Audience watching a colorful, glitch-effect presentation in a dimly lit room. A group of people is seated at desks on stage, with a large screen displaying text, including the name "Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor addressing the crowd at Vision for Wellington’s second event. Image: Joel MacManus

OPINIONPoliticsApril 15, 2025

Windbag: Vision for Wellington shows its blind spots

Wellington editor

Richard Taylor addressing the crowd at Vision for Wellington’s second event. Image: Joel MacManus

The political supergroup’s event about Wellington’s art scene involved lots of CEOs and very few artists.

Windbag is The Spinoff’s Wellington issues column, written by Wellington editor Joel MacManus. Subscribe to the Windbag newsletter to receive columns early.

I’ve been pretty sceptical about Vision for Wellington, the supergroup of wealthy and powerful Wellingtonians, ever since it launched with a glowing front page story in The Post. They’ve made absurd claims that their inherently political project is “non-political”. Sinead Boucher seems to have used Stuff as the group’s internal marketing department. Their star-studded debut event was devoid of vision and consisted mostly of angry retirees complaining about bike lanes.

Credit where credit’s due: the group’s second event was more interesting and constructive than the first (though that’s not saying much). “A Creative Conversation”, focused on Wellington’s art scene, was held on Thursday last week at Toi Whakaari in Newtown. It ran for nearly two-and-a-half hours, starting with a panel discussion followed by an audience brainstorming exercise. Throughout the evening, two people frantically jotted notes on whiteboards; Vision for Wellington has hired consulting firm PwC to collate its ideas and write its final “vision”.

The three panellists were impressive. Muralist and sculptor Ariki Whakataka Brightwell presented some of her pieces and discussed the challenges of finding workshop spaces. NZ Art Show director Carla Russell highlighted the importance of finding profitable models and working with the business sector. Wētā Workshop founder Richard Taylor brought out the Wētābot005, a Terminator-esque robot that was both awe-inspiring and terrifying. It remained on stage for most of the event, subtly lifting its arms and chest every few seconds as if it were breathing.

The audience was considerably smaller than the 1,000-strong crowd at the first event, with the 200-seat theatre about three-quarters full. Most of the audience members were individually invited because the group deemed them “important members of Wellington’s arts and creative community”.

When MC Simon Bowden asked how many of the audience were artists, about 10% raised their hands. When he asked how many had a second job to support their art, the number halved. There were plenty of chief executives and board directors who run arts organisations, but very few people who make art.

At the start of the brainstorming session, Bowden invited six early-career artists (the youngest people in the room by far) on stage to ask “provocations” for the crowd to discuss. The results were a mixed bag. The crowd suggested a council-funded role to help artists with administrative tasks, a city arts hub, and an artists-in-residency programme within government ministries.

One person raved about their recent visit to the British Museum and suggested, “What we really need is a museum that incorporates our music and our art” (a fascinating idea for the city Te Papa is in). Carolyn Henwood, a founding member of Circa Theatre, wanted to create a unified arts industry group in the vein of Beef + Lamb New Zealand or New Zealand Winegrowers. Richard Taylor suggested forming a commercial board to be “the Fonterra or Zespri of the arts world”.

When you put a bunch of board directors in a room to solve a problem, it’s not surprising that their idea is to create another corporate board. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the fundamental problem with the Vision for Wellington project so far. They’re the upper class, talking to the upper class. The people who will take Wellington’s art scene forward aren’t sitting in board meetings. They’re putting on grimy gigs at Valhalla and unhinged shows at BATS. They’re 21-year-old buskers, not 65-year-old CEOs.

Let’s ask the question no one at the Vision for Wellington event asked: what makes a city’s art scene great?

In 2022, researchers at Columbia University tried to answer that question with a study titled Towards quantifying the strength of music scenes using live event data. They used the number of live music shows per 100,000 people as a rough indicator to measure the strength of a local music scene. Then, they explored how it correlated with 28 socio-economic indicators.

The factors most strongly correlated with thriving music scenes included the number of performance spaces available, affordable rents, high population density of people aged 18-29, and high rates of public transit use, cycling and walking.

