Council Planning and Finance Committee

Kia ora koutou, ko Maybret Enkelhardt tōkou ingoa. Firstly, I'll start with a point of democracy, given that some councillors have publicly criticised some council staff for being anti-democratic. Democracy is about listening to all voices, listening and respecting the views of the majority, not just the loudest voices or those with the most resources. It means not continuing to revisiting decisions that have already gone through extensive public consultations, which is going to increasingly disenfranchise those voices that are least likely to engage to start off with because an influential minority do not like the decisions. I moved to Wellington, or Pōneke, just over 10 years ago. I really loved that city then. Yes, there are infrastructure and other deficits from many very historic poor decisions and accountability. This does not mean that the council cannot and should not cut some costs and raise new revenue, and I support many of those initiatives. However, there needs to be an investment, not a short-term budget view to it. There's got to be a balance of addressing past neglect with investing to make a viable future city. More consideration should also be considering to the economic position of many of our constituents. Some of them may need a longer period of time to be able to cover costs. There also needs to be more evidence-based, more investment, future-focused, and less reactive and less squeaky wheel solutions. Need to invest in people infrastructure first and foremost. People— Poneke is at a turning point. Around the world, the evidence is really clear. The most successful cities invest in people-first infrastructure, reliable public transport, safe cycling networks, walkable neighbourhoods, affordable houses, and vibrant public spaces. This is likely to— more likely to attract young people, family, tourists, entrepreneurs than cities designed mostly around cars. The evidence is clear that these become congested, pollutive, expensive and less attractive to live in. Safe and connected cycleways and walkways are not anti-business. They support local business and the future by increasing foot traffic, accessibility, and livability. People choose where they live today, or at least a number of people have choices—entrepreneurs, youth, skilled people, families. They will continue to exercise these choices based on the decisions we make today. Back to my earlier point about being future-focused but yet also recognising the economic realities. Short-term accommodation operators should pay not a proportionate rate but the full commercial rate because they get all the benefits of commercial business but often without the same contribution in terms of taxes, jobs, and currently rates. There is significant evidence that they contribute to housing shortage shortages and affordability pressures. Look at Queenstown, look at Tasmania. I could give example after example. Too many homes are being removed from the long-term rental market for short-term profit while the wider community bears the social and economic context. Kaanakee needs long-term and diversity of residents, thriving neighbourhoods and sustainability businesses more than it needs unchecked growth in unfair short-term accommodation options. Going back to again my point about investment versus short-term reactive thinking, vibrant future-focused cities invest in climate resilience and emissions reduction. Ignoring climate realities now in 2026 only creates larger costs later. Aotearoa and Pōneke are renowned for paying for recovery and putting only a pitiful amount of money in preventative and early intervention options as far as climate change goes. Reducing climate adaptation spending in this time ignores overwhelming scientific evidence and recent weather events, which I don't think anyone needs to be reminded about, affecting our community and across Aotearoa and globally. Infrastructure underinvestment over decades cannot be solved through short-term squeaky wheel or anti-progress thinking. Poniki's cultural energy matters just as much as its balance sheet. A city that feels stale, tired, and unwelcoming will struggle to attract visitors, skilled workers, and investment. This is a make-or-break moment for Poniki. We must decide whether we want to reduce costs and increase revenues in ways that support the future or the past. Where is the right balance? Do we want to invest in becoming a modern, affordable, vibrant city for future generations? Or do we want more of the past, drifting further towards stagnation and decline? And I can tell in the 10 years that I've been here, I haven't seen so much progress as more of the same, and a very sort of move towards more of the same is going backwards, while other cities move ahead and are dynamic and future residents move to these. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

