Welcome to Wellington, a once vibrant city surrounded by its own faeces
Thursday, 12 February 2026
It’s long been the punching bag of central government, with John Key once calling it a ‘dying city’ and Bill English calling public servants ‘Wellington waste’. Now Wellington has an actual human waste problem, with raw sewage being dumped into Cook Strait - a once vibrant city that’s now literally drowning in its own shit. Lloyd Burr looks at the state of the capital.
As capital cities go, Wellington is far from the world’s worst.
It’s not soulless and people-less like Myanmar’s Naypyidaw, which was built in the middle of nowhere following advice from the military rulers’ astrologers. Naypyidaw is a ghost city, despite having 8-lane motorways, stadiums, dozens of hotels, and being the home of its national assembly.
It’s not a hotspot of dangerous crime like Papua New Guinea’s Port Moresby or South Africa’s Pretoria, nor blanketed in pollution like India’s Delhi or China’s Beijing.
But for the capital city of an advanced OECD economy, (and a country without a dictator nor rampant corruption), Wellington leaves a lot to be desired.
The catastrophic failure of Wellington’s wastewater treatment plant at Moa Point last week is just the latest in a long list of problems that are - and have long been - plaguing and embarrassing the city:
- Its fresh water pipes are a mess. There are 640 leaks in the wider metropolitan area (that Wellington Water knows about).
The ‘Let’s Get Wellington Moving’ initiative did the opposite and roads are constantly jammed. It’s since been scrapped.
Thousands of public servants have lost their jobs, or have the fear of redundancy hanging over them, meaning less is being spent in the economy.
Covid made working from home possible and that flexibility means fewer people in the city spending their money - especially on Fridays which used to be the busiest, now they’re the quietest.
Long-standing cafes, restaurants, bars, and shops have pulled the pin and closed.
Cycleways are built and removed or complained about.
Dozens of major buildings sit empty because they’re quake prone, while others are repaired with constant budget blowouts like the Town Hall.
Homelessness on the streets is increasing.
Courtenay Place is more feral than fun, and its overhaul has been paused.
But let’s start with the 70 million litres of untreated sewage being discharged into the sea each day.
Moa Point Wastewater Treatment Plant
It sounds bonkers but Wellington’s sewage wasn’t properly treated until 1998 - the same year that Te Papa opened(!!).
Before then, only the chunky bits were filtered out and the rest of the raw sewage was piped into Cook Strait at Moa Point (this pipe is five metres long, is still there and dubbed the ‘short pipe’).
It’s the main plant servicing Wellington City, with the other in the hills south of Karori which also opened in 1998. It also discharges treated sewage into Cook Strait (interestingly into a designated ‘Key Native Ecosystem’).
The region has another plant at Seaview serving both Upper and Lower Hutt (This also discharges into Cook Strait near Pencarrow), and one in Porirua which discharges into the sea near Titahi Bay.
The 1998 Moa Point upgrade saw the construction of a full treatment system and a 1.8km long pipe (dubbed the ‘long pipe’) that discharges the treated effluent deep into Cook Strait at a rate of three bath tubs per second.
It’s owned by Wellington City Council, managed by Wellington Water, and since 2004 has been operated by French utility company Veolia.
Last week’s failure is believed to have been caused by a blockage in the long pipe, which meant the effluent backed up and flooded the lower levels of the treatment plant (with 3 metres of poo).
Most of the plant shut down and raw unscreened, untreated sewage was diverted to the short pipe which ended up on the beaches around the South Coast.
The long pipe has since been fixed but untreated sewage is being sent through this while the plant is cleaned up. The sewage is being screened to remove the chunkier items though (like pre-1998 times).
A permanent fix is months away, meaning raw sewage discharging through the long pipe is the new normal until then.
Wastewater expert: ‘It’s embarrassing for NZ’
Given the cause isn’t yet known and an investigation is pending, one Auckland-based wastewater expert didn’t want to put their name to their analysis of the situation.
However, there was a common comment: “It’s embarrassing for a first world country”.
“My first reaction was ‘it shouldn't happen’. This really should not have happened,” the expert says. “At an advanced wastewater treatment system, there’s redundancy or contingency for failure so how did this happen?”.
“How does a discharge pipe like that get blocked? Normally what happens is they don't have just one pipe, they always have alternative plans. Where were the holding tanks? My other question is why was it bypassing all of the processing systems and discharged straight into the sea?,” the expert says.
A (shit) metaphor for Wellington?