If up-and-coming artists are surrounded by their peers, have plenty of opportunities to perform, and can afford to survive with a part-time job, they have the best chance to develop their talent.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Wellington produced an enormous number of breakthrough artists (Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie, The Phoenix Foundation, Fat Freddy’s Drop, The Black Seeds, Fly My Pretties, Fur Patrol, Dai Henwood and Jo Randerson, to name a few). That’s because the growth conditions were ideal. There were twice as many performance venues operating, and rent was a hell of a lot cheaper.

In 2025, there are still plenty of cool people making interesting art (shoutout Dartz, Dateline and Maria Williams) but they’re doing it in an environment that makes it much harder to succeed.

Notes on the whiteboard that will be collated by PwC (Photo: Steve Cosgrove)

Richard Taylor spoke about live music as the nucleus of the art scene. “Youth culture gathers around the brightest lights,” he said. Young artists “deserve a home”, but Taylor said he was worried about the financial pressures they faced. He gets it. I’m not sure anyone else from Vision for Wellington does.

When an audience member made an impassioned plea for affordable housing – “If people can’t afford to live in the city, that’s the issue” – there was an awkward silence. Then, a couple of people started clapping (I joined in). Bowden hurriedly cut off the applause and moved on, insisting they were behind schedule and didn’t have time to dwell on housing. The event ran for another 75 minutes after that.

Maybe Bowden was worried that housing was too political. But these are political problems. Successive councils have created a housing shortage by introducing zoning changes that restricted the construction of new homes. They’ve made it more difficult for venues to operate by limiting opening hours and liquor licensing and cracking down on noise complaints.

Vision for Wellington, so far, has been unwilling or unable to grapple with the role the cost of living crisis plays in Wellington’s malaise. I suspect that’s because they don’t feel it.

Here’s my practical suggestion for Vision for Wellington: go talk to the E tū Musicians’ Union about its successful efforts to change the council’s noise control rules for venues. Find out what else they need and use your power to amplify their voices.

Then, go talk to A City for People, the young-people-led Yimby group that spearheaded the fight for zoning reform to allow more housing. Use your considerable wealth and influence to support property developers who want to build homes and oppose those who try to stop them. It would do a lot more good than another two-and-a-half-hour talkfest in a room full of CEOs.

Keep going!

A framed document titled "Resource Management Act 1991" is displayed against a picturesque hilly landscape with a view of the ocean.

Design: Liam Rātana

OPINIONĀteaApril 14, 2025

The resource management reform is a direct hit on te Tiriti

Nicki Wakefield

Guest writer

Design: Liam Rātana

While there’s broad agreement that the RMA needs fixing, there’s growing unease about what its replacement will prioritise – and who it will leave out.

Since 1991, the Resource Management Act has underpinned how we protect and use the whenua. It’s been the legal backbone of everything from subdivisions to sewage schemes — designed to promote “sustainable management of natural and physical resources”. It brought together councils, scientists, developers, communities and mana whenua to weigh decisions using the best available evidence.

It wasn’t perfect. But for more than three decades, it gave us a shared framework to balance development with environmental kaitiakitanga.

Under the Resource Management Act (RMA), most resource management decisions are made by local councils, guided by regional and district plans that reflect national direction and community values. If a proposed activity – like a new subdivision, farm expansion or wastewater discharge – might affect the environment, resource consent is often required. These consents are assessed against environmental standards, mātauranga Māori, local plans, and the potential impact on tangata whenua and the wider community. Mana whenua can be involved as affected parties, submitters, or in joint management roles.

While far from perfect in practice, this system provides a legal pathway for environmental and cultural concerns to be heard – and sometimes acted upon – before irreversible damage is done.

By the time of the 2023 election, it was clear the act’s days were numbered. Labour had just passed two laws – the Natural and Built Environment Act and the Spatial Planning Act – based on years of consultation and the 2020 Randerson Review. But National, Act and NZ First campaigned on scrapping those reforms and starting again.

Within its first 100 days, the coalition government delivered on that promise. The replacement laws were repealed, a new advisory group was formed, and the rhetoric ramped up: fewer consents, faster projects, and the “restoration” of property rights.

