Green Councillors should not get away with asset sales
Council votes on selling the airport shares.
Wellington has a lot on its plate. You don’t need to live or have ever set foot in Wellington to hear about this perpetual crisis we’re in - doomed, dead, failing, apparently wading through shit every morning. I haven’t seen it, but if firstname bunchofnumbers on x dot com says it then it must be true.
This kind of sentiment has been parrotted across the country by talkback radio listeners because Wellington’s perceived failure, in their eyes, is evidence of the left’s failure and the Green Party that owes much of its success to Wellington voters. But the truth of it is, Wellington is being set up to fail.
Whatever they say out there in talkback radio land, Wellingtonians have had a lot of buy-in for some sort of vision espoused by the Independent but Green-endorsed Mayor Tory Whanau. In 2022, every Mayoral candidate was pledging to fix the pipes, but we trusted a Tory Whanau-led council, at least more than we did a Paul Eagle or Andy Foster-led council, to address the problem with competency and without resorting to the same austerity that got us into this mess. We reasserted that mandate by electing two Green MPs in the general elections, and Geordie Rogers in this year’s by-election. Whatever you might think about it, the Green Party has tapped into Wellingtonians’ collective desire to see a proactive left-wing government.
Geordie Rogers and other Councillors speak at Unions Wellington "Keep the Airport Ours" forum
But on Thursday 30 May, two Green councillors showed us what their vision and promises were worth.
On Budget Day, while tens of thousands were out protesting the budget and the attacks on Tino Rangatiratanga, I was over the hill, in Bargaining at one of my sites in the Wairarapa, checking my phone during our adjournments for updates on a lesser-known local issue - the council’s discussions about the future of Wellington Airport. By the end of the day, I’d learned that the Wellington City Council had voted 10 to 8 in favour of selling the council’s 34% share in Wellington Airport.
While the bulk of votes in favour of privatisation came from right wing councillors - Dianne Calvert, Nicola Young, Tim Brown and the like - the sale would not have gone through without Tory Whanau, who has been pushing this from the beginning, or without the deciding vote from Laurie Foon, a Green-affiliated and endorsed councillor who represents the Paekawakawa/Southern Ward where I live. As she will tell you at length, and repeat like a mantra for the rest of her life, she didn’t want to do it. She felt really bad about it.
I won’t deny councillors were put in a difficult position. The dodgy behaviour of council staff has been well-covered already - the lack of transparency, threats of individual legal action against councillors behind closed doors, and threats to pull money out of other important public projects. But at the end of the day, the votes have been cast, and the betrayal stings just as hard.
30 years from now, no one’s going to care that councillors were in a hostile environment, or that they felt really bad about selling public assets, just as I don’t give a fuck today how councillors felt back in the 90s about selling its parking buildings to Wilson, or selling bus services. No one cares how the agents of the Crown felt about selling the other 66% of Wellington Airport shares to Infratil, or other state-owned enterprises through the 80s and 90s up until today. It doesn’t matter who it is that seals the deal for privatising public services and enterprises. It doesn’t matter why they do it, if they’re left, or right, or anywhere in between. It’s the legacy of these decisions that matters.
There is only one Airport in Wellington City, and until the beautiful dream of high speed interregional passenger rail becomes a reality, air travel is not going away any time soon. That 34% isn't a majority, but it gives the council a lot of power. Handing full control and ownership to private companies will mean less accountability, and worse outcomes for workers and the environment, and many of us will remember that it was Green-endorsed councillors who had the deciding votes in that outcome.
The people in this city have long memories. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles remember the sell-offs of council housing and car parks, and maybe that’s why the city is so overwhelmingly opposed to the sale. 74%, according to the Unions Wellington poll. A majority in every ward. The highest majority, 84%, in Laurie Foon’s ward.
So while councillors were letting themselves get led astray by an agenda of privatisation, despite public opposition, us unionists and environmental activists saw the writing on the wall. We had to pick ourselves up, dust off our banners, get a fresh batch of campaign t-shirts printed, and remind our elected politicians again why asset sales are bad.
Unions Wellington and supporters turn out for “Keep the Airport Ours” public submission.
I’ve come to have a good idea of the pressures facing council and councillors, but we need to remember that neoliberalism and privatisation is not something that just comes out of nowhere. It comes out of crisis, out of a period of pressure, mismanagement, and declining public trust and confidence in the state to effectively manage these enterprises and services.
Privatisation comes to us wrapped up in a bow of rational justification, and golden promises that private ownership will be better for us all. We should have learned by now that they’re selling us snake oil. And the Green Party, which traces its whakapapa to Alliance, that broke from Labour on these very issues, should know this most of all.
When the public good and long term benefit is bargained away to address short term crises, it’s workers, the environment, the people who live here who have to pay the price, while private companies reap the rewards, and then we end up back in another crisis a few years down the track.
When we give an inch to capitalism, it takes a mile. Mass privatisation has taken so much from us, and we’re facing enough claw-backs on our assets and public services from the central government. Schools and healthcare are being driven to a state that privatisation will be the proposed solution in a few years. We don’t need this from Green councillors. What we need is people with political willpower not to buckle to the pressure that capitalism pushes on them, and be uncompromising in retaining public ownership, because it’s only inevitable if they allow it to be.
We’ve seen councillors like Nurredin Abduraman exemplify how this is done, showing principled opposition to the sale from the beginning, alongside his Labour-backed colleagues who had a firm mandate from their local branch preventing them from repeating their party’s past mistakes, or as some might call them, betrayals. We’ve seen Green councillor Nīkau Wi Neera, and our former-councillor-now-MP Tamatha Paul, who both initially voted to put the sale out for consultation, hear the unions and the public’s response and stand on the right side of history against the sale. These are examples to follow. If our left-wing politicians aren’t following this example, and are not accountable to the public, workers, and their own party’s left wing policies, then they don’t deserve our backing.
Against the rising tide of far right politics, the enclosure of public assets, the attacks on Māori sovereignty, public services and workers’ rights, we need our chosen representatives to hold firm to left wing principles and show political bravery in the face of pressure, because if we allow our so-called left-wing councillors to keep giving in, and not be held accountable to those who endorsed them, campaigned for them, and elected them, we’ll end up left with nothing.
Kate McIntyre is a jaded millennial, union organiser and socialist who has lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara her whole life. She is a committee member of Unions Wellington - the local affiliates council of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions - which has led the campaign to “Keep the Airport Ours”.