Andrea Vance: Treading murky waters as Wellington dives into a super city debate
Sunday, 1 March 2026
Andrea Vance is National Affairs Editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times
OPINION: Andrew Little marked the reopening of Wellington’s southern beaches last week, wading into the Moa Point fallout with the resolve of a man who knows that sometimes you just have to test the waters.
He’s taking the same approach with local government reform.
While the Government is still working through its dramatic plan to reshape councils, Little and the region’s mayors have decided they’d rather not wait around.
Read more
LGNZ gets behind push to reorganise regional government - with conditions
Councils push back on Government’s plan for Combined Territories Boards
Instead, they are diving head-first into talks about amalgamating parts of the Wellington region. A process that, depending on your view, is either well overdue or as politically unpleasant as what is pouring out of Tarakena Bay.
The Government outlined its direction of travel last year.
Ministers want to get rid of more than 130 regional councillors and replace them with combined territorial boards made up of mayors. Those boards would be tasked with designing a new structure for their local government.
Amalgamation of territorial councils is not part of the reform. But it is hard to see how more councils merging into unitary authorities isn’t the logical endpoint.
Chris Bishop’s resource management overhaul will dramatically shrink councils’ regulatory workload, and officials reckon this will save an estimated $5 billion. Fewer rules leads to fewer planners and a reduced role for regional government.
And if the Government pushes ahead with plans to replace regional councillors, that also weakens the logic for keeping a fragmented territorial layer as well.
For Wellington’s mayors, this reform opens a window, and gives them political cover.
Making the capital a super city has been talked about for years. But local politicians hate being seen as pushing amalgamation.
Voters have repeatedly rejected it. In Nelson and Tasman in 2012, in the Wellington region and in Hawke’s Bay in 2015, and two years later in Wairarapa.
A decade on and councils can try again with a different narrative. Instead of “We want to merge councils” it becomes “Better to move first than be told what to do”.
And the public might actually be listening this time.
The Moa Point fiasco, the endlessly leaking pipes, and the realisation that fixing three waters infrastructure costs a bomb has softened the ground. Ratepayers can see the appeal of a bigger, better-resourced council.
Auckland has been a super city for 15 years now, and it’s practically a state in miniature.
For Wellington to recover from the post-pandemic doldrums, it needs a regional deal, a strong mayor to reflect one voice and a renewed partnership with the Government.
It’s economy-of-scale and economy-of-clout.
Ahead of the curve, Porirua and Hutt City ran referenda at last year’s local elections to test the public mood. The results gave mayors Anita Baker and Ken Laban a clear mandate to open discussions with neighbouring councils. Little also campaigned on mergers.
By December, the Wellington Mayoral Forum - now chaired by Little - formally agreed to work together on exploring amalgamation options.
The mayors decided to use the momentum from the election, the two referenda, and the ongoing water debacle to push the conversation forward on their own terms. They’ve mooted a 2028 referendum.
Early this year, Wellington City Council signed off on a working group to coordinate these talks. They have promised a clear plan to show ratepayers what a super-city might look like.
One option could be community boards (Auckland has 21) to give neighbourhoods a say in how big decisions are applied locally. Perhaps the super city decides to implement cycleways from A to B. The board could then decide on the exact route, and whether car parks are sacrificed.
That guards against the argument that amalgamation strips out the local voice and keeps some decision-making close to home while the wider region plans and spends at scale.
The debate on the shape of a new super city is taking shape. The most obvious grouping is Wellington, Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, and Porirua, although Upper Hutt’s Peri Z is said to be more lukewarm than the other mayors.
The region has a population of 545,000, represented by eight mayors. For comparison, the Greater Christchurch metro area has 556,500 people and just three mayors.
Out east, the three Wairarapa councils have formally approached the Local Government Commission to explore their options. It seems likely they will stick together. For South Wairarapa mayor Dame Fran Wilde, it’s second time ‘round: she backed the 2015 proposal as chairperson of the regional council.
Kāpiti and Horowhenua are trickier propositions. Kāpiti is economically and socially intertwined with the Wellington metro through commuter rail and Transmission Gully, and the district’s fortunes track with the capital.
Horowhenua isn’t technically in the Wellington region, but its council has written to the mayoral forum to ask to be considered.
Elsewhere in the country, Southland hasn’t just dipped a toe in. The region’s councils took the plunge last year by proposing a merger into two unitary authorities, one urban and one rural.
The Local Government Commission is now doing a deep dive and a poll of voters could follow in 2027.
Back in 2023, an expert panel warned the then-Labour Government that councils were heading towards a funding and legitimacy crisis. Infrastructure was ageing, with extreme weather compounding problems, voter participation was collapsing, and we had reached “peak rates” with unsustainable deficits.
Among a suite of recommendations, they said a number of the 78 regional, city, district and unitary councils were no longer viable and structures must be redrawn, with consolidation of services and entire councils.
Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty immediately threw their sobering report on Labour’s policy bonfire. He claimed “bread and butter” issues took precedence.
But there is nothing more bread and butter than rates.
Council charges have become one of the biggest drivers of the cost-of-living squeeze, alongside rents and power. For many households, double-digit rates increases now land on the door mat with the same dreaded thud as the mortgage or the grocery bill.
It’s gone from a slow-burn structural problem to a kitchen table one.
And that is why this time might be different. Where amalgamation was once an abstract argument about democracy, efficiency and administration, it’s now about whether people can afford to stay in their homes.
In Wellington, where the Moa Point crisis exposed just how broken the system is, creating a super-city is now less about keeping power - and more about keeping the power on.