Why Wellington should no longer be the capital of New Zealand

Thursday, 12 January 2023

Wellington exists because of a propaganda campaign, which led to it becoming the capital under questionable circumstances. Charlie Mitchell makes the case that Hamilton (that’s right) is a better bet.

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A long time ago, when the first batch of colonists squeezed through the Cook Strait and into Te Whanganui-a-Tara to occupy land they had bought sight unseen, some of Wellington’s first non-Māori residents were visibly upset.

They had been lied to.

Popular images of the new settlement, advertised widely in the UK, had exaggerated the amount of flat land, the size of the harbour, and the navigability of the Hutt River. Some were under the impression bananas would grow there.

It wasn’t accidental. It was the result of a propaganda campaign imagined by Edward Gibbon Wakefield while he sat in prison for abducting a child to be his wife.

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The foundation of modern Wellington was, to put it bluntly, a scam by the New Zealand Company – a group of property speculators – to sell land it didn’t own.

Its sloppiness was due, in part, to haste. “It had been expected by the Company that their new town would become the capital … it was certain that whoever owned the land on which it [the capital] was located stood to make a large profit,” wrote the historian David Hamer in an essay published in The Making of Wellington.

Many colonists, even those who were deceived, came to love Wellington because of – or in spite of – its bracing winds, its harsh topography and its at-times-thrilling precariousness.

But the city did not prosper. Auckland was made the capital, while Wellington was ravaged by one earthquake and nearly finished off by another.

By the early 1860s, its ailing economy relied on whaling, producing flax doormats, and the belief that its ascent to capital status was inevitable.

The gambit worked. Wellington, a dying city, achieved its founders’ great hope; it became the capital.

The question

It might come up as a cheeky question at a press conference, which the prime minister of the day will gamely bat away, or as a fleeting topic of discussion following a natural disaster.

Should Wellington really be the capital?

The question is treated as a passing whimsy; Capital cities don’t move, we think. They are gifts from our ancestors, immovable, like maunga in the breeze.

But why shouldn’t we consider it? Numerous countries have moved – or plan to – shift their capital cities, for economic, environmental or cultural reasons.

Capital status is a pact between a nation’s citizens and one of its population centres. It requires the city to safeguard the country’s civil service and protect its national cultural artefacts in exchange for the economic subsidy that comes with housing the seat of government. It is not a birthright, and what can be given can be taken away.

So, in the spirit of the new year and new beginnings, here is one case for why Aotearoa New Zealand should make its own new beginning: It should relocate its capital city.

The Australians chose poorly

It wasn’t completely irrational.

In the 1860s, an increasing majority of New Zealand’s population lived in the South Island, but Auckland retained significant cultural and political power.

This is a classic dilemma. Two big shots at the bar are threatening biffo, so instead of litigating their concerns, you chuck them both out.

While the logic of a central capital was sound, the decision-making process was not. To determine where exactly in the central hinterlands the politicians would be forced to sail, the Governor – rather than seek any public mandate – assembled a commission of three Australians to render their verdict.

A brief digression. In their search, these men would have canvassed the remote, rocky south coast of Wellington.

More than a century later, on one of these beaches, a scientist discovered a sea slug.

This slug, less than half the size of a fingernail, lives deep in gravel, scraping rotting seaweed from the rocks for sustenance with its tiny jaws. It likely cannot see, or hear, anything happening on the surface; it is forever cloistered in a tiny world of ocean rubble.

I believe this slug was equally qualified to choose New Zealand’s capital city.

One of the Australians, Francis Murphy, was a former sheep farmer turned politician known for having few observable convictions. Joseph Docker, another politician, had been a surgeon and was once described as “given to old fogeyism and a desire to retard rather than advance good legislation”. Ronald Gunn, a prison warden turned botanist, was fondly remembered for his brilliant recall of the plant life of Tasmania.

Respectable people of their time? Sure. Far-thinking urban planners? Certainly not.

We might have more faith in their process if they’d written it down. What came to be the first commission of inquiry in New Zealand remains, to this day, the shortest: Their ruling came in the form of a two-page letter that briefly outlined their vague criteria but no actual justification for why they chose Wellington.

Because most of the listed criteria were harbour-related, Wellington’s very good harbour – basically a sheltered inland lake – was likely the reason, combined with its central position.

Few of their criteria concerned the basic liveability of the place: the steep topography, the villainous wind gusts, the suspiciously frequent natural disasters. And why would it? They didn’t have to live there.

Our criteria for today’s capital would be different. It doesn’t need beautiful forests to raze for timber, or a need to defend itself from seaward invasion; it might not need a harbour at all. Instead, we might prioritise resilience against disasters, the capacity for urban growth or even a pleasant climate.