Andrew Little’s only been the city’s mayor for four months, following a landslide election win last year on the promise to turn Wellington around.
There’s a certain absurdity that his first major test is literally cleaning up Wellington’s crap.
“I was voted in on a platform of getting shit done,” he jokes. “I just didn't quite imagine it was going to be in this way”.
While he’s using humour about it, he knows the seriousness of the situation and the impact it is having on both people, the environment, and the city’s reputation.
“It still beggars belief that a sewerage plant for a major metropolitan city should fail in the way that it did. There's no sugarcoating it but it is what it is, it’s happened and we’ve just got to deal with it and we have to fix it,” he says.
When the long list of Wellington’s other problems (see top of article) are read out to him, Little doesn’t shy away from them and the mountain he needs to climb to sort them all out.
“Wellington is feeling a bit dowdy. I think Wellingtonians have been feeling in a bit of a funk,” he says. “But we do focus a lot on the challenges and the things that drag us down even when nearby, there are things that should lift us up”.
“My job as mayor is to be upfront and honest about the bad things and how we're going to deal with them, but also to be part of championing and celebrating the good things, because there's a lot of good things happening,” he says.
Wastewater failure ‘doesn't detract from incredible other stuff’
One of the surprising takes from Little is his belief that the Moa Point meltdown “doesn’t detract from the incredible other stuff” that’s going on in Wellington.
“It's not a happy thing to have happened and it's going to take a big effort and spending money to get it fixed, but we will get through that,” he says.
“Yes, the money we put into fixing the sewage plant is money we can't put into things we might otherwise have done but that's life. There are always trade offs.
“We'll get through those hard things, but we'll do so at the same time as celebrating the other amazing things that are happening. We've got to harness and celebrate those, and we've got to front up to the hard bits as well, and we've got to be not afraid to talk about both,” Little says.
But what are those ‘amazing things’?
Even with an acute crisis that involves tens of millions of litres of untreated shit being dumped in the ocean, Little is somewhat upbeat about the state of the city.
“Firstly, there’s the tech sector. We have this incredibly successful, thriving tech sector. There’s FinTech, GamingTech, and would you believe a sector now called GovTech which is providing services and software and technology to the government,” says Little.
He lists off numerous tech incubators which are luring big investors to the city, including The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall.
“This is the best place to be a tech startup because everybody you need to deal with and talk to to get a business going, you can get to within 10 minutes.
“There's no other city in the world where that happens. We have a lot going for us, and there's a lot of energy and dynamism,” Little says.
The problem? “We've got to sort out the physical appearance of the city, and I'm determined to do that,” he adds.
‘There’s brilliant things behind the hoardings’
There are vast parts of central Wellington that are fenced off with construction hoardings that look about as classy as a portaloo on a wedding lawn.
Most of these have been erected because the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake damaged swathes of buildings - many of which played important roles in creating the city’s vibrancy.
The Reading Cinema complex is off limits, meaning a decent chunk of Courtenay Place is now a hoarding wall. It was a gathering place for so many people - a social hub that’s been lost.
A few doors down, the Molly Malones pub is boarded up because it’s quake-prone. Many see it as the gateway to Courtenay Place’s entertainment corridor.
The Town Hall, library, council headquarters, and the entire Civic Square that surrounds them is off limits while upgrades are done. That area brought heaps of people into the city, and it was used as a thoroughfare to the waterfront across the City-to-Sea Bridge.
Across the road from the Town Hall precinct is the eye sore that is the abandoned Amora Hotel, fenced off since the 2016 quakes rendered it unsafe.
“Some of the brilliant things that are about to happen have all been happening behind hoardings and on construction sites,” Little says.
“The Civic Square area is being sorted out. It's just created a bit of a dark hole down that corner of town and that will all open up very shortly,” he says.
Is Wellington the punching bag of central government?
Former Prime Minister John Key once called Wellington a“dying city”, former Finance Minister Bill English referred to public servants as “Wellington waste”, and current Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has made numerous digs at the capital and its governance.
Do they have a point or are those in the Beehive just playing politics to get votes from anti-Wellington heartland Kiwis?
“Notwithstanding the negative comments and perhaps some convenient political rhetoric, in their heart of hearts, I know they want the city to do well,” Little says.
“The meeting I had with the Prime Minister and Simon Watts earlier in the week and actually meetings I've had with Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis and others, they actually do want the best for Wellington,” he claims.
“They are very keen to see Wellington thriving and succeeding and stuff but they quite rightly want a relationship with the city council to work together on that stuff.” Little says.
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