As Wellington City Council prepared for its final vote on whether to sell its shares in Wellington Airport, councillors clashed with the mayor and put their relationship with mana whenua at risk. And still, the outcome was anyone’s guess.

In the final instalment of a three-part series running this week, Oliver Neas explores the dramatic conflict and behind-the-scenes dealmaking that shaped the Wellington Airport saga. You can read part one here and part two here. 

Nīkau Wi Neera couldn’t sleep. There were no good options. He could betray his principles or disenfranchise his own iwi. “I thought I was going to be the first Māori ward councillor and the Māori ward councillor that blew up the relationship with iwi,” he says. 

The problem had started with a breakthrough. 

For months, Wi Neera and his allies had been trying to secure a second vote on the sale of the council’s shares in Wellington Airport, knowing that a majority of councillors now opposed it. But at every turn they had been set back by bureaucratic obstacles. Then finally, in early August, the door opened. There it was: a notice of revocation, signed by a majority of councillors, revoking the decision to sell the shares. 

The problem was it didn’t work. As council staff explained, the decision to include the airport sale in the long-term plan had been made by the council’s subsidiary long-term planning committee. The council could accept or reject that decision, but it couldn’t undo it. And because the long-term plan had now been approved, the only way to change it was to follow a formal amendment process involving further public consultation. 

Wi Neera’s colleague Nureddin Abdurahman tried a workaround, rewording the notice to propose that the council “commence a process to halt the sale”. But this was too ambiguous, the lawyers advised. Eventually, after discussions with officials, new wording was agreed. The new notice proposed that council “commence a process” to amend the long term plan “with Council’s objective being No Sale”. It was more complicated than what anyone wanted, but at least officials said it would work. When this latest iteration came through, Wi Neera didn’t look at it closely. “I just thought, ‘this is another attempt that will probably get shut down. I’ll put my name to it.’”

On September 5, the morning after the new notice was filed, an email came through from the council’s in-house lawyer. She was passing on a message from the council’s two mana whenua representatives, or pouiwi, Liz Kelly of Ngāti Toa and Holden Hohaia of Taranaki Whānui. They had a serious issue with what was proposed. 

There were four clauses in the notice of motion. One of them proposed that the amended plan be prepared by the council, not by the long-term plan committee. The effect was to exclude the pouiwi, who sit only on the committee and not council, from the entire process – which included much more than the airport sale. As Hohaia put it to The Post, councillors were “attempting to exclude mana whenua from making decisions”.

Wi Neera hadn’t foreseen this when he signed the notice. As he saw it, as a matter of law, “the council alone can sell a strategic asset, therefore any vote would have been at council anyway.” But he still wanted mana whenua involved in the process – back in June, he had tried unsuccessfully to get another vote at the committee level, precisely because he wanted to include the pouiwi. Similarly, Abdurahman’s initial draft of the notice had proposed to suspend the council’s delegation to the committee only for “further decisions on the sale of the airport shares”. But on the recommendation of staff, the suspension had been broadened to cover all work on the amended long-term plan. This was the notice that Wi Neera and others had signed. “We messed up and didn’t do our due diligence on the exact wording. I’m going to own that. I did sign on to something that had one clause in it that would have disenfranchised mana whenua,” Wi Neera says.

Wi Neera didn’t see the issue as a “zero sum” choice between his commitment to public ownership and Te Tiriti. After all, he had been elected to represent the Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Māori ward as a leftist opposed to privatisation. These dual commitments had guided him as he had navigated the airport issue – initially opposing the sale, before supporting it when he learnt iwi might buy the shares, before then changing his mind again when he realised that prospect was unlikely. 

As soon as the matter was raised, Wi Neera knew there was a big problem. It had nothing to do with the airport. It was that they had proactively asserted the council’s power over its Treaty partner. 

He thought he could bring everyone affected together to resolve the issue. He and Abdurahman wanted to reword the notice to avoid any suggestion of disenfranchisement. But the issue was spiralling fast, with the mayor publicly condemning the anti-sale group for damaging the council’s relationship with mana whenua just “to achieve a certain political outcome”. 

Abdurahman struck back, saying the mayor’s office was “weaponising” the issue for “political gain” to shift the discussion away from privatisation. To his dismay, some right-wing councillors wanted to lean into this framing and “play dirty politics to fight the mana whenua”, as he put it. Abdurahman begged them not to get involved. But he was quickly becoming isolated from his colleagues on the left. “They were not talking to me; they excluded me. That was very difficult. But I said, ‘No, I am OK, when it comes to my values, to stand alone.’” 

