Wellington's daily The Post breaks the news a group of local grandees - including the paper's owner - has formed to get the capital 'back on track.' Photo: The Post
Last week, an un-bylined front page story in The Post delivered what seemed to be some good news for Wellington.
"Some of Wellington's biggest movers and shakers have come together with a new vision to dig the city out of its slump," it read.
What could these local luminaries be up to?
Paying for an upgrade to the bucket fountain? Housing close to the city centre? Finally exiling Mediawatch's Colin Peacock?
Nothing as specific as that.
The group, Vision for Wellington, is touting positive-sounding but vague goals: Building a city people want to live in, ensuring it's financially sustainable, providing world-class infrastructure.
Not many people would disagree with any of that, though the devil is always in the details.
One person's world-class infrastructure is another person's gold-plated, business-killing cycleway.
On those details, Vision for Wellington - and the anonymously penned Post story announcing its arrival - is mostly silent.
The group itself says it's apolitical.
But dig a little deeper, and questions start to arise.
Its membership includes several prominent political figures, such as National Party-aligned former Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast, sitting Wellington regional councillor Simon Woolf and former Labour cabinet minister and former Wellington mayor Fran Wilde.
Another member, Marsello group chief executive Luke Pierson, is rumoured to be weighing up a run for mayor next year.
There are also some familiar names with strong, mostly pro-business views.
Property magnate Sir Bob Jones, for instance.
When asked on Newstalk ZB how and why the group came about, Fran Wilde said it was born out of dissatisfaction with the current council.
"It's pretty bad. When I took over as mayor in the early '90s, Wellington was in the doldrums, but we got a council that was prepared to work together.
"We had people as diverse as Rex Nicholls on one side, and Sue Kedgeley who was Green. They all had their views, but there was enough compromise to get big things done and we don't seem to be getting this with this council."
The group's website, which is registered by Pierson, is more forthright with that criticism.
The website of Vision for Wellington. Photo: screenshot
It cites a citywide "crisis of confidence" brought on by the council's "inability to rein in spending" and "ideology-fuelled decision-making".
Labour-aligned councillor Ben McNulty has called it a "right-wing front group".
Advocacy groups can have political leanings, even if they say they don't. But if the group isn't really apolitical, that poses questions for The Post.
The paper's owner, Stuff chief executive Sinead Boucher, is among those who have signed up to Vision for Wellington.
The Post's story revealing the group's existence said it had been "working in the background for months".
That coincides with intense coverage of the council in The Post.
It's been particularly critical of its cycleway rollout, running a series of stories and opinion pieces pinning the