Auckland Observer Report: Wellingtonians the problem with Wellington

Never liked Wellington; liked Wellingtonians even less. Hobson felt the same way. He toured the country soon after he had signed the Treaty and visited Wellington. It was a New Zealand Company settlement. The NZ Co. officials tried to bribe him to make their settlement the capital of the nascent colony – Hobson rejected the overture and gained a very unfavourable impression of their character. That cabal of colluding, covetous opportunists is the base character of the modern-day Wellingtonian. That is the whakapapa of their mentality. Nothing has changed in that respect since 1840 – nothing.

There is a brooding illness about that place. It doesn’t just look barren and hostile, it feels barren and hostile. Maori say they can sense something off, something wrong, something creepy. Some get bad vibes around Mt Crawford where the old prison used to be, some feel it around the Courtney Place area. Some say the whole city is like that. Something very bad happened there. Something very bad is bound to happen there and does happen there. I don’t blame the land so much as the people – the illness is the people.

I had been to Wellington before a few times – all of them disagreeable (due to the people) to one degree or another – but on one trip, driving in and out and staying a couple of nights, some mundane events happened that crystallised exactly what was wrong with the people of that dreadful, accursed town. I had previously thought their defining unpleasant characteristic was simple arrogance and that it came from being the capital city rather than it being that it was Wellington per se. I’ve changed my mind on that, although it definitely is partly because of their status as Capital, it has more dimensions.

Wellingtonians are lazy.

The only people who did anything extra or went out of their way were foreigners. The woman who took out bags up to our room at the Backpackers was German. A Wellingtonian wouldn’t have done that. The guy at Archives who rushed to get something done before closing was a British Indian. A Wellingtonian wouldn’t have done that. There are a multitude more examples from previous ill-fated visits, but these are all from this one trip.

The moment the penny dropped on laziness was at a café on the way out of town and the pancakes were fine but the maple syrup was just a few drops in an already tiny jug. I didn’t want to fuss, but it was absurd and if I didn’t say anything the GF certainly would. So I went to the counter to ask for some more – not complain either, it wasn’t in the form of a complaint that was not how it was framed it was just I required more. Well, the chef was none to happy, and as he harrumphed out, banging doors and cupboards as he went he muttered audibly enough so I could hear: “I’ve got to go and open a new one now!” Yes, he had been too lazy to fetch a fresh bottle from out back. Wouldn’t he have to open a fresh one anyway though for the next patron? What a cunt – a lazy cunt. Things like that don’t happen in Auckland, in part because the customers wouldn’t allow it, in part because the chefs wouldn’t think of it. Want something a bit different, a simple request? – forget about it, just forget it.

Went to ‘The Flying Burrito Brothers’ Mexican restaurant because I had heard good things and noticed everything seemed to have coriander as an ingredient, so I asked the waitress if they could leave the coriander out. Can we guess? Can we? She came back – no, everything has coriander and none of it can be left out of anything, best order something with the least amount of coriander (which, of course, seemed to have extra coriander for my troubles). So many instances, so many stories.

The surly shop assistants, the indifferent, swaggering security guards, the list is endless. The ingratitude is palpable. And that’s just the frontline. The backline are just as bad. The staff in Wellington – when I was an acting GM in an Auckland head office – were operating like it was ‘Gliding On.’ Timelines meant nothing. Results meant nothing. They weren’t impressed by efficiency – they were horrified by it. All their energy was devoted to resistance instead of productivity.

It was gratifying to hear from a Wellingtonian, (and serial Mayoral candidate) Jack Yan, in a Twitter aside (when he was still on Twitter) that this service deficit was real. He said matter-of-factly that Wellington had very bad service and that Wellingtonians had come to expect it. I think he was absolutely right, but the interesting point for me (that he wouldn’t engage with) is why? Because such things just do not happen in other places in New Zealand or in other parts of the world I have been to. Why is Wellington service terrible? Geography and weather cannot have any bearing on why service is terrible – so what is it? What would the factors for terrible service be? Is it they consider themselves above the act of serving others? What’s with the resentment?

Naturally that terrible service is not restricted to just customer service, it is an attitude that necessarily permeates every institution, every interaction. Reflect now, at this point, on the sad fact that the people giving the worst service are ensconced as the Capital to provide service to the whole country. A praetorian entitlement saturates everyone there and the whole country suffers as a consequence. The least respectful, least responsive, least sympathetic people run the country. And they run it primarily for themselves.

The Wellingtonians have constructed a self-serving hegemonic paradigm that spans policy and ventures into the mythologic. The default thinking of Wellington on the rational division of resources is half for Wellington and half for everyone else. That is the starting point – and more often than not the ending point. Two cases of their propaganda exercise come immediately to mind.

Te Papa – the Museum of New Zealand – is a glorious example of Wellingtonian myth-making and ideological (if I can call it that) supremacy. I doubt anything has changed in the seven years or so I last visited that cultural bunker.

