for an effective threat. “That, to me, is also really concerning. Because, if that risk is true, if that risk is serious enough that had we not voted to sell the airport we could have been at risk of collective or personal prosecution, why have we not got that at least documented in some sense?” To McNulty, it’s a symptom of a deep fault at the heart of how Wellington City Council operates: “That’s a cultural aspect of council. There’s this idea that, actually, elected representatives aren’t entitled to all the information that they need to make decisions.” He says the legal advice incident is an example of what makes the sale “toxic,” adding “to proceed with it is a validation of, I think, really poor process.” “It’s also very sad,” says Councillor Abdurahman of the outcome and what he thinks it means for the future of the city’s politics. “A very progressive council and a lefty Mayor [are] who are selling this idea…To some extent that means people are just gonna buy into it, because they trust you.” All three councillors seem to share this sentiment, there’s a palpable air of disappointment in supposed fellow lefties on the council. Ben McNulty describes Whanau’s election as something that was seen as a victory as much by left wing Labour voters disillusioned with the party’s offering of Paul Eagle as it was by Green voters. “No one in the city was expecting an airport sale when they put a number 1 beside her name…She has not engaged with the people who got her into that role, and nor have some of the other councillors.” In particular, he says, he’s heard a lot of dissatisfaction from a huge number of people who got the mayor and other supposedly progressive members of council elected, “the people that knocked on the doors in all the weather that Wellington throws at them, the people that did the phone banking–that were willing to call up strangers and vouch for us–the people that [distributed] the fliers, they’re feeling betrayed. And I know they’re feeling betrayed because I’ve had so much outreach from people.” “Essentially,” says Councillor Wi Neera, “the conflict is between people who keep promises and stick to principles, and people who don’t.” None of the three seem overwhelmingly optimistic about the direction things are going. “I was very optimistic seeing a majority [of] progressive, lefty councillors in this term and I thought ‘we’re gonna do a lot of progressive policies!’” says Abdurahman “I never thought we would be even considering making such big mistakes. It makes me, to be honest, ashamed to be part of this council that is selling strategic assets.” He says the last time he can remember Wellington Councillors making an equivalently terrible decision was “in the 1990s, when we sold Capital Power–the electricity company that we used to own.” He notes that, back then, there were left wing councillors who were convinced to side with the privatisation, too. “Today, we’re [making] the same mistakes, and that is a shame. And I don’t expect anything less from this council from now on.” Wi Neera has a similarly dark view of the sale’s position within a long continuum of privatisations. “It’s the same process!” he half-laughs, his exasperation clear, “It’s defund, run it into the ground, make sure it breaks and then sell it off to private capital. It happens every time! Their strategy has not changed and we keep letting it happen.” He decries what he calls a kind of “historical amnesia,” in some of his colleagues, “about what happened not even forty years ago during the eighties and the nineties.” “I’m very concerned what the next thing is gonna be,” he says later, as we talk about what this whole farce means for the city and the council. “We have fifteen more months of a term and I don’t know what the next airport sale is gonna be. And I am worried that, when it does come up, we’ll get a similar result if the culture doesn’t change.” McNulty expresses similar feelings: “I’m scared about what the next half of the term is…What’s the next terrible idea that’s in the bowels of the machinery of council that’s gonna get presented to us with ‘you have no other option but to proceed’?” He offers an example: “Let’s be up front: There is a campaign from conservative councillors and right wing interests across the city to get rid of our social housing…and we have a government that is not necessarily the best partner around that direction.” In the Long Term Plan, he notes that the Council’s second biggest capital cost is around the upgrading and refurbishment of its social housing. “I think it’s a fantastic thing! We’re actually upgrading their housing to a level of dignity for those tenants…but what happens if the officer's advice in a years’ time comes back and says: ‘we can’t sustain this’?...that’s where I have fears.” It’s a point worth worrying about. The picture these councillors paint is one of a city at the whims of an unelected and unaccountable force of neoliberal administrators, of a Mayor and a (slim) majority of councillors completely happy to sell out an electorate that votes overwhelmingly to the left when those administrators put pressure on them to do so. It’s not so hard to believe. In so many recent decisions forced through the council, we see a market-first, right wing agenda. One would be forgiven if they completely forgot that such a decisive victory had at all been won by the left as the one that was in 2022. It’s as though we might as well not have voted at all. “We need to set a red line,” says Councillor McNulty. “There are other things that we’ve asked for assurance or strong direction on, and we haven’t been able to get that out [of] the Mayor’s office.” In the statement sent to Partisan in response to a request for comment (printed in full at the end of this article), Tory Whanau did, at least, provide something resembling the “confirmation in bold, red, flashing lights” that McNulty said he really wants to see, and hasn’t yet, that the Mayor won’t sell off the council’s social housing stock. We welcome this confirmation–we’re sure Ben McNulty will as well–but it’s worrying that an email exchange with a tiny communist newsletter with very few readers could get it but elected councillors apparently could not. One needn’t exercise that much cynicism before starting to wonder