With the local body elections in October, a long-awaited upgrade of Courtenay Place, and big changes for water, housing and the economy, it’s set to be another dramatic year for the capital city.

The Golden Mile

Conservative city councillors made a last-minute attempt in November to scrap the Golden Mile upgrade from the council’s long-term plan. Mayor Tory Whanau considered the streetscape upgrade a bottom line and refused to budge. This story has played out countless times over the past nine years: it’s cancelled, it narrowly survives, and the city kicks off yet another round of consultation, debate and delays.

Construction is supposed to start this year, but we’ve heard that many times before. At this point, I won’t believe it until there are jackhammers in the ground. Wellington City Council is currently negotiating the construction contract and says it will provide further information and a detailed design in February. The works will begin at the corner of Courtenay Place and Cambridge Terrace.

With the October local elections, the construction timing will be crucial.  Voters tend to hate roadworks, but they see the benefits once completed. Whanau has tied her brand to the project, so she will be hoping it’s at least partially complete before ballot papers go out.

Housing

Wellington City Council’s most significant decision in 2024 was the new District Plan, which revolutionised the city’s housing rules, allowing more high-density apartments and townhouses.

In 2025, we’ll see some of those changes become reality, especially if interest rates continue to fall and property developers have more capital to play with. One example is Forma Group, which is planning several new developments that would have been impossible under the previous District Plan. Its first project is Mayfair in Mt Victoria, a six-storey apartment building that will add 32 new homes to a suburb that desperately needs them.

The anti-density group Live Wellington is strongly opposed to the development. “There is a significant impact on those who already live in the area – through shade, increased traffic, loss of privacy and impact on the suburb’s character. Basically, the amenity of existing owners is being stolen by this development,” the group’s spokesperson Phil Kelliher said.

Live Wellington has filed a judicial review against Wellington City Council and RMA reform minister Chris Bishop, seeking to overturn key parts of the new District Plan. The case will be heard in the high court on February 24.

Bike lanes

Thought we were done with this nonsense? No way. In 2025, Facebook comments will remain filled with ungrammatical and fact-free rants about bike lanes destroying businesses and causing famine and plague. Commuters are getting used to the new road layouts, and the statistics show that bike lanes have led to a significant increase in cycling, but the rage-based opposition isn’t going anywhere.

Two significant new cycling connections are under way and will be completed soon. A new bike lane in Berhampore will link the Island Bay cycleway and the Newtown cycleway, bringing the southern connection’s total length to six kilometres through some of Wellington’s most populated suburbs. The second new bike lane is the Karori Connection, which will extend the Botanic Gardens cycleway to Karori, giving another 20,000 residents the ability to commute to the city on a protected route. This has been Wellington’s most controversial cycleway since Island Bay in 2016, especially since Karori is a suburb that skews older and more car-centric, so the responses will be interesting to watch.

Public sector job cuts

The coalition government has cut 9,520 public sector jobs so far, according to the most recent RNZ tally. Most of these cuts have been in Wellington, which has taken a severe toll on the local economy. There are more cuts expected in 2025, including at the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Department of Internal Affairs, the Defence Force and Te Whatu Ora.

Water reform

Wellington City Council’s new long term plan includes the biggest-ever investment in water infrastructure, with $1.2 billion in capital funding and $676 million in operation funding. But even that is barely enough to scratch the surface. Truly addressing the problem will require more substantial reforms. Greater Wellington Regional Council chair Daran Ponter has been working with councils around the Wellington region to develop a new water services organisation that aligns with the government’s Local Water Done Well policy.

The new model is expected to be revealed to the public for consultation early this year, and councils are expected to present their plans for approval by September. A new water entity could shift significant debt from council books and lead to cheaper rates for residents, but getting all five Wellington councils on the same page has proven challenging.

Lobby groups

Lobby group Vision for Wellington continues to pick up high-profile endorsements, including Avatar director James Cameron, while other members have been desperately texting National Party ministers in an attempt to influence Wellington City Council decisions. It’s not clear yet what the right-leaning Vision for Wellington’s plans are for the local elections: will it endorse a mayoral candidate, will it spend money to support a candidate or a position, or will it continue its background approach of privately lobbying its allies in government? The group will host its first public event on February 19, which should offer some insight.

But Vision for Wellington isn’t the only newly-formed group looking to swing the local elections. Conspiracy-aligned Better Wellington, founded by whaling lobbyist Glenn Inwood, is ramping up its social media presence on Facebook and Twitter and isn’t afraid to get mucky or misleading. The group seems to have lined up behind councillor and mayoral candidate Ray Chung. Another new conservative group, Concerned Ratepayers Wellington Region is already holding public meetings and organising campaigns.

On the progressive side, Cycle Wellington and other urbanist groups (such as Urbanerds) have become increasingly powerful and will undoubtedly have some influence on the local body elections, though it’s unclear what form that may take.  And, of course, there are the two active local political parties, Labour and the Greens, which are currently in the process of recruiting and vetting potential candidates and developing campaign strategies.

As parliamentary staff start to read through thousands of submissions on the Treaty principles bill, Shanti Mathias explores how submitting became the go-to way to engage with politics – and asks whether it makes a difference. 

While the exact number is currently being confirmed, it seems almost certain that submissions on the Treaty principles bill will total more than 300,000, a new record for levels of public engagement during the select committee process. It’s the latest example of an increasingly popular way for regular people to participate in politics: submitting on bills before they become law. 

“The Foreshore and Seabed Act under the Helen Clark Labour government received over 4,000 written submissions, and that was considered a huge number of submissions at the time,” says Eddie Clark, a senior lecturer in law at Victoria University of Wellington, who specialises in how the public engages with the government. “Yet that’s just 2% of the submissions expected for the Treaty principles bill.” 

