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PoliticsSeptember 29, 2023

It’s happening: There’s finally construction on Wellington’s Golden Mile 

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The revitalisation of the city centre that Wellington has been debating for years is finally actually happening. Joel MacManus explains what that means.

There’s a handful of road cones and some tradies hanging around Grey Street this morning, and it’s possibly the best thing to happen in Wellington since Elijah Wood pissed in the Bucket Fountain. After years of shitfighting, the first piece of construction on the Golden Mile has officially begun. 

It’s not much, just some new road markings and some footpaths being dug up to put in mobility ramps. But it’s worth celebrating, because getting to this point has been exhausting. Wellington has faced a never-ending onslaught of debates and reports and consultations and angry pictures of shop owners with their arms crossed. At times it felt like nothing would ever happen. 

The Golden Mile is the very centre of Wellington’s retail and hospitality economy, but it’s become shabby and dilapidated. It has been in desperate need of an upgrade for years. Wellington needs its mojo back, and this could be the city’s best hope. 

What is the Golden Mile?

The Golden Mile is not golden, nor is it a mile. It’s called Golden because it’s the financial and economic centre of Wellington, and it’s called a Mile for no good reason at all.

The Golden Mile is 2.43 kilometres (around 1.5 miles) long, and because I refuse to acknowledge the imperial system, that is the term I will be using from here on out. 

A rendering of the Golden 2.43km changes on Courtenay Place

The Golden 2.43 kilometres is four connecting streets, each of which have a slightly different vibe and purpose: 

  1. Lambton Quay is the business district. It’s lined with huge offices full of public servants, lawyers and accountants. The most successful retailers take advantage of the enormous foot traffic from workers pouring in and and out of offices. But it’s dead on weekends and outside of work hours; there isn’t much drawing people in or making them stick around. 
  2. Willis Street is thriving. Spark Central and Aon Centre stand on each side, filled with tech businesses. It has better entertainment offerings than Lambton, including three great food courts: Willis Lane, Press Hall, and 18 Willis, and craft beer bars capturing the after-work drinks crowd. 
  3. Manners Street is a shitshow. It was once a pedestrian mall, but was paved over to make room for a bus lane. It has high foot traffic – largely because it’s the closest bus stop to Cuba Street. But it can be pretty gross at times – a boarded-up $2 shop, grimy footpaths, and a minor hotspot for crime. 
  4. Courtenay Place is Wellington’s nightlife centre. It’s full of bars, clubs and restaurants, and a great stretch of greasy 2am takeaways. With so much fun stuff all on one street, it has the potential to be the best entertainment hub in the country – but right now it’s nowhere close. It looks dated, it feels dodgy at night, and most of the prime party space is taken up by parked cars. 

What they all have in common is buses. The Golden 2.43km is Wellington’s public transport spine – about 95% of all buses in the city run through here, carrying tens of thousands of people every day. 

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

What’s going to change? 

The Golden 2.43km revitalisation is a core part of the Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme. It often gets summarised as “removing private cars”, but that undersells the project. There’s a huge number of changes based around two concepts: making buses more efficient, and making the area prettier and nicer to spend time in. 

There will be much wider footpaths along the entire stretch, a cycling and scooter path, many more trees and shrub plantings, as well as new parklets and shared spaces. 

Private cars will be blocked from most of the Golden 2.43km, but they will still be allowed on Courtenay Place after 7pm and before 7am, which is a good thing for getting drunk people into Ubers. There will be loading zones for businesses, and an increased number of mobility parks on side-streets. 

Most of the intersections onto side-streets will be closed and converted into public spaces, or pedestrian-priority areas.

A rendering of the Golden 2.43km changes on Lambton Quay

There will be bus lanes running the entire length of the Golden 2.43km, and the bus stop locations will be changed. With no cars turning from intersections and delaying buses, Metlink reckons it will save each bus three minutes and 40 seconds. That doesn’t sound like much, but delays on the Golden 2.43km compound across the whole city, making the entire network less reliable. 

Will there be a street full of road cones?

No, not yet. Minor work is starting today on Grey Street, which runs between Lambton Quay and Customhouse Quay, and will continue on all the Lambton Quay side streets, but will be paused in November to keep the streets clear during the Christmas shopping period. 

In early 2024, early construction work will begin at the Courtenay Place end with new pedestrian crossings and footpath changes. 

The Golden 2.43km changes for Midland Park

The main construction work doesn’t start until mid-2024. It will begin at the Courtenay Place end and work its way along in chunks, so only a certain section will be under construction at any given time. 

Could this entire thing still be cancelled? 

It’s possible, but pretty unlikely. 

The Golden 2.43km revitalisation is mostly popular with the public – surveys of 2,000 Wellingtonians overwhelmingly found people wanted more radical changes to the street, not less. 

It has faced heavy backlash from some businesses who fear change; last week a group filed a judicial review application to prevent the works going ahead, but insiders at the council and LGWM feel quite confident it is baseless. 

The construction is part of Let’s Get Wellington Moving, which National wants to cancel, but it’s unlikely the Golden 2.43km changes would be affected should they win the election. The works should be under way by the time the new cabinet is appointed.

National’s Simeon Brown suggested he would cancel the plan if the construction contracts were still unsigned, but even that probably wouldn’t stop it from happening. Wellington City Council and Greater Wellington Regional Council both want the project to go ahead, and they ultimately have authority over the roads – funding might get a bit tricky, but it’s hard to see the councils backing down.