But Abdurahman couldn’t stop the airport sale by standing alone. He needed Wi Neera, urging him to hold the line. “You know me, when I go home today, I will sleep knowing I’m not doing this cynically to exclude mana whenua,” he told Wi Neera in a last-minute plea. But there was much more at stake than the airport alone. 

Iwi representatives had written to senior figures in the Labour and Green parties, prompting a senior Green staffer to call Wi Neera, asking him to explain. Mana whenua threatened to withdraw from the partnership with the council unless the notice was withdrawn in its entirety. Wi Neera was hearing the same message from closer to home. “My relations told me loud and clear that this has to be withdrawn. I took a long hard look at myself, I went to meet with my chief, and I was like, all right, this has to go,” he said.

Two weeks after he signed the notice of motion, Wi Neera announced his about-turn on Instagram. “I am committed to the constitutional document of our nation and for Māori to have a voice at the decision-making table. For this reason, I cannot support any notice of motion which would jeopardise our mana whenua partners’ rights to govern with us.” 

But the only person who could revoke the notice was Abdurahman, as mover of the motion. He had signalled he would ask councillors not to support the problematic disenfranchising clause, but he refused to withdraw the notice entirely. Whether Wi Neera liked it or not, the motion would be put to a vote on October 10.

Wi Neera had tried his best to get it withdrawn, but he failed. As he saw it, he had three options: “Abstain, look like a coward or sneaky; vote against this motion and betray my principles of public ownership and look like a turbo hypocrite and someone who doesn’t keep his word and breaks election promises; or I can vote for it, and I can seem as if I’m endorsing a process that local iwi have called racist.

“What do you do in that situation?” 

Winning and losing

At the back of the council chamber, among the packed public gallery, the Unions Wellington crew had no idea which way Wi Neera would go. 

It had been nearly a year since the meeting at Trades Hall when the campaign to stop the airport sale was born. The activists at that meeting couldn’t have foreseen how big the issue would become, reconfiguring political alliances and leading now to an extraordinary moment: a vote on whether to undo the council’s entire long-term plan, just three months after it had passed. 

Sabina Rizos-Shaw, Ashok Jacob and Finn Cordwell could claim some responsibility for what was unfolding. They had collected signatures, met with councillors, written letters and op-eds, made phone calls, surveyed residents, given media interviews, prepared submissions, and made signs, badges and T-shirts. Most importantly, they got people to show up. Back in April, more than 150 had turned out to the public forum on a Wednesday night. Dozens had shown up to submit against the sale and to attend key council meetings in May and June. The crowd that now packed the public gallery and a separate overflow room was the biggest the council had seen since the 1990s. There were another 2,500 people watching on the livestream. 

These mobilisations weren’t purely symbolic. Their purpose was to show decision-makers that this issue was deeply felt, to hold them accountable to their election promises, and to give them confidence that the public backed them to oppose the sale. There had been a healthy dose of luck along the way – including some questionable political judgement from the mayor’s team and some convenient political opportunism from rightwing councillors. But without the public turnout, “I don’t think we would have been able to crystallise our support with the leftwing block,” Cordwell says.

Nīkau Wi Neera was one of those leftwing councillors who the Unions Wellington crew had supported and cajoled. They knew he was under pressure, but they had no idea how much. His vote was crucial. Was he now about to let the sale through? “I was very stressed,” Cordwell says. “I was relatively confident going into the meeting that Nīkau was going to go the right way – until he started speaking.”

Wi Neera was standing before his colleagues, dressed in a black three-piece suit. He looked down at the page of notes in his hand and began his speech. 

“It is with a lot of pain that I observe who is not in the room today. My iwi is not in the room, and part of the responsibility for that fact lies with me,” he began. “If we are to win on this issue – and I believe that we will and we must – it becomes us to win on values. There is a right way to win and there is a wrong way to win. I feel that the bringing of this motion to council with clause three, with its disenfranchising implications for our Tākai Here partners, is the wrong way to win.

“If I could characterise the process with a single word, it would be misunderstanding. Crossed wires, people not picking up the phone, emails shooting back and forth without an appropriate CC. So many miscommunications at every step of the process, which could have been solved by concerned parties simply getting in a room together. As Māori ward councillor, I represent the bridge between the institution and tangata whenua. Therefore, the responsibility to facilitate this coming together ought to have been mine, and I have failed.

“All I can really do at this point is take responsibility for these failings and – if the motion is indeed put, and I fear it will be – apply my best judgment to the words that are put on the paper before us… I will leave it to the mover in the meeting to make the next steps.”