What has changed in the two decades since the Foreshore and Seabed Act was passed in 2004? A rise in submissions isn’t simply because legislation has become more controversial. While the Treaty principles bill and the fast track legislation (27,000 submissions) attracted large volumes, other issues with similar degrees of possible political controversy didn’t: the high-profile law that outlawed displaying gang patches in public attracted only 164 submissions, and the Immigration Act amendment to give further oversight over potential mass arrivals of people seeking asylum in New Zealand on a boat received just 322 submissions. 

Nor is the increase in submissions due to leftwing, online groups being mobilised against the National-led government. The current record holder for number of submissions is the ban on conversion therapy, passed by the Labour government in 2022. 

Accessibility is one factor, of course. Almost all submissions are now made online, rather than through the post, and it’s more straightforward to open a new tab and type into a box than it is to write on paper, find an envelope and stamp and locate a post box (especially as New Zealand Post services become less frequent and more expensive.) “A one-paragraph comment saying ‘don’t pass this bill and here’s why’ can take five minutes to submit,” Clark says. “The barriers to engagement are lower.” 

To him, the investment parliament has made in making the digital submission process nearly seamless is a good thing, even if the thousands of Treaty principles bill submissions stretched the IT systems. “Democracy isn’t just what happens at an election – it’s important for people to be civically engaged outside of elections,” Clark says.

Submissions are made to select committees, which are smaller panels of MPs from all parliamentary parties whose makeup reflects the ratio of parties in parliament. After its first reading, a piece of legislation is assigned to a topical select committee (the Treaty principles bill to the Justice Committee, the fast-track bill to the Environment Committee, and so on). The MPs receive feedback from the public and concerned departments, and compose a report of proposed amendments and further information about the issue that is presented to all of parliament before the second reading. The committee doesn’t have the final say – for example, many of the final changes to the fast-track law were added through an amendment paper after the select committee stage, which is also how a controversial prohibition order addition was made to the gang patch law. 

Increasingly, submissions play a role in broader politicking, as political parties, NGOs and activist groups try to make their voices heard – which is why these groups will often make up templates for submissions, contacting supporters and encouraging them to follow the templates.

Traditionally, submissions were considered to be a way to inform the select committee considering a bill about aspects of an issue that may not have been thought about, giving the politicians more detail and ideas to contribute to future iterations of the bill when they report back to the rest of parliament. Clark says that submissions have started to resemble a petition, a way for people to express their opinions about an issue, rather than necessarily engage with the actual wording of the proposed law. In 1985, 800,000 people (many of the signatures doubled up or discredited) signed a petition against the Homosexual Law Reform Bill that made gay sex legal; today, that might have taken the form of hundreds of thousands of submissions instead.  

“Parties sometimes treat [submissions] as a really expensive Stuff poll,” Clark says. “It’s not unimportant – it does give you an indication of extremes of public feeling – but there sometimes isn’t a lot of information when many of the submissions are in form templates.” In speeches supporting a bill or opposing it, politicians will often mention submission numbers to back up their position, Clark points out – even if numbers alone aren’t that telling. 

Submissions aren’t like votes: not every one is equal, and more submissions against or for a particular bill won’t necessarily make it more likely to pass or fail, especially if the bill is supported by a governing party. Form submissions create volume, but they don’t raise new points, meaning these submissions will be considered together, rather than based on number. “Even if you’ve reworded a form submission a bit, if you’re saying the same thing in the same way as other submissions, it’ll just go into a repeat pile,” Clark says. Individually written, unique submissions, especially those raised by subject matter experts or leaders of relevant organisations, might have more heft. 

For example, as part of the university’s role as a “critic and conscience” of society, Clark submitted on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill, suggesting specific wording that included examples of what constituted a conversion practice – language that made it into the final version of the law. “There are some submissions you can make where you can see the throughput, especially if you suggest drafting changes to the language of the bill.” Nearly 70% of the submissions for the conversion therapy ban were templates from activist groups, while 38,900 were written individually. “The unique submissions were all read and analysed, and formed the basis of our consideration of matters in this bill,” the select committee report reads.

On a logistical level, a huge volume of submissions creates extra work for parliamentary staff who support select committees. It’s not possible for every member of the select committee to read all submissions – your words might not end up in front of the eyeballs of a member of parliament, but will be read by someone. This is a huge amount of work, especially because the Office of the Clerk has a fixed amount of funding that is used for reading through exceptionally high volumes of submissions, on top of its normal work. 

There’s every sign that the enthusiasm for participating will continue. Thanks to some social media campaigns, more than 20,000 submissions were lodged during the consultation period for a proposed Regulatory Standards Bill, which hasn’t even been drafted or introduced to parliament yet. “Usually it’s just 20 nerds like me whose job it is to think and write about the law who submit on things like that,” Clark says. The calls to submit emphasised potential harmful impacts of the as-yet-untabled bill. 

While it creates extra work, there is widespread agreement that public engagement in legislation is ultimately a good thing. “Even people who don’t support my bill appear to be supporting the idea of mass participation in what the Treaty means in 2025. I think that is very, very exciting,” David Seymour told Stuff as submissions on his bill closed. Clark agrees. The volume of submissions might not make a direct impact on a bill the governing party has already promised not to support past its second reading, but participating in democracy is a win in itself. “You don’t have to be an expert for your feedback on a bill to be useful,” says Clark. “There are always things officials don’t know, and we’ve made it easier to have a say. That doesn’t mean your perspective will win, but engaging with the substance of lawmaking is incredibly important for a healthy democracy.”