Keep going!
Winston Peters may change what policies are in or out (Image: Gabi Lardies)
Winston Peters may change what policies are in or out (Image: Gabi Lardies)

PoliticsSeptember 29, 2023

There’s always another Winston

Winston Peters may change what policies are in or out (Image: Gabi Lardies)
Winston Peters may change what policies are in or out (Image: Gabi Lardies)

Christopher Luxon looks like he will have to call Winston Peters on October 15 to form a government. But which Winston will answer the phone?

Winston Peters has been booted from parliament on three separate occasions since he first entered in 1979. Every time it has changed him.

In 1981 his loss came just two years after he had fought a court battle to win his marginal seat as a National MP. After the court battle he had been mocked relentlessly and had largely toed the party line as a government backbencher. Never again would he be content with being a political nobody – one needs a reputation to survive in this game. 

In 2008 he faced his first period in the wilderness since coming to national prominence and forming his own party in the early 1990s – a period when he temporarily was the most popular MP in the country, and then had acted as the kingmaker in both 1996 and 2005. He had been pushed out by a resurgent National Party whose leader John Key refused to entertain the idea of ringing him after the 2008 election – an unforgivable insult he would partially repay by bloodying the party in the Northland by-election.

And in 2020 he again found himself in the wilderness and with time to stew about a prime minister – one who he felt had kept him out of the loop on Te Tiriti issues and was now drunk with power. Labour would feel his wrath – he soon ruled them out as a potential coalition partner. 

But really you don’t need to wait for a new election loss to see a new Peters. If you stay in a conversation with him long enough you can get a whole host of different Winstons. Christopher Luxon, it seems, will soon have the pleasure of several very long conversations with Peters, despite claiming a number of times at the second leaders’ debate that he “didn’t want to” work with him.

Here’s a guide to the different Winston’s he may get.

Winston the statesman

Everyone cracked up when the script of the They Are Us film leaked, featuring Peters reciting a Māori proverb to comfort Jacinda Ardern after the March 15 shooting.

They were right to, and Peters would never do that, but he absolutely can put all the hijinks away in a crisis and act with the dignity and deftness one would expect of our most experienced politician. After the March 15 terror attacks, Peters got out of the prime minister’s way and swallowed any objections to the firearms bans. During those chaotic early weeks of Covid-19, he gave New Zealanders overseas the clear message that they should travel home if possible and didn’t give any hint that there was anything but cabinet consensus around lockdowns. 

And it isn’t only crises. Peters did a lot of work to get some warmth back into the US relationship in his first stint as foreign minister under Helen Clark. When he needs to be affable, wise, and careful with his words, he can be.

Winston Peters at the Newshub Nation debate. Photo: Warner Bros. Discovery ANZ

Winston the xenophobic race-baiter

Then there’s the Peters who joked that “two wongs don’t make a white,” who accused “two Asian immigrant reporters” of fake news, who called New Zealand “the last Asian colony,” who defended his deputy telling National MP Melissa Lee to “go back to Korea,” or a different deputy when he attacked a “flood” of Asian immigrants.

This is a man who has undoubtedly experienced some pretty strong racism himself through 78 years as a Māori man. But he has certainly been comfortable pushing the race button himself. 

Winston the corruption watchdog

Peters made his political name in the 1980s as an attacker of corruption and secrecy, whether that be unproven allegations about ships in the Cook Strait or the very proven allegations about the Māori Loans affair. This came to a real crescendo with the “Winebox Affair” in the early 1990s – a sprawling set of allegations surrounding the bailout of BNZ that I’m not sure anyone but Peters himself can quite explain properly. 

Winston the corruption watchdog watchdog

You would think all this dogged investigative work would make Peters an ally of our country’s top corruption watchdog the Serious Fraud Office. But when the SFO announced it was laying charges against two people following an investigation into the NZ First Foundation, Peters found himself instead attacking them as biased. Swings and roundabouts!

Winston the insult comic

Peters has a dexterity of language that can make his insults really sing. He once said Helen Clark was the “only politician in the Western world who can talk on foreign affairs with both feet in her mouth”. He called Gerry Brownlee an “illiterate woodwork teacher”. He’s called his potential governing partner David Seymour a cuck more times than I can count. 

Winston the media critic

Most politicians attack the news media every now and then – if only to partake in our great national pastime – but Peters insults reporters with a reflexiveness and repetitiveness few can manage.

Sometimes this is just the way he gets through a tough interview, taking every single question as an affront and deciding to bog the interview down there instead of venture into any territory he would prefer not to touch. Sometimes it’s just a bit of throat-clearing on the way to delivering some other point – he once suggested I was working for the Act Party because I had quoted them in a story. This kind of stuff is usually done with a big grin on his face, with the implied promise that this is all a bit of fun and we can see each other at the parliamentary bar later to laugh about it. 

At other times it gets much more vicious – like when he sues journalists or includes their ethnicities while attacking them. 

Winston the historian

It is impossible to understand Peters without understanding the political era that shaped him – the neoliberal turn from 1984-1993, when huge parts of the state were privatised and the welfare system torn up. Indeed, I think the best way to understand Peters’ particular political oddities is to see him as someone who thinks things were pretty damn good before 1984, a view that endears him to the left economically and the right socially. 

Peters has a remarkable ability to recall detail from his huge political career throughout this change. He will bring it up to make a point whenever possible, reminding journalists who weren’t even alive then of key political betrayals or victories, which he can almost always use to justify whatever point he is making that day. And the small moments of respect one can get from Peters usually come when you jump to the historical analogy before him. 

He’s a man who remembers everything, as Luxon will soon find out.

Henry Cooke was chief political reporter at Stuff. He writes a newsletter about New Zealand politics called Museum Street.

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