The only mention of Auckland – a quarter going on one third of the country’s population – is in the souvenir shop. In the souvenir shop – where commercial reality cannot be overwhelmed by political edicts of curation – Auckland is allowed to exist. It is eerie how the Wellingtonians have avoided any mention of Auckland from the supposed national museum. Like an erasure. Like a genocide. The exhibition on Pacific Islanders in New Zealand doesn’t mention Auckland. Anyone from overseas who had walked through Te Papa and asked to name New Zealand cities would not know about Auckland. If they did recall a mention of Auckland they might conclude it is the same size as New Plymouth or Napier. Asked where Pacific Islanders mostly live they would say Wellington. Their commitment to a total metropolicide takes on a rigorous pedantry when even the Industrial Exhibitions of the past omits Auckland. What impression is dedicatedly chiselled throughout is that modern Aotearoa is an evolution of the NZ Co. and Wellington is half the nation – a total misleading fiction.

The second, similarly fictional account of the unimpeachable importance of Wellington I discovered in the history of parliament on the parliamentary website. They cannot change the chronology of where parliament was – that Auckland was the seat of Government up until 1865 – but they can, and do, distort the facts so as to render a mythic tale whereby Wellington was destined and was always meant to be the capital. In their telling the capital should have been Wellington from the beginning. No telling of their attempt to bribe Hobson of course – they wouldn’t want anyone knowing that. The holding of parliamentary sessions in Christchurch and elsewhere is written off as some accident, that it was some mistake, that it was a series of errors when it was meant to be Wellington the whole time. It is self-serving nonsense and yet they not only believe it they insist that the rest of the country does too.

The chief characteristics stemming from the laziness and the born-to rule attitude of the inhabitants is complacency. Complacency permeates every fixture. They hold themselves responsible only to themselves and for their own convenience they hold very low standards. Do people ever get fired there? They can lie, they can cheat, they can commit any gross negligence and still remain in their positions, beyond accountability.

The other prevailing characteristic, which must stem from some core element of complacency is conformity. Total conformity. Conformist thinking and action in every respect towards everything. All departments suddenly have personal pronouns. Everyone suddenly has Te Reo salutations in their emails. The closest thing to ‘the Borg’ in real life is Wellington. The existence and level of conformity was thoroughly proven on that trip to Wellington when the GF and I were standing at traffic lights on a week day lunchtime waiting to cross on Lambton Quay, the government end of town, and she says “look, everyone is wearing purple.” There was more than a dozen pedestrians on all corners waiting. I thought: impossible. “No, look.” We scanned around. He was wearing a purple tie, her a purple bag, him a purple scarf, her purple polka dots, a purple belt, a purple shirt, a purple umbrella… and so on. But hang on – “that guy isn’t!” Only one, but he didn’t have purple, so she was wrong. We looked hard. “No, look, he’s got purple socks.” Oh, so he did. Every single person there was wearing at least one item of purple. The dress code. The advertisement to demonstrate you were part of the Borg. The club card. Complete conformity. They didn’t need a memo, they were just conforming, as they do – the whole street. Anyone (like ourselves) who were meeting someone from the Borg would be instantly identifiable to them as not one of them – and I guess treated as an outsider. Subtle, but effective segregation.

With that assessment of what typifies a Wellingtonian let me approach the question of the Government’s announcement they will appoint a ‘Crown Observer’ to the semi-functional Wellington City Council.

Their city council is just a manifestation of themselves. They are a  precious and wanky lot. They elect by STV – of course they would, it’s the wankiest system available and they would feel obliged to choose it. They elect dweebs. Dweebs. Hand-wringing, lisping, falling down stairs drunk, bad haircut mayors and councillors. Dweebs. Surprisingly the first non-dweeb this century is Tory Whanau. She hasn’t gelled with the councillors perhaps because she isn’t a dweeb. She has other problems, hilariously, but being a dweeb is not one of them.

If we come back to complacency and to conformity and to collusion also we can chart the course to Crown observation and potential commissionership.

Why would a city destroy its iconic infrastructure? Why would a city dismantle its point of difference, its uniqueness, its differentiation? Would Melbourne rip out their trams? Would San Fransisco rip out their cable cars? Would Venice fill in their canals? It is unthinkable to do such a thing. Yet that is what Wellington did – they pulled down the trolley bus wires – no more trolley buses. They destroyed the only thing, the one and only thing, that made Wellington different. An electric bus system – object and envy of any city – and they just tore it all down.

And then…

In that city with the worst wind, the worst weather, the steepest streets, the narrowest streets, that city council allocated a quarter of a billion dollars in their Long Term Plan for cycleways. Trolley buses were a futile waste, but hundreds of millions of dollars on cycle lanes were a futurist utopia. This was the thinking of the Wellington City Council.

And then…

The city that had skimped for years on maintenance of their water and sewer network, having them explode at ever increasing intervals all over the city, that never had any meters so no-one ever cared about usage, that had conspired with central government to get “3 Waters” established so everyone else would be subsidising their network, instead of firing the network manager promotes her to be CEO of Wellington Water. This was the thinking of Wellington.

And now…

A Crown Observer is to be put in to make sure the Long Term Plan gets through after the Council reneged on selling their airport shares. What a joke. Almost as though they don’t care about consequences.  Trust their mates across the street in the central government departments will have a few meetings with them to get the rest of the country to bail them out – that has always been the extent of their strategic planning.

We are all waiting for the inevitable earthquake that reduces the city to rubble. Then we will all be expected to resurrect Hellington? Hell no!