I mean, yeah. Yep. No, but I think you've highlighted some— Sorry. You've highlighted some good things for us to take away, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate you coming in. Now we're going to head to Elliot Chapman, who I believe is online. Hi. Welcome, Elliot. 5 minutes. Thank you. Thanks. Alrighty. Mayor and councillors, Wellington is navigating a fiscal landscape where past, present, and future shocks will arrive within this annual plan period. The Strait of Hormuz is not a distant geopolitical story. It is a domino effect that will run through Wellington's economy in a 9 to 18 month lag. Volatile oil prices flow into fuel costs, cost of living, commercial rates, bases, and the council's fiscal capacity. What is already on the table is sobering enough on its own. A 212% debt to revenue ratio breaches this council's 200% debt ceiling. More points still unfunded. April flood damage estimated in the hundreds of millions. Demand for rates assistance up 150% in 2 years. CBD vacancies at 9.3%. 62% of residents say Wellington is deteriorating. These are not isolated issues. They intersect across an ecosystem of people, profit, planet, and place. This pattern is not unique to Wellington. The UK local government sector is now openly naming the same dynamic. A policy landscape designed for a stable world operating in a destabilising one. Wellington's case is sharper because we have spent 6 years optimising potentially the wrong variable. The foundations of our net zero policy are structurally misaligned for today's context— not the intent, the design. The current policy is structured to control one variable: Wellington's territorial emissions through direct local intervention. In a simple, stable system, that approach may be more effective. In a complex system under polycrisis conditions, it takes— it does the opposite of what it intends. Laid onto everything else, the net zero mechanism drives the cost of living up. Squeezed households substitute towards the cheapest goods available. The cheapest goods on the market today ship direct from China on coal-powered supply chains. China and Temu alone emit 25 megatons to Wellington's 1 megaton. In 2024, China commissioned a coal-fired power station emitting in 3 months what Wellington's bike network is designed to save in a decade. Meanwhile, the local carbon abatement we are paying for is the most expensive on the curve. Cycleways, $800 to $2,400 per tonne. The emissions trading scheme, $50 to $65 per tonne. This council is paying up to 50 times the market rate for carbon. While pushing its residents' consumption habits away from local business powered by 80% renewable energy toward a coal-fueled supply chain emitting 50 times more across its distribution networks. Simultaneously, we are eroding local climate resilience, local livelihoods, jobs, and sustainable wage increases. This is not a question of climate action. It is a question of climate accounting and recognizing the wide boundary impact of carbon tunnel vision. We have unwittingly inherited a policy that improves the scorecard while making the actual problem worse. The unintended consequences of unsustainable policy is a war on all Wellingtonians, from graduates to working class to seniors, and their adaptive capacity to survive future shocks, including the meta disruptions emerging from exponential tech. So I have 3 asks. One, what if we treated the cycleway question as an adaptive part of a holistic civic portfolio? Yes, considerable funding has already gone into the existing network. In every low-performing segment costs ratepayers twice more, once in maintenance and once in lost revenue. Pause the 26-27 expansion, publish utilisation data. Where existing segments are not performing, convert them back to productive revenue to buffer our fiscal slippage. 2. Correct the creative capital disparity. A 5% cut versus Social and Recreation's 0.4% cut is an outsized burden that does not follow proportional discipline. The creative sector already runs on a $37,000 median income, well below the living wage, with returns $3.20 per dollar invested. Protect the grants. 3. Reprioritise the upstream net zero policy. The numbers show that attempts to accelerate the pace of change are having a counterintuitive impact on social, economic, and planetary capital. Recalibrate our systemic direction from eco-austerity to regenerative economic resilience and localism, civic abundance, in order to protect human flourishing amidst these liminal times. Climate spending follows where it actually works. In times of volatility, we need to adapt capacity, not the sunk cost fallacy of low leverage abatement. Update our carbon accounting to a holistic model that accounts for second-order impacts, across people, profit, planet, and place. In conclusion, this is not a debate about whether climate matters. Decisions based on the first to zero policy are forcing us to do the wrong thing the right way in the face of volatile emergent conditions. The evidence strongly suggests the context has shifted since its inception. It has made the city poorer and incentivising higher emitting consumption habits. That is not climate leadership, that is policy failure. Now is the time to make course corrections. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Elliot. Do we have any questions? Doesn't appear— oh, no, doesn't appear we have any questions. So thank you so much for tuning in and doing your submission. Appreciate it. No worries. Cheers. Thanks, everyone. So we're going to take around about a 20-minute break and return at 3 PM.