Mount Maunganui landslide fiasco and Moa Point meltdown will happen again and again and again – The Daily Blog
‘Deep and systemic issues’ led to Moa Point wastewater failure
The failure of Wellington’s Moa Point wastewater treatment plant was the culmination of “deep and systemic” problems stretching across governance, accountability, risk management and ageing infrastructure, an independent review has found.
The Crown review into the February 4 disaster found there was no single decision or isolated failure behind what Local Government Minister Simon Watts described as one of the region’s most significant wastewater infrastructure failures in decades.
Instead, it identified longstanding weaknesses in how the system was governed, how assets and risks were managed, and how infrastructure resilience was planned for.
Stuff
Six deaths, decades of warnings, and no accountability
Questions remain over failures and accountability in the Mount Maunganui landslide, after a review found the tragedy could have been prevented, had councillors bothered to read commissioned reports
RNZ
New Zealand likes to think of itself as a modern, accountable democracy. A country with checks, balances, and institutions capable of protecting the public interest.
The reality is far less flattering. What happened in Wellington and Mt Maunganui was not an accident, a maintenance lapse, or bad luck. It is the logical end point of decades of privatisation ideology, political timidity, and the outsourcing of public infrastructure to multinational corporations with no stake in the consequences.
The Myth of a Functional State
The problem of believing we are a country is that it treats a false sense of oversight and bureaucracy. Checks and balances built into place to ensure the egalitarian values of our country can be expressed.
The truth is we are not a country.
We are 3 sparsely populated giant Islands that sold its economic sovereignty away a long time ago.
Old Zealand is a broken privatisation experiment and we are utterly unaware of it!
Wellington was not drowning in sewage by accident and Mt Maunganui ignored the threats by design!
This is the predictable outcome of decades of privatisation ideology, lowest-bid contracting, political cowardice, and a coordinated propaganda campaign that successfully scared voters away from the only reform capable of stopping this collapse.
What happened Mt Maunganui and Moa Point was not a “failure of maintenance.” It is a failure of ideology — and the consequences now stink.
AI Bryce has done the best examination alongside Andrea Vance at how broken NZ is thanks to privatisation experiments that have utterly failed…
…the writing on the wall from this failed privatisation experiment has been obvious for years now…
Moa Point Was a Known Failure, so was Mt Maunganui
Years of warnings ignored
The Moa Point plant has been non-compliant with its resource consent conditions for almost every month since January 2024. Wellington Water Committee papers from December show the facility passed compliance checks in only two months out of 24. Issues included unconsented discharges, odour problems, and multiple faecal coliform exceedances. Of the four Veolia-run plants in the region, Moa Point was the only one that never achieved a single “green” rating in that period.
Veolia and the Cost of Outsourcing Responsibility
Veolia’s Record of Operational Failure
A 2021 review commissioned by Wellington Water itself painted a damning picture of the plants’ operations. It found “understaffed plants, inexperienced operators and a lack of executive oversight, leaving frontline teams to deal with complex process failures on their own.” The same review found that the contractor operating the plants, Veolia, “failed to carry out basic asset management, including regular maintenance.”
Equipment was described as “obsolete and outdated and prone to failure.” Spare parts were hard to source, with long delivery times. There was “no clear responsibility for monitoring critical equipment or leading renewal programmes.”
A follow-up 2023 report from engineering firm Stantec focused specifically on Moa Point and warned that the plant was “highly exposed” during upgrade work that reduced its capacity. The report predicted increased bypass events where partially treated or untreated wastewater would be discharged into the ocean.
Vance noted the irony: “To layer irony onto irony, the plant meant to treat wastewater became a giant sewage geyser in the middle of an upgrade.”
Upgrading Infrastructure While the System Collapses
Upgrading the Plant While Breaking the City
The catastrophe happened while they were supposedly fixing the problems.
Wellington Water Committee chair Ros Connelly was blunt about what this represents: “the chickens coming home to roost after decades of underinvestment in water infrastructure.”
Privatisation Was the Ideology, Not the Accident
Privatisation, Not Just Underinvestment
This is true, but underinvestment is only part of the story. The other part is who was responsible for operating these plants, and why they kept the contract despite years of documented failure.
….just like the IT contracts with lowest cost contractors. The French multinational Veolia is laughing all the way to the bank, while Wellington swims in the consequences, while we go for lowest-cost contracting ideology!
All that institutional engineering knowledge and management have been sacrificed to give far away corporations responsibility that they don’t care about.
How fitting for our Capital to sit in systemic contamination.
…here’s the icing on this policy failure layered on policy failure – we did it to ourselves.
How Three Waters Became a Political Casualty
How Three Waters Was Killed by Lies and Dark Money
Labour’s Three Waters was created to deal with this enormous infrastructure problem, while acknowledging Māori interests in water.
We allowed Dark Money to seep into the Taxpayers’ Union, weaponising ignorance and racism to protect corporate profits and convince you all that ‘da Maaaaares is stealing da water’ and National, ACT and NZF played along.
Three Waters which would have lowered the costs you are all now facing in your rates was destroyed by reactionary politics and now manufactured backlash are sewage failures.
Oh the irony you stupid silly sleepy Hobbits.
Your petty bigotry has been manipulated for the interests of the corporations and polluters and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
This Was a Choice — Not a Natural Disaster
Privatisation promised efficiency. What it delivered, was a city drowning in its own wastewater collapse.
The question is can Kiwis wake up and see this?
The answer is, ‘I don’t think so’.
The Mount Maunganui landslide fiasco and the Moa Point meltdown will happen again and again and again as more extreme weather unmasks all this incompetence in the most destructive ways.
We have guttered our institutional knowledge for short term management contracts and called that capitalism.
We will learn the hard way what the true price of that mindset delivers.
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