The Wellington City Council’s Facebook page recently featured a post on the flowers its gardeners had planted on Lambton Quay. More than one comment bemoaned the council “wasting money” on wild poppies when it should be fixing water pipes.
It reminded me of a quote often attributed to Emma Goldman: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.
Apparently, the anarchist revolutionary never said it but, like the political slogan bread and roses, it’s memorable because it sums up a basic truth: a good life requires both necessities and simple pleasures.
There’s a meanness, often on display in letters to the editor columns, that’s a kind of inversion of the Goldman “quote”: if public moneys are being spent there is to be no dancing, no flowers, no joy, no fun …
The letters invariably speak of “taxpayer” or “ratepayer” dollars, and the likes of flowers, bike lanes, and library and swimming pool upgrades are dismissed as “nice to haves.”
The guiding principle is permanent public sector austerity.
Finance minister Nicola Willis, when scrapping the proposal to buy new Cook Strait ferries, described it as a Ferrari rather Toyota Corolla option. Critics were quick to point out that they wouldn’t want to cross the Cook Strait in a Toyota Corolla – but the idea of crossing in it in a supercar is no less absurd.
What was truly striking about the metaphor is that Willis couldn’t find a public transport comparison of excessive public spending in her storehouse of neo-liberal cliches.
The scrapped Korean hybrid ferries are much more like a Mercedes coach or a high-end Hyundai bus than a Ferrari.
It’s illuminating to compare the value of much public investment to that in the private sphere – particularly considering the oft-heard plea for governments and councils to be run more like households.
Two examples of the extraordinarily good value of public investment from my childhood growing up in the Wellington’s northern suburbs spring to mind: The English Electrics and the Khandallah swimming pool.
Photo from Wikipedia
The first English Electric DM/D class trains were introduced on the Johnsonville line in 1938 – the same year Volkswagen Beetles rolled off a production line for the first time. Extra units – as they were known – were added in 1942 and 1946 as other suburban lines were electrified. The trains were finally retired in 2012.
In household terms, it’s as if families buying their first car in the 1930s and 40s held off replacing them until the 21st century.
You’d need to carry out an exercise in forensic accountancy – that’s well beyond my resources or capabilities – to illustrate just what extraordinary value for money those trains delivered but their value goes well beyond simply the economic.
For nearly nine decades, Wellingtonians have been commuting to work in EVs – the electric trains, trolley buses retired in 2017, and now electric buses.
The new Korean-built Matangi trains and the electric buses stop Wellington streets from grinding to an over-congested halt in a sustainable way.
I’ve got a photo of my mum – aged eight or nine – with her cousin Miriam that must have been taken around the end of the war enjoying a picnic at Khandallah Park. No doubt they had enjoyed a dip at the park’s swimming pool – built by locals in 1925.
One of my earliest memories is being taken to the pool as a preschooler by my mum. I spent hours and hours there with friends during my teenage years and took my own kids there for swims when they were little.
WCC Facebook
Surrounded by bush, the pool is much as it was when it was built 99 years ago. Some solar panels have taken a little of the bite from the unheated pool but that’s about it in terms of upgrades.
This week The Post reported that it might be grassed over.
That would be a crime. The Council had been planning to spend $11.7 million upgrading it. That’s been scrapped as part of a package of cost-saving proposals that could see some suburban libraries close and opening hours reduced.
The $11.7 million upgrade sounds a lot but based on that initial investment it could well be benefitting generations of kids over the next 99 years.
A few years ago, the then ANZ boss David Hisco hit the headlines when it was revealed that heating his outdoor pool in Auckland was a major contributor to the $100,000 upkeep of his mansion.
There were, however, no calculations of cost per swims, carbon emissions, waste of water, or comparison of what the money could have been spent on if only it wasn’t being wasted on “nice to haves”.
“Nice to haves” is reserved for the things we enjoy as a community and never seems to apply to private sector excess – be it private jets, super yachts, or super cars.
It’s difficult to gauge how well or badly the Wellington City Council is spending my contribution to the rates bill. But if you were to ask me what a private business would charge for the annual use of libraries, public parks, the sewerage system, drinking water, art galleries etc. etc. I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t a hell of a lot more than what I’m paying now.
My library card alone delivers me subscriptions to the NZ Herald, Ha’aretz, The Economist, the New York Review of Books, two video screening services, e and audio books, not to mention traditional books.
Manufacturing meanness has become an industry.
The Taxpayers Union – the only union I know of that’s dedicated to opposing solidarity wherever it sees it – is tireless in its promotion of public austerity. It claims to have more than 200,000 supporters, with 80% of its income coming from people donating less than $1000 a year.
So, it’s unfair to dismiss it as simply a tool of the 1%, but the TPU – and other organisations like it – are dedicated to a low tax, minimal state that largely benefits the rich.
It’s a formidable campaigning machine. As Newsroom reported last year:
“Between August 1 and election day, it paid for polling at the national and electorate level, issued almost 100 press releases, hosted seven political debates, published four policy reports, started a petition, and drafted alternative legislation.”
The TPU employs 18 full-time staff and its executive director Jordan Williams is also chair of the World Taxpayers Association – part of the Atlas Network of right-wing lobby groups.
If we want to live in a community that celebrates and enjoys public spaces and facilities, we need to counter the politics of meanness with the politics of solidarity.
From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based freelance journalist
Good post, Jeremy.
What price can we put on healthy, vibrant, welcoming, and supportive communities? What are they worth? We can calculate the cost of a pool but what dollar value should we place on what flows from a well-used public facility or service? Should we have to quantify it? We can't calculate the financial cost of loneliness. There's no chart that illustrates the contribution to the national GDP of social connection and cohesion, but we understand how important they are.
There's as good group of Kiwis on Substack and a raft of good ideas worth clinging onto from like-minded people elsewhere. Conversations create space, public conversations create public space, and public space provides a place for communities to come together. We might live on islands but we are not islands.
Impolite to mention it here, but Ghost might be a better platform for a collaboration. Individuals would continue publishing on their own sites but there could be a hub where people could feast on a smorgasbord of independent, fresh, Aotearoa Pacific content. (As you've probably noticed I'm might well be Substack's least productive writer. This is me thinking out loud about how that might change.) The paradox of the web is that it is both a great atomiser and a community builder. But creating communities beyond friend groups or shouty Twitter tribes is difficult.