Old Zealand is a broken privatisation experiment – are Kiwis capable of waking up?
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 we are living through in Wellington right now is 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 is not drowning in sewage by accident.
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 is happening at Moa Point is not a “failure of maintenance.” It is a failure of ideology — and the consequences now stink.
Take a long hard look – this is Old Zealand, a broken privatisation experiment drowning our own capital in sewage.
The French must be laughing.
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
Years of warnings ignoredThe 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.
Documented Failure, No Accountability
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?
We have to put it into the context of having a Labour party so busy sucking the dick of neoliberalism they still don’t understand that succouring ACT in their midst was a betrayal of everything their party ever stood for.
Forty years on & Treasury can’t make 3% growth more than one quarter in twelve, and they still worship those clowns like the statistical confidence of their assertions is not worse than chance.
We need a Cass report on neoliberalism – it doesn’t fucking work you morons.
I’m glad 3 waters was scrapped. Here in Taranaki we are still owners of our water and waste ‘assets’ and still have control over their maintenance and repair. If they fuck up that is entirely on us.
Right now if we were under 3 Waters, every spending priority would be on Wellington and we, in New Plymouth would be paying for their shit
Just because you believe a lie does not make it true.
Is Simon Watts channeling Max Bradford with this LNG billion dollar fuckwittery
NZ isn’t a nation.
It is a group of people living within a welfare state paid for by taxes on a mixed economy based on house prices increasing forever.