The centrality argument may have made sense then, but flight has made geographic distance irrelevant. Today, most New Zealanders live north of Te Awamutu, meaning Wellington is a considerable distance from the country’s population centre.

The argument in 1865 was tenuous; now, even that doesn’t apply.

A mythical city

Over a decade ago, Wellington was labelled “the coolest little capital in the world”. The city shrugged off the compliment, and we never heard about it again.

Of course not.

It’s worth remembering how this phrase came about. It was a subheading in a listicle produced by Australian guidebook slingers Lonely Planet, which named Wellington the fourth-best city in the world to visit in 2011.

The comment was widely covered in the media and gained a second life when then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – who happened to visit Wellington the following week – repeated the phrase in a press conference.

The comment clearly resonated, and there’s nothing wrong with celebrating your city. Some of us have never been described as “cool”; it must be exhilarating.

But here is the cynical take. Lonely Planet’s business model relies on flattery.

Just a week later, another of its listicles said Auckland should be the capital city of New Zealand. In 2018, it hedged its own description by calling Wellington “one of the coolest little capitals in the world”. In 2021, Auckland topped the same list of best cities to visit, and few people cared.

Wellington, in 2011, treated this listicle entry like a religious text inscribed on a stone tablet. The head of the city’s tourism agency said the designation “comes with it responsibilities”, with the sincerity of a student asked to look after the classroom while the teacher nips off to the bathroom.

As a marketing consultant recently told Wellington NZ, cool cities don’t insist on their own coolness.

This speaks to a broader characteristic of the city: One that champions pithy myth-making above competency. It is even imprinted on the city's own coat of arms, which includes the Latin phrase “Suprema a situ” – supreme by position.

Since the beginning, when the New Zealand Company lied to colonists about its flat land and banana-growing climate, Wellington has simultaneously insisted upon its own excellence while failing to deliver core services.

There was understandable outrage when, a few years after “coolest little capital”, then prime minister Sir John Key produced a less flattering moniker for Wellington – “dying”. He quickly walked it back, submitting in its place “under sustained pressure”.

“Dying” wasn’t the best description. It implies an uncontrollable force happening against one’s will.

I’d offer a different word. “Languishing”.

On various metrics, Wellington city’s economy is struggling relative to other cities, despite being generously subsidised by the public service that provides a pool of well-paying jobs tasked by people who, in many cases, are forced to live there to work.

The Wellington region was recently overtaken by Canterbury as the second-largest regional GDP.

In the last five years, Wellington city’s annual economic growth has slowed, falling behind the rest of New Zealand. Data from Infometrics shows that Wellington’s average annual GDP growth since 2017 has been lower than many other New Zealand cities. That is despite a 26% increase in the GDP of its largest industry, public administration, largely due to the pandemic.

Wellington’s productivity is lower now than it was five years ago, and between 2021-22 the city lost proportionally more of its population to outward migration than any territorial authority (TA) except for the Buller district on the West Coast.

It’s not that Wellington is an economic basket case, or “dying”: It’s simply falling behind other cities that face the same macroeconomic conditions and without the capital city subsidy.

This may not be permanent; Wellington’s poor economic performance is a fairly recent phenomenon.

More problematic is the city’s culture.

Wellington, too often, chooses to be small and hostile. It guards its position like Smaug, the miserly dragon from The Hobbit, who the city appropriately celebrates with a statue in the airport.

A housing crisis has afflicted most of the country, but it has been most acute in Wellington, the city founded by property speculators.

Wellington city, in 2021 and 2022, was in the bottom quarter of all New Zealand territorial authorities for consenting new housing per head of population, worse than any city not named Dunedin or Invercargill.

Nationally, new housing in those years boomed to the highest point in nearly half a century. Wellington city was one of 10 local authorities (out of 68) to have dropped its consenting rate for new housing from the two years before the boom.

This miserable effort is inflated by building on the city’s outskirts. In the last 12 months, the inner city suburbs of Thorndon, Aro Valley, Wellington Central and Kelburn (with a combined population of more than 14,000) approved between them 10 new dwellings.

Yes, Wellington is not blessed with open green space. It cannot unfurl a sprawling empire on to the river plains like the mighty Selwyn District.

But it chose a district plan that allowed a jumble of townhouses on prime central city land. A majority of councillors didn’t need to sabotage the city’s spatial plan – which itself was likely short of what is required to house the future population – by putting up barriers to high-density housing along a train line, where many of those people were expected to go.

This engineered housing shortage has grossly inflated rents and house prices. Despite a significant drop, the average house price in Wellington city remains above $1m, according to CoreLogic data. Unlike other cities, where house prices vary, all parts of the city – central, north, west, east, and south – were above $1m.

