Nerd Tuesday: There must be something in the water
If you think this cock-up doesn't affect you, think again.
By all accounts, my kids’ grandad on their father’s side was a pleasant and ordinary man.
People called him JJ. He passed away before I met his son, so I’ve only seen him in photos, bespectacled and bald, and heard about him through stories. From what I understand, JJ was careful, conscientious and level-headed. Mostly. At his funeral, someone told the story of the time he had a couple of drinks, cut loose, and buttoned his cardigan up the wrong way.
JJ was a public servant, but not of the kind we have today.1 Mostly, he worked as a county clerk in South Otago, the type of job that doesn’t exist the same way anymore; but he devoted much of his life to it, raising his family in the community he served. The pride of his career was the construction of a local irrigation scheme. The scheme was opened ceremoniously by Robert Muldoon, the National Prime Minister of the time, in 1982. JJ brought his family along to the occasion, making his ardent Labour-supporting wife promise she’d behave herself. (She did, apparently, but I secretly wish she hadn’t.)
In JJ’s day, the government did things differently. Government owned a bunch of economic assets, from forestry to banks to telecommunications. And it built stuff: a lot of stuff. Most of the infrastructure you use every day was built by the government, even if it was later sold into private hands. At its height, Aotearoa’s Ministry of Works employed thousands of people.2
Robert Muldoon was the last of the ‘building stuff’ Prime Ministers. Heard of Think Big? Muldoon launched a series of grand government projects - from building the Clutha dam to extending the Tiwai aluminium smelter. Critics complained. Not one for diplomacy, Muldoon invited them to kiss his asset management. By the time his government got voted out in 1984, some of the Think Big projects were going OK, but others were cock-ups. And Think Big had been very expensive, getting New Zealand into a lot of debt.
People were pissed off. They debated whether the government had overstepped into areas it shouldn’t - and that debate included infrastructure. Should the government stay hands-on building and maintaining stuff, or would there just be more cock-ups and budget blowouts? Or should the government pay the private sector to do the building and maintaining instead?
And couldn’t the public service be a bit more like the private sector? Consumerism was taking off in the 80s: slick brands, a wide range of goods, things that could be bought and enjoyed on the spot. People’s expectations were changing. The government’s way of doing things seemed old school. Folks like JJ seemed to belong to a time gone by.
Change came during the 80s and 90s, and to many it felt brutal. Government started doing things very differently, including infrastructure. The Ministry of Works was chopped up and sold off. Government investment in infrastructure slumped. No one was really taking an overview of infrastructure anymore, or planning for the future. Fast forward over thirty years, and we’re now facing a whole different kind of cock-up.
OK. Already, I’m picturing you losing consciousness and I’m gripping your hand and saying, ‘Stay with me, damn it, STAY WITH ME’.
In this post, here’s what I’ll try to convince you. There’s a story here that matters. How the government organises itself to serve people - called ‘public administration’ - is important. Public administration includes what government does, what it gets others to do, and where the buck stops if something goes wrong. It goes through fads. And there’s another story about infrastructure. Aotearoa has an infrastructure investment shortfall of about $104 billion. That’s just the shortfall - what we need to bring things up to scratch, not prepare for the future.
Let’s step through some key ideas, using an example: the hoo-ha over Wellington Water. Whether or not you live in this part of the motu, these ideas affect you. And they’ve changed over the years, from JJ’s time to now. Have they changed for the better? Or are there things we could learn from the past?
What hoo-ha?
Disclaimer. I’m no expert on Wellington Water, or indeed most things I write about, although I’ve read the just-released inquiry report. I’m not qualified to lay blame or offer answers - only give a few thoughts.
First things first. Wellington Water is the organisation that manages the three waters for the Wellington region and Wairarapa. Very basically, the three waters are:
Drinking water - making sure it’s safe and doesn’t make us sick.
Storm water - ensuring rain can drain away and our houses don’t flood.
Waste water - getting poos and wees to wherever poos and wees are meant to go.
The councils still own their water systems, but Wellington Water is paid to look after them - and it can only spend as much money as the councils give it. We’ll come back to this later.
Wellington Water has had some bad press. For example, there was the infamous poonami of late 2019. An antiquated pipe under Willis St collapsed, sending torrents of sewage into the harbour (although as someone pointed out, it didn’t stop locals insisting you can’t beat Wellington on a good day).
Then, somehow, things actually got worse.