Attention turned to Abdurahman. Would he withdraw the motion? The mayor asked if he needed an adjournment. Abdurahman shook his head. The vote would go ahead. Wi Neera asked for a separate vote on clause three and urged his fellow councillors to vote it down. It was unanimous, 0-16. Then, they turned to the main vote. The notice of motion. Councillors were reminded to vote “yes” to keep the airport and rewrite the long-term plan, or “no” to sell the airport and keep the plan. 

Seated among a sea of supporters, his heart pounding, Cordwell watched as, one by one, the councillors’ names turned blue on the overheard screen, indicating they had cast their votes. Then, in an instant, the results appeared. Applause broke out in the public gallery. Nine votes to seven – they had done it. “I looked and it flashed on the screen, and I looked across at Ashok, and then I looked behind me at our supporters,” says Cordwell. “And I finally realised, ‘Jesus, has this actually just passed?’”

The airport would not be sold, and mana whenua would remain part of the amendment process. The Unions Wellington crew were ecstatic. News soon filtered through from the mayor’s office: Whanau wouldn’t be pushing a sale any further. Finally, it was over. 

But as the crowd dissipated, and the Unions Wellington crew and their supporters drifted down to the pub, Wi Neera didn’t feel so good. In casting his vote to unwind the sale, he had stood apart from his Green council colleagues. He felt gutted. “I think there are lots of people at the party who want to kick me out, to be frank, which is sad, and it makes me feel very insecure. This movement that I feel like I’ve given so much of myself to now doesn’t want any part of me,” he says. “It’s weird that winning is worse than losing. You wouldn’t believe the political capital I had when we lost [in May] – I was this guy who had heroically gone down trying to stop privatisation. It’s almost like the left doesn’t want to win. They just want to lose with mana.”

Postscript

Two weeks later, local government minister Simeon Brown announced plans to appoint a Crown observer to oversee Wellington City Council. 

To some, it was a vindication of officials’ warnings and an indictment of those who had put “political theatre” above responsible governance. Others pointed the finger at the mayor, who had held herself up as a builder of bridges but mainly just burned them. The minister’s stated reason for intervening, however, was only partly about the airport drama. At the heart of it was the council’s decision to rely on rates rather than debt to fund water infrastructure that meant it was “front-loading costs on current ratepayers”. Legally speaking, it wasn’t clear intervention was warranted. “If this low bar is applied in the future, the government’s going to be sacking councils all over the country over the next year or so,” law professor Dean Knight warned.

As councillors scrambled to hash out an amended long-term plan, a familiar narrative was emerging: without the airport sale, significant cuts were unavoidable. It was a cruel logic, symptomatic of a conundrum facing councils nationwide as the insurance giants retreated and central government did little to help. Sell your assets so you can spend down the proceeds when disaster inevitably strikes, or cut spending so the auditors let you borrow more. Privatisation or austerity. 

In fact, the council did have options – it could assume more risk, increase rates, borrow more, or sell something else – although these all had trade-offs, some unpalatable. And councillors were once again questioning the assumptions underpinning the advice after it emerged that the council’s insurance shortfall was $800 million less than previously thought. To Abdurahman, it was more evidence that councillors were “threatened throughout the airport sale based on figures that were wrong”. 

Months earlier, councillor Tim Brown had accused the Unions Wellington crew of “chasing Roger Douglas’s ghost”. In a sense, he was right. If you took the airport sale as a discrete policy decision at a single moment in time, it could be hard to see what the big deal was. After all, this was about a minority shareholding of a for-profit company. But the Unions Wellington crew was looking at it from a different angle, seeing this moment as part of a decades-long process that had fundamentally reshaped life in New Zealand. This was about more than the airport; it was about the erosion of public control, the gradual siphoning of community wealth to private interests, and the diminishing ability of public bodies to enact the public will. 

Turning the page on that chapter of history was about more than one campaign. It would be the work of lifetimes. But if the three young unionists had done anything, it was to show that it was possible to win. The lesson they took from it all was this: in Rizos-Shaw’s words, “There has never been a mandate to sell public assets in Aotearoa, and there continues to not be one.”  

The mayor’s office declined to be interviewed for this article or to answer specific questions. Separately, the Green Party provided the following comment: “Green-endorsed councillors facing difficult decisions regarding airport shares have been open with the party membership in Wellington about how complicated the situation is. Party members and supporters have expressed a range of views for and against the sale of airport shares to create a perpetual investment fund. Fundamentally, central government needs to come to the table with better funding and financing options for local councils to deal with insurance risks. Discussions have been had about how the party can support councillors to interpret and apply manifesto commitments in complicated situations and these discussions are ongoing. The party aims to support councillors to exercise their best judgment based on Green values and the information they have in front of them.”