It’s a Wellington icon, but we must say goodbye. It is time to demolish the bridge, argues Joel MacManus. 

Wellington’s City to Sea Bridge is beautiful and weird. Its design says something about what Wellington is and the way the city sees itself. It’s been the home of many late nights and long conversations with people I love, memories captured only by a Polaroid camera and some hazy nostalgia. For a more detailed love letter to the bridge’s architecture, I highly recommend Jeremy Hansen’s essay In praise of Wellington’s City to Sea Bridge.

I’ll always love the City to Sea Bridge, but it is time to let it go. It is earthquake-prone and far too expensive to fix. It’s not just about the risk that the bridge could collapse and squash the people underneath; it’s that it could block a six-lane arterial road, which would be a nightmare for emergency responders in a natural disaster. And it’s not just about the bridge itself – the bridge is connected to the Capital E building, the sea wall, and the basement loading zone for the town hall. Repairing the bridge would require repairing the entire surrounding infrastructure. 

This should not be a point of debate. This is the kind of project that makes absolutely no sense. The city council knows this; the public consultation documents don’t even offer the option of keeping the bridge. And yet there is still a growing pushback from a group of mostly older Wellingtonians, unofficially led by former deputy mayor Helene Ritchie, demanding that the council keep the bridge no matter the cost. 

This is largely the same crowd that campaigned to save the earthquake-damaged Wellington Central Library building (opened in 1991) rather than tear it down and rebuild. I was recently invited to tour the construction site of the library and town hall. The staff constantly pointed out the intricate difficulties: removing and retaining heritage-listed plaster, fighting through water-logged foundations, and retrofitting base isolators. A builder told me the project would have been much, much easier if they could have just retained the front facade and the distinctive nīkau palms rather than keeping the entire building. The town hall has been a similar fool’s errand. The builders have done an impressive job modernising the space, and it will be an asset to the city once it’s open. But the council could have built something bigger and newer for less than the price tag of $330 million.

There’s a common 80s movie trope about a group of plucky kids coming together to save [insert beloved community institution] from [insert antagonist]. But it’s not cute anymore. The kids from that 80s movie aren’t the same scrappy underdogs. They’re in their 60s and are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the city. The new generation of kids doesn’t see these elders as heroes defending their city, they see them as stubborn toffs demanding nothing ever change. This is the same generation of local politicians and voters who invented “character areas” to stop new housing from being built in the inner suburbs. They might have thought they were protecting their neighbourhood, but to the new generation, it just looks like an effort to keep out poor people. The library and the town hall have saddled the council with eye-watering costs, but it’s not enough for these people. It will never be enough. 

The word “heritage” gets tossed around too loosely these days. Historic Places Wellington chair Felicity Wong tried to rebrand the Johnsonville line as the “Johnsonville heritage train line” to stop housing developments near it. Helene Ritchie is trying to claim the City to Sea Bridge is a heritage bridge and the paving tiles of Civic Square are heritage bricks. I love old buildings. I’m a big ol’ history nerd. There are some buildings that are so important to our shared national or civic heritage that they should be preserved by law. But it can’t just be every building you liked in the 90s. We need to be serious here. 

One of the amazing things about cities is that they constantly grow and reinvent themselves. The next generation will have emotional attachments to certain buildings, and they won’t be the same buildings as the previous generation. We all tell our own stories. So yes, we should celebrate the City to Sea Bridge for what it was, share our special memories, and then let it go and embrace whatever comes next. 

The minerals sector is highly volatile, highly competitive and changing rapidly, and the most obvious rationale for expansion – that it will provide a boost to national and regional economies – is certainly not a given.

Shane Jones’s mining boosterism has regenerated a seemingly perennial debate around the industry and the sector. As Sefton Darby noted in a Spinoff piece in 2017, successive governments over the past decades have made a point of reversing the stance towards and the policies of the previous crew – and the current coalition’s reversal of Labour’s ban on offshore oil and gas exploration is another example of the continuation of this trend.

The current round of reversals from Jones has also seen a revised draft minerals strategy, a resurvey of the country’s mineral endowment, the development of a draft list of “critical minerals”, and inclusion of 19 mining and quarrying projects on the initial list under the government’s fast-track legislation. 

Jones’s ambition – to create 10 significant new mines and a doubling of export values within the next 10 years, and reestablish mining within the culture of regional NZ in particular – and his almost boyish enthusiasm (a master of triggering hyperbole, he has already suggested that blind frogs called Freddy had better watch out for the expansion of the industry) has provoked the expected response from environmental and community groups. Similar moves under the Key government in 2010 produced some of the largest protests seen in the last two decades. 

This time around there has already been widespread opposition expressed through the media, protests around new exploration targets in Tasman District and Central Otago (see here and here), including from high-profile winemakers and celebrities (such as Sam Neill) and, in a very different setting, student protests around the Career Expo recruitment efforts of the Australian mining sector at Victoria University (see the debate between Martin Brook, a geologist at Auckland University who took particular exception to the latter, and the response from the organisers).

What the current debate has exposed is a poor understanding of the industry and the opportunities and challenges it presents, and no clear sense of how it can contribute effectively to Aotearoa’s future. So what does international experience tell us about the sector – what can we really expect from an expanded mining industry, and against what conditions should this expansion be evaluated and permitted? 

First, the most obvious rationale for the sector – that it will provide a boost to national and regional economies – is certainly not a given. Indeed, the returns are probably not likely to be what the minister would like. By its very nature the contemporary mining industry is (imported) capital-intensive and a relatively small employer of a mix of highly skilled tradespeople and more traditional roles (such as the dump truck drivers). The Victoria University economist Geoff Bertram carried out a detailed analysis during the last flurry of National-government interest in the sector and found that the share of the value of the resource the country receives is relatively low. And the small workforce similarly means that salaries and wages form a low proportion of the gross value-add from the sector. 

At this point, it is worth quickly pointing to the differences between New Zealand and Australia in terms of the mining sector, wealth and the economy, a comparison that is often made to support the case for why we should be doing more to free up our mineral resources. We know that Australia is a much more heavily minerals-dependent economy, but I doubt many of us realise just how much so: New Zealand mineral exports were worth just over NZ$1bn in 2022, while in the same year Australia’s mineral exports from more than 350 operating mines topped A$400bn.

There are two ways to look at this disparity – one is that NZ should be exploiting its mineral wealth if it wants to get closer to parity with Australian levels of wealth and standards of living. The other would perhaps recognise that mineral wealth might not be the key element in the disparity if it takes more than 400 times the value of mineral exports to produce the 30-50% differences in GNI/capita and incomes between the two countries.

The reasons for this are complex and varied. One of the most significant is the highly volatile nature of the minerals sector. Gold is a lovely case in point: the table below illustrates this with reference to the price of gold – up by 371% in the decade 2001-2011 and down by 7% in the following decade – with significant peaks and troughs within each of these decades. Most recently the price of gold has taken off again, trending up by more than 30% in the year to early November.

An even more spectacular rollercoaster is illustrated by the green transition mineral lithium. Due to new deposits and sources of supply appearing rapidly in recent years, the metal has lost 90% of its value in the last two years from the peak in December 2022, which itself was a staggering 1,350% increase on two years earlier (Dec 2020). Booms, busts and the constant search for the “motherlode”’ of value are still defining characteristics of the sector. 

Large-scale contemporary mining is complex to operate and to regulate, govern and even tax effectively. Again, we can legitimately ask whether – even before the significant cuts in personnel and resourcing – the public sector had the regulatory capacity to facilitate the development and effective and safe operations of anything like the 10 significant new mines the minister would like to see in place within the next decade.

The sector is also highly competitive and changing rapidly. The regulatory “opening up” of new countries and areas for exploration and mining (such as Jones is attempting to do for Aotearoa) has seen countries globally tinkering with the regulations and requirements around mining, all with the intent of attracting further foreign investment. This has created a drawn out, global “race to the bottom” in terms of “freeing up” the environmental, fiscal and social regulation of the sector. The reduction of regulatory and approval oversight contained in the fast-track legislation appears to be Minister Jones’s contribution to this race.

The minister’s references to the need for New Zealand to “do our bit” in terms of the production of “critical minerals” is used as an additional justification for the expansion of the sector. The problem is that none of the evidence to date – over a hundred years of sporadic and the more recent systematic surveys – indicates that we have significant, world-scale reserves and resources of any of these critical minerals. There are potentially reserves of antimony on the West Coast, and exploration interest in lithium in a few spots, but nothing like the scale elsewhere. And the argument that we have a moral obligation to produce some of what we consume in terms of the critical minerals we draw on in our everyday lives just doesn’t hold water in the globalised world we live in. The label “critical minerals”, then, is just being used as a discursive shift to try and justify the continuing relevance of the mining sector and open up new opportunities for the expansion of non-critical minerals (such as gold) and fossil fuels (coal). 

Mining by its very nature transforms landscapes – physical and social – and despite much progress and improvement in social and environmental management of the effects of mining, it continues to be a sector that is bedevilled by environmental legacies and more recent disasters, acts of cultural destruction, and an oftentimes wilful disregard for communities and governments.

So yes, we cannot wish away mining, and indeed we can embrace it or at least learn to live with it. But what we can wish for is a sector that meets the expectations and standards of the 21st century. Betram’s warning from 10 years ago is equally apt today:

Mining will not increase economic welfare – on the contrary, it will often reduce it – if done in the wrong place, or in the wrong way, or without a proper legal and regulatory framework. Mining therefore presents industry-specific problems for regulators and policy makers, which cannot be finessed by overgeneralised rhetoric or glamorous photography.

A sector that is led by Shane Jones’s hyperbole and industry boosterism will be damaging to the country, its people and its landscapes, all for little or no return.