Out of the blue, on 15 March this year, Wellington Water announced that fluoride to much of the area had been switched off a month before. Adding fluoride is, of course, part of the ‘drinking water’ aspect of Wellington Water’s job. This was bad: people were angry, and I was one of them.
The following day, another announcement was made - and this one was dire. The 15 March information had been incorrect. Fluoride had actually been turned off way longer, since May the year before. And that wasn’t all. Thanks to wonky equipment, fluoride levels had been inconsistent for years.
Now people were losing their shit faster than the Willis St sewage pipe.
Why is this so bad? Well, there are the obvious reasons. Public health is one. Lack of transparency is another: locals thought we were getting a service, and no one told us the truth. But these things are more like symptoms. We need to think about the underlying causes.
What even is Wellington Water?
OK, this bit is kind of boring - but stick with it, because it’s important to the plot.
Wellington Water happened when the six councils in the Wellington area got together and made a baby.3 The councils own and fund Wellington Water together. Fair enough. It makes sense to put the skilled water-managing people in one place, to create an expert organisation - and all six councils can use that expertise, instead of competing for staff.
Wellington Water is also ‘arm’s length’ from the councils that own it. This means councils have some oversight, but they can’t just tell Wellington Water what to do. Instead, councils and Wellington Water make service agreements, saying what Wellington Water will provide with the funding councils give them.
Well, this is ****ing tedious, I hear you say. Yes: it’s public administration. Why am I talking about it?
Recall the Think Big time, when people got mad at the government for coming up with a bunch of projects (some more sensible than others), charging ahead with them, and blowing the budget? In the time of change that followed, government moved away from doing stuff itself, and towards ‘contracting out’.
I’ll have a crack at explaining.
When government wears its ‘funder’ hat, it’s responsible for making sure the money it gives out is well spent. When it wears its ‘provider’ hat (doing stuff, like delivering services), it’s actually spending the money. If government tries to wear both hats - spending the money, and checking it’s well spent - then it’s responsible for checking on itself. Does anyone ever self-assess with complete honesty and accountability? I’ve had enough Tinder dates to understand the scepticism. (No, Dave: painting your garage last weekend does not mean you’re ‘in property development’.)
So, from the 80s on, government continued giving out money (as funder), but more and more, it funded others to actually deliver stuff (as providers). Those others could be from the private sector - or they could be new-fangled government organisations, set up for the purpose, to run like the private sector. That’s because the private sector was seen as cheaper, more effective, and generally more sexy. Wellington Water is one version of these new-fangled organisations.
OK, we can see the logic of contracting out. But there’s a lurking question. If government gets someone else to provide stuff, how can it be sure it’ll get a good job? Will it be like that time I asked my children to make dinner, and they microwaved the lettuce?4 The short answer is this: providers have to report what they’re doing. Mostly that works fine, but:
Those reports aren’t easy for most people to read and understand. I’m desperately boring, yet the kind of people who read accountability documents for LOLs make me look like an amateur.
Unless you already know what’s going on in a organisation, it’s hard to know whether an accountability document includes all the right information. Cock-ups could be slipping through the cracks.
What did the Wellington Water inquiry report say?
Facing a shit show even worse than that time on Lambton Quay, Wellington Water commissioned an inquiry. It’s just finished. If we work through the inquiry’s findings we can start to figure out what happened.
Fluoridation for oral health wasn’t a priority for Wellington Water.
There are hard rules under the law for water safety, but not so much for fluoridation.5 If there’s too much fluoride in drinking water, it can be harmful. So that’s a no-no under the safety rules. If there’s too little fluoride, it won’t be effective at looking after people’s teeth - but that didn’t break any rule. Laws aside, the councils didn’t actually ask Wellington Water to make sure there was enough fluoride, and Wellington Water didn’t report on it. Basically, the rules sent a signal that ensuring effective fluoride levels wasn’t so important.
Drinking water has been safe, but not optimally fluoridated.
Phew. Wellington Water never let the fluoride levels go too high and become harmful. But as we’ve seen, they managed that risk by letting the fluoride go too low instead - or by turning it off altogether.
Fluoridation was stopped to ensure the safety of drinking water, but with no plan to turn it back on.
This bit is kind of technical, but in short, the equipment for regulating fluoride in the water was buggered. Fixing it was challenging for a bunch of reasons, including COVID. And it was hard for Wellington Water to know what to do, because some of equipment was probably going to be decommissioned - so did it even make sense to fix it? Whatever the case, there were no steps in place to get the fluoride going again.
