Don't Lose Hope for Wellington, Get Informed & Get Voting, that's the Takeaway from My Interview with 'Better Wellington' Co-Founder (Best-Known to Locals As the 'Backbencher' Publican)

What started out as a small group of disgruntled locals is snowballing into a major force for change . . . starting with exposing the antics of the Wellington City Council and those of its elected representatives driving the "woke idiocy and rampant profligacy" evident in the way the Council is spending residents' skyrocketing rates.

And if the many incoming messages of support with which the group is being inundated is anything to go by, their message is reverberating from suburb to suburb around the city:

“Get Wellington back to the vibrant city it once was. Stop the cycle ways. Fix the infrastructure. Get rid of the ideologists in Council. The city looks like shit!”

“It’s about time there’s a group that’s dedicated to taking back the power from the Council and their ridiculous spending on things no-one wants or needs. The wasteful spending and overspends show how incompetent they are in handling finances, and the ratepayers are suffering because of it.”

“When does a minority rule in a democracy? No-one I know agrees with anything the Council is doing. I am watching my city die.”

“We have been watching in horror, the decimation of our city as the Labour and Green Parties vote according to the wants of their Parties – and not in the interests of Wellington. Ratepayers have been consistently hobbled by Council officers in conjunction with the Councilors in question, who are not interested in what their constituents are telling them. Wellington is now just a shabby mess.”

Indeed, read any of the published comments on the supporters’ feedback page of the Better Wellington website, and your clear conclusion can only be that Donald Trump was correct at every level when he made his now-immortalised quip, “Go Woke, Go Broke.”

And “wokeism” is on steroids in the Wellington City Council, thanks to so many of the bums on seats around the Councillors table pushing for their own personal ideologies to be rolled out to every corner of (what they seem to believe is) “their” city.

A Rapidly Growing Movement of Concerned Wellingtonians

According to its website, Better Wellington is a small core group of long-time locals, now flanked by a rapidly growing movement of Wellingtonians, who “want a better future for our city. The current direction being imposed on Wellington residents is ruining the capital. Commerce is drying up as people are being forced out of their cars for a cycle-way and climate change ideology.”

Too many of Wellington’s city councilors are more concerned with pushing identity politics, rather than improving core services. That’s the common core of agreement between the founding team and its snowballing base of supporters.

Better Wellington received an unintended but ironically welcome boost in awareness last month, when local posties (prompted by their Union) refused to deliver the flyers it had printed as part of a city-wide campaign. (Read or download the flyer here. It seems pretty fact-based to me.)

In short, Better Wellington’s core mission is to see Wellingtonians better informed of the policies and priorities of each Councilor, and then, on the back of greater transparency, to urge them to get out and vote for candidates driven by sanity, when the next Local Government elections roll around i.e. in October 2025.

This page on its website highlights the specific ideas and policies the group believes will achieve a “Better Wellington”. Their no-wasted-words, very easy-read Policy Statement is well worth a few minutes of your time. It doesn’t loan itself to further distillation for the purposes of my article, because its key points and writing style are already sufficiently punchy and highly concise.

My Interview with Co-Founder, Long-Time Publican of the Iconic Backbencher, Alistair Boyce

I interviewed one of its founding members, Alistair Boyce, best known locally as the long-time publican, proprietor and chef of Wellington CBD’s famous Backbencher Pub – situated right across the road from Parliament Buildings.

Boyce (along with his fellow Better Wellington core group members) “oppose the dangers of ideology capturing the necessary Council operations that underpin (what should be and was once) a vibrant, growing and economically viable city”.

The only hope of turning around Wellington’s woes is to get ethical, smart, and rightly-driven candidates onto the Council, Boyce tells me. And Better Wellington is making good traction in its mission to achieve this, he says.

“Our founding members first got together before the last local government elections two years ago. We were, at that stage, a small and informal group – but we got reactivated three or four months ago to give us a long runway into the next elections, to get better awareness of the issues and to expose the true values and motivations of councilors and candidates.

‘No Option Now but to Restore Economic Sensibility & Responsibility’

“We have no option now but to restore economic sensibility and rationality to the Council’s operations. We MUST get rates down and we MUST focus on the key issues that we need addressed in order to make our city both livable and affordable. That is, water, rates, rubbish, roads and the like.

“We MUST remove political ideologies and the nice-to-haves, and restore fiscal responsibility.

“In short, we need to expose the idiocy and profligacy (excessive spending) of what’s going on around the Council table . . . and that is therefore being rolled out by the layers of operational staff below, if we’re to stop this demolition process in its tracks.”

Postie ‘Cancel Culture’ Move Backfires on Those Behind It

With regard to the media storm surrounding the recent flyer the group produced, and the non-delivery stance pushed by the postal workers’ union, Boyce explains:

“One of the numerous educational bullet points in the flyer, referred to the Council as wanting the six mosques around Wellington to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer.

“They argued that they had not posited that.

“But the wording on their Council meeting motion referred to ‘investigating’ whether it could be allowable under existing city noise limits.

“Well, if you’re going to ‘investigate’ the allow-ability of something, you’re clearly working towards achieving that, aren’t you? So, the whole thing was a disingenuous debate in semantics, as far as we’re concerned.

“But we came out of it on the upside, because we got a whole lot of mainstream media publicity we couldn’t possibly have paid for!”

Boyce says that, while “the posties were rarked up by union influence”, they relented and most of the flyers were delivered, with New Zealand Post recognising both the overreach and the fact that there was nothing inherently incorrect in the flyer . . . that its content was all perfectly legal.

“Some suburbs still didn’t get delivered to, but at least 70 percent of the flyers reached the ratepayers.” (Although, he says, he never received one in his own letterbox.)

‘We Have No Position on Religion . . . and Council Has No Business Meddling In It, Either’

“To be very clear,” Boyce stresses, “we have no position on religion, but we were stating the fact that the council has no business having a position on it, either. We were making the ultimate point that we want the council to concentrate on council business, not peripheral issues that it has absolutely no business meddling in.

“We also want the completely unnecessary ongoing expansion of the Council’s operations to stop, and we want that area of excessive spending to also be redirected back into a focus on core maintenance.

“I mean, they’ll send out an investigative team to dive into the issue of how they can enable the broadcasting of Islamic calls to prayer, but we’ve got rubbish issues, potholes for Africa, and burst water pipes all over the place . . . and all the while, our rates are going up by – this year – between 18 and 22 percent for most of us!

‘Our City Has Been Hijacked by Ideologists & the Residents and Ratepayers Are Paying the Price’

“Our city has been hijacked by political ideologists and we, the residents are suffering extreme consequences.

"Financially speaking, the ratepayers are paying the cost of this idiocy that the majority of aware and awake Wellingtonians want no part of . . . including the many that idiocy has put out of business, not least of all in the hospitality sector that made our city what was once described as ‘the Coolest Little Capital in the World’.

“Well, it’s not any more, is it? It’s a shabby, horrendously over-priced, increasingly unlivable and unsafe mess – and we need to galvanise to bring awareness of exactly what’s been behind that change, if we’re to turn things around.”

Editor’s Note: 

If you want to know just how crime-infested and rot-ridden Wellington has become, try this:

I live in Masterton but drive down to Wellington most weeks for an intensive acupuncture session for a back injury.  

I have loved Wellington since my first of numerous periods living there, in my early 20s. So whenever I have cause to go down, I look for every excuse to elongate the day's stay. My favorite way to do this, is to eat at the outstanding but still very affordable Ruchi Indian restaurant in Petone. 

While waiting for it to open a couple of weeks ago, I’d taken some photos further down Jackson Street (Petone’s busy “hospitality strip”). I’d wanted to depict the horribly dilapidated state of many of the buildings there, despite its still highly trafficked nature.

But I can’t show you these photos. Why? Because, immediately after taking them, I drove down to the Petone foreshore to toilet my dog, and my handbag (containing said camera) was stolen. Apparently, I had not sufficiently obscured it on the passenger side floor for the few short minutes I was out of the car, and someone smashed the driver’s window and helped themselves.

And to show you just how much the cops (don't) care about burglaries, thefts and other crimes that they once used to be relied upon to do something about, read my account of it here. It says a lot about why crime is spreading faster than a case of the clap in a New York City nightclub. No-one who should care, does care.

And the update you have when you’re not having any update at all, is that I’ve written (fruitlessly) TWICE to the Minister of Police, as I was urged to do by an MP from his own Party, but whose staff have summarily ignored me.

Of course.