This is an issue predominantly affecting young people, and it’s a self-reinforcing problem. Housing is unaffordable, so demand drops; demand is low, so there is no need to increase housing supply; round and round we go, while the next generation of Wellingtonians are blown between damp gullies in search of a rundown villa they can’t afford to rent, knowing they may struggle to ever afford a home in the city.

Those who can afford a home will pay to address decades of infrastructure neglect. When Wellington became the capital, it was “routinely damned as the dirtiest town in the Colony”, historian Redmer Yska wrote in his biography of the city.

That was due to the raw sewage washing through the streets, which was such a threat to public health it was blamed for killing Lyttelton MP George Macfarlan​, who died of a gastro illness a year into his first term.

Today, Wellington’s creaking water infrastructure is equally infamous. It manifests through poos and wees erupting on to the city’s streets or into the harbour with comical regularity, and looming water restrictions after the wettest winter in recent memory.

The average water pipe in Wellington was built around a decade before the average New Zealander was born, and parts of its most important pipe have not been replaced since 1899. In 2021, a third of Wellington’s pipes were in poor or very poor condition, worse than any other New Zealand city; the next ranked was 11%.

Like the economy, this could change. But the capital’s failures on these fronts have compounded over many years, and have coalesced in a way that makes the city unaffordable and hostile to new people.

A capital city doesn’t need to be a glittering metropolis. It doesn’t even need to be cool. But it does need to provide housing and opportunity for the public service workers, and their families, who are obliged to live there.

If being little and cool and brimming with character is what Wellington wants, fine. A city has a right to choose its own destiny.

But the rest of the country doesn’t need to subsidise it. A city that won’t accommodate its share of the growing population does not need a disproportionate amount of transport funding. A city that sees its network of mouldy villas as a living museum does not need the nation’s actual treasures, too.

The earthquake thing

While some issues may be temporary, one is not.

Wellington is not merely at risk of earthquakes, it is the most earthquake-hazard exposed area in a seismically active country.

Wellington city’s boundary contains at least seven active faults, one of which is the Hikurangi Subduction Zone, capable of producing not only one of the largest earthquakes experienced by human beings but also a large tsunami.

The Wellington fault, which trails just behind Parliament, is itself capable of producing a large earthquake with significant ground shaking.

These faults are statistically unlikely to generate large earthquakes in the next 50 years (the most likely is the Hikurangi, with a roughly 1 in 4 chance in the next 50 years. The Wellington Fault has a 10% likelihood in the next 100 years).

But earthquakes will happen. There is no scientific reason that two highly active faults will stop producing large earthquakes because we arrived and quietly hoped they wouldn’t. If the timeline for Wellington remaining the capital is open-ended, the likelihood of our capital being affected by earthquakes becomes inevitable.

This isn’t unique, and we can point to other capitals exposed to earthquake risk – Tokyo, Mexico City, Tehran, Bucharest – and say Wellington, the soon-to-be fourth-largest city in the world’s 126th largest country, which requires seven years to build a library and wants to give heritage protection to a disused oil tank, would bounce back from disaster like Tokyo would.

In reality, a large Wellington Fault earthquake could take out the already fragile train network for nearly three years. It would have catastrophic economic consequences, even with significant investment in resilience. There is less modelling about damage from a large tsunami, but – based purely on suspicion – a tsunami would be economically undesirable.

Even the state sees this as a problem.

In 2014, the government produced a plan for the continuity of Parliament in the event of a disaster in Wellington. It involves helicoptering the politicians to a naval base in Devonport, on Auckland’s North Shore, where they’ll be issuing dictates while crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the navy gym.

There’s a simple way to avoid this. If we were choosing where to put our seat of government, most of us would not choose the most geologically imperilled city available to us.

Now, thanks to more than a century of scientific advances, we have information the early capital city-deciders did not.

There are better alternatives

In the 1860s, the choice of capital city was constrained by many factors which no longer exist.

Today, it could be anywhere. Like some countries, we could build an entirely new city, or we could reward an existing community with the generous economic boost of housing the public service.

There are reasons to be cautious about traditional alternatives. Auckland has struggled to accommodate existing growth and Christchurch is likely too far from the population centre to be viable.

The best choice, on paper, is Hamilton.

It will overtake Wellington as the third-largest city and is 90 minutes from both the country’s economic centre and its largest port. It is connected to both, and Wellington, by rail.

It has accommodated population growth on its fringes, and its airport has room to expand. Its quake-hazard risk is low (but not zero). It is already the closest city to the median person, and it’s more ethnically diverse than Wellington city, which has become increasingly European.

Moving the capital would be expensive. But what better way to recognise present-day Aotearoa than a nation-building project to transform Kirikiriroa into a modern, prosperous capital that is not merely supreme by position, but supreme by ambition?