What we’ve heard since has been light on detail but heavy on ideology. Resource Management Act (RMA) reform minister Chris Bishop has promised a “radical” overhaul that cuts red tape and prioritises the enjoyment of private property. Many of the tools he’s mentioned – like spatial planning and environmental limits – are already part of the system. But there are some new elements such as a national compliance regulator, blanket zoning rules, and a proposed compensation scheme for landowners who lose value through regulation.

Quarries are heavily regulated under the current resource management settings (Photo: Supplied)

And then there’s the deletion of the Treaty clause.

This wasn’t a recommendation from the expert group. It didn’t come from Winston Peters’ ongoing review of Treaty clauses across 27 other laws. It came straight from Cabinet.

Māori development minister Tama Potaka temporarily forgot that detail when asked – forcing Bishop to clarify: “I don’t know what’s in Tama’s head,” he said, before claiming that generic Treaty clauses create “more legal risk”.

So far, there’s been no explanation of what exactly that risk is – or why te Tiriti, a constitutional foundation of this country, is being surgically removed from environmental law.

At the New Zealand Planning Institute’s conference in Waihōpai on March 28, Simon Court, the undersecretary to the minister overseeing the reforms, accused RMA decision-makers of “regulatory anxiety” – a supposed culture of caution, complexity and delay. The coalition’s solution? Simplify the system. Reduce what planners and councils are required to do. And, in his words, “close the doors to people with concerns”.

‘Become a member to help us deliver news and features that matter most to Aotearoa.’

Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

That isn’t reform. That’s exclusion.

Federated Farmers are thrilled. They’ve applauded the idea that councils might be forced to compensate landowners for environmental protections, reframing land and water as private commodities first and foremost.

Local Government New Zealand is cautiously supportive of simpler consenting and stronger central direction – so long as communities still get a voice.

Others are far more direct.

Rachel Arnott, Ngāti Ruanui kaiwhakahaere, says “this government has an ideological and political commitment to gut Tiriti-guaranteed rights of iwi, hapū and whānau”.

Graham Young, also of Ngāti Ruanui, calls it an effort to “trample key protections to the benefit of big business”.

A man in a suit speaks at a podium on a dimly lit stage, with a dark blue curtain backdrop. — Chris Bishop is leading the reform of how Aotearoa manages its resources (Photo: Property Council NZ)

Green MP Lan Pham, the party’s RMA spokesperson, warns the country is on track to “gift our most precious waterways to industry to make a quick buck”.

And all of this is happening as our environmental report card grows more dire. Nitrates in groundwater are rising, soil erosion is increasing, and climate change pressures are intensifying.

The government has promised two new bills to replace the RMA: a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act. They’re expected before the end of 2025 and will likely be rushed through before the next election.

And while there’s broad agreement that the RMA needs fixing, there’s growing unease about what this new framework will prioritise – and who it will leave out.

As parliamentary commissioner for the environment Simon Upton warned when Labour’s reforms were repealed, “Environmental management law that flip-flops following every general election will not be good for either our economy or our environment.”

If you’ve spent time in resource management, you’ll know that even the most basic protections for te taiao are hard-won. In just the past year:

Hapū fought to stop houses being built on wāhi tapu at Ōnoke, Whangārei.
A mass tuna kill in Mataura led to a rare sentencing of accountability.
A fast-tracked reclamation in Whangārei Harbour is cutting hapū off from a key stretch of coastline.

In each case, those resisting harm weren’t doing it for profit. They were doing it for whakapapa, for whenua, for future generations.

And despite the rhetoric, less than 1% of resource consent applications are declined. So much for a “culture of no”.

This new direction suggests something different: a system designed to serve those who are burdened – not by pollution or loss, but by inconvenience. A system that privileges profit over protection. That sees community values, mātauranga Māori and te Tiriti not as essential, but as obstacles.

Based on what we’ve seen, the guiding principle of this reform might as well be: “Let extraction proceed, undisturbed by best practice, local opposition, or anything that makes Aotearoa unique.”

But we can still demand better.

There is a chance to recentre this work in care, in evidence, in equity. To build a future-facing system that remedies the injustices of the past and protects what remains. That honours te Tiriti. That looks after our mokopuna – and their mokopuna – in a climate-uncertain world.

That’s what true reform should do.