whether, should something like the kind of officers’ advice McNulty describes come up, it’d be a lot easier for the Mayor to walk back something said in a right of reply to us, versus a promise on record in a council meeting. The preferred right-wing future for Kāinga ora–a move from direct government ownership and management to ultra-bureaucratised, disconnected from government, so-called “community housing providers”–has already been embraced by Whanau’s Council. We’re not saying that she will break this promise, just that it wouldn’t be the first time and it wouldn’t be hard. All that’d need to come up would be some ‘new’ financial problem that ‘hadn’t been taken into account’ when a promise was made. Maybe, say, an old building like Aro Street’s Pukehinau flats start looking like they’ll require a lot of maintenance–what if advice of a few unelected and unnamed officers leads the council to decide it needs to “work through a decision regarding the building’s future”? How easy will it be, then, for Tory Whanau to say she needs to make a few more “tough decisions”? The only safe option, really, is to remind these people who elected them in the first place and demand a rejection of the apparent bureaucratic capture of our local democracy. Abdurahman, McNulty and Wi Neera have taken a commendable first step towards this in announcing their refusal to support the Mayor and her Long Term Plan. Their actions have also exposed a number of councillors–namely Crs. Matthews, O’Neill, Rogers and Foon–as fundamentally unprincipled and spineless sellouts who will not back left wing causes or even oppose obviously right wing ones. This has to mean more than simply a call to “remember this at the ballot box” (although, sure, do that too). Left wing power in this city has to be built from outside the council to a point where it can exert more pressure on and in it. Built from the groundwork set by campaigns like Unions Wellington’s “Keep the Airport Ours,” towards creating a space where a more unified left can push more effectively in what very much is a worthwhile arena to make some real, tangible, socialist wins. With as progressive a council as we’ve elected, we should be expecting an enormous amount more public ownership of public assets and infrastructure, more and higher quality social housing. This council should be leading the city that elected it away from profound inequality and the dominance of wealthy property owners and towards an equitable and empowered future for the ordinary people who elected it. We deserve these things. We deserve things to get better. We shouldn’t be reduced to simply begging and hoping that they won’t be made outright worse. Beyond that, we deserve an actually democratic local government that represents the interests of working Wellingtonians. Not one apparently run wholesale by behind-the-scenes bureaucrats in the service of private capital. As we’re wrapping up our interview, Nurreddin closes out his thoughts on the political direction of the council, “one thing is very clear for me: I’m determined to fight back every little decision that’s coming on the way. To protect progressive values. To protect the dignity of people who voted for me, who campaigned for me, who trusted me…Values are very important for me. I think this gives us more moral background and legitimacy to fight back.” It’s funny how reassuring that sounds. We really shouldn’t expect anything less. After interviewing Abdurahman, Wi Neera and McNulty, we approached the Mayor’s office for comment about their claims. It should be noted that the primary focus of this request for comment was around the councillors’ allegations that the sale was the project of an unelected “council bureaucracy”. We highlighted in particular the feeling from Cr. Wi Neera that he and others had been “conned” into initially voting for the sale, and the feeling expressed by all three councillors that a Neoliberal line was being forced through by unelected staff. We also made note of McNulty’s worry around the future of social services in the city–including and for example social housing–and a feeling from all three that Whanau had let down progressive voters. After a few days, Tory Whanau’s Principal Communications Specialist provided us with the following statement for attribution to the Mayor: “I am committed to leading Pōneke with a progressive vision. Our Long-term Plan invests $1.8b to protect one of our most important natural resources water [sic], delivers better transport with bus lanes and cycle lanes, tackles climate change by transforming our waste system and decarbonising our pools, extra funding to pay workers the Living Wage and invests in our community by funding city safety. I fully appreciate the airport decision was tough for many progressive Councillors. But it’s important to be clear this is not a straight asset sale. I would never support selling strategic assets to pay down debt. Instead, the our [sic] minority shareholding in the airport will be reinvested to establish a new green, ethical perpetual investment fund, that will grow over time to be a billion-dollar asset and support future generations of Wellingtonians. I will never privatise our Council’s community housing. In fact in this Long-Term Plan we have invested over $500m to upgrade our community housing so it is warm safe and dry. Making tough decisions like selling the airport shares and addressing our insurance risks, means we can afford to keep investing in social services like housing that really matter to our people. I will continue to work constructively with everybody around the Council table, but especially my colleagues who share a progressive vision for the city. I know we can continue to double down on the wins we’ve made so far and deliver even more for a thriving Pōneke.” While we welcome the assurances on housing–whilst noting the move under Whanau’s Mayoralty from outright public ownership to the management of a National-Party-Endorsed “Community Housing Provider” model, which she alludes to without explicitly mentioning–we note that this statement does not address at any point the allegations of bureaucratic domination of the Local Government’s democratic process, which was the overwhelming focus of our request for comment. We find this concerning. |