There were longstanding challenges to providing fluoridation safely.
It wasn’t just buggered equipment that made it hard to regulate fluoride levels. The fluoride itself - a powder, or a liquid - was sometimes poor quality, thanks to international shortages. As well as creating a risk of too-high levels, poor quality fluoride gunked up the system, and people kept having to fix it. Crappy storage facilities got the fluoride damp, making the gunking even worse.
Operational people were aware of the problems, and they tried to address them, although slowly.
Wellington Water didn’t just do nothing. ‘Operational people’ (the worker bees, as distinct from the bosses) tried day-to-day fixes, like talking with suppliers about getting non-gunky fluoride, and installing some new equipment. And they tried to get funding for bigger fixes, but got told they’d need to find money from the existing budget.
There were organisational challenges to raising and addressing issues.
If you want to be good at asset management (making sure your equipment is OK), you need processes for finding problems, logging them, and ensuring something happens. The processes at Wellington Water weren’t great - and so people stopped trying. Again, funding was a constraint. The inquiry report called this ‘learned helplessness’.
The Board didn’t have the technical expertise to know what questions to ask.
The Board? Boards are typically a private sector thing - a group of people who keep an overview of an organisation. Board members might be from outside the organisation, but should still understand how it works. Wellington Water’s Board didn’t know enough about technical water stuff to spot the fluoride problems - and people within the organisation didn’t tell them.
Escalation and communication of the decision to stop fluoridation took too long.
Any organisation should have a chain of command - and everyone should know where they sit in that chain. ‘Escalation’ means a clear process for sending a problem up the chain, to someone responsible for fixing it. But at Wellington Water, people didn’t know what to do with fluoride problems - or they assumed someone else was sorting them. The bosses didn’t always know what was happening, let alone the Board or the councils. This wasn’t deliberate, but the result of a muddle.
The complexity of the Wellington Water model makes service delivery challenging.
There’s six councils involved, and they all want different stuff. That must involve more confusingly high-detailed fannying around than a Jamie Oliver recipe.
The prospect of reform appears to be challenging for Wellington Water’s performance.
Fair. With Three Waters about to change how water infrastructure is owned and run, it doesn’t make sense to invest in Wellington Water’s assets.
There may be a capacity issue for the Board.
The Board has a big job - and maybe it needs more bums on seats.
Critics have noted something else, although it’s not in the inquiry report. They say Wellington Water thinks of itself as a ‘corporate brand’: it worries more about its image than its mahi. I can’t comment first hand, and nor can I excuse it if it’s true. I’ll just say, remember the 80s? When Aotearoa wanted public services that looked like the private sector - less JJ, more sexy? Maybe many roads led here.
With that in mind, let’s now step back further, to the deeper underlying issues.
There’s already too many ideas in this post, but that’s not going to stop me introducing an awkward metaphor
Righto. We’ve seen that Wellington Water did some pretty inexcusable stuff - but we’ve also seen how that stuff happened in a context. Wellington Water is an arm’s length organisation. That means it’s got a job to do, but it doesn’t control all the factors, like the level of funding it gets, or the crappy state of the infrastructure it works with. Mix together circumstances like these and things get tricky.
How to explain? OK, say we’re married. (Like I said, it’s a metaphor, but message me if you’re interested.) You agree to do the cooking - you’re better at it - and I agree to do the grocery shopping. Problem is, I don’t get the groceries you need. A while ago, I decided we need to cut the food bill. When it’s time to make dinner, you find that all you’ve got is mince, tinned tomatoes, a rock and a hard place.
At first you think, no problem: you’ve got this. You’re gonna sex that mince right up. So you turn to the pantry for a rummage - but more disappointment awaits. Thanks to my budget-cutting decision, the stores have gradually been run down. Damn. The cupboard is almost bare. For a while, my budget decision seemed like no big deal, but now it’s starting to bite.
You stand there, scratching your head, while the kids complain. You don’t think there’s any point bringing it up - we’ve already talked about the grocery budget, and I’m adamant we need to stick to it. You could go buy some extra groceries anyway; but then you’d be blowing the budget on the sly, and breaking our agreement. Alternatively, you could just cook a crappy meal - but the kids won’t eat it, so it wouldn’t serve the purpose.
You’re out of ideas. Feeling you can’t win, you might be tempted to put a positive spin on the situation - more positive than it deserves. You might even try better branding. It’s not mince, kids. This is mince surprise!
To put this in different language, splitting up the funder (the grocery-getter) from the provider (the cook) can also mess with the accountability (who makes sure the kids get dinner). If I don’t give you the funds (groceries) to do your job, I can’t fully blame you if you don’t provide what you agreed (kai). Now, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You can’t wilfully do a bad job - or worse, do a bad job and not tell me. You need to be upfront about what’s going on. At the same time, since you’re the expert cook, not me, I’ve got a responsibility to listen. I need to consider if I’m doing my bit to support you.
When the funder and provider are in tension this way, it’s harder to prevent cock-ups, or figure out where the buck stops. Worst case scenario, your kids end up hungry while you have a barney in the kitchen.
Treating more than the symptoms
The inquiry report found Wellington Water now has things under control, with more funding on the way. Fluoride is expected to be switched back on in September. That’s progress, I guess. It’ll take longer to see the full picture, how badly people have been harmed.
But without real change to the way we do infrastructure, people will continue to be harmed - and not just in Wellington. The current government has started on this journey, with a massive infrastructure fund, a new approach to planning for future needs, better oversight of the state of our assets, and new organisations to manage them. I wish the government luck: with such a mountain to climb, they will need it.
Of all the assets we’ve neglected, water has perhaps fared worst; maybe because its decline is slow or subtle, at least for a while. Government has only started gathering data, but of 1,975 water supplies across the country, 296 don’t meet standards. They have bacteria or chemicals harmful to humans, compliance work not done, infrastructure that can’t treat the water properly, or boil water notices in place. I guess I could come up with more facts and figures. Here are the numbers I want to leave you with.
When sheep shit got into Havelock North’s water in 2016, there wasn’t only one cause: assets or people, organisations or processes. There was no simple answer, just like there isn’t for Wellington. It was all of these things, intertwined in a kind of neglect that became catastrophic. In a little town of only about 15,000, up to 8320 people were infected with campylobacteriosis. Some 45 people were hospitalised. The numbers of the permanently disabled aren’t known. Four people died.
One of those who died was a lady named Jean. She was 89 years old. She had kids and grandkids and great grandkids, her friend said. And she was lively and sharp, remembered all her family’s birthdays.
JJ died years before, in 1994. He died as a person is meant to, I imagine, having arranged his affairs and made his peace. Even though his type of public service had been eclipsed - careful, conscientious and level-headed - he must have left his corner of the world with a certain satisfaction, having ordered it for those who would come next. That’s why infrastructure matters. It’s a funny thing to say of concrete and steel and pipes and wires, but these are how we show our duty of care, our kaitiakitanga. The next generation cannot lay its own foundations: we have to do it for them.
Jean was not afforded the kind of death that JJ had. Nor were the others. They must have been in agony. That such a thing could have happened - that governments could so fundamentally fail in their duty of care, that one generation could so badly let down others - would have been unthinkable to JJ. It would have haunted him.
No simple answers, like I said. No turning back the clock, like it’s the 80s or earlier: as if the past was perfect and we can simply recycle its answers. Still, that being said, maybe something has been lost.
All I know is, this wouldn’t have happened on JJ’s watch.
I’m using the terms ‘public service’ and ‘public servant’ to gloss over a few different things I won’t explain because even I find them boring. Basically, I mean the government doing stuff, and people working for the government so it can. When I say ‘government’, I’m usually talking about the institution of government (and everything it does and owns, including government departments) rather than a particular government. Water management is local government, but some of the stuff we’ll talk about is central government. It doesn’t matter: the key ideas are the same.
One definition of infrastructure is ‘…the fixed, long-lived structures that facilitate the production of goods and services, and underpin many aspects of our quality of life. Infrastructure includes buildings and physical networks, principally transport, water, energy, social assets and digital infrastructure such as mobile and broadband infrastructure’. Social assets includes stuff like hospitals and schools.
The councils in question are Hutt City, Porirua, Upper Hutt and Wellington city councils, plus South Wairarapa District Council and Greater Wellington Regional Council.
I still love them.
The inquiry report notes the rules around fluoride are going to be tightened.
I work in local government, and I'll be sending this out to my team tomorrow morning - what a fantastic, accessible breakdown of a really meaty issue.
This was so well written and explained - I ended to reading the entire thing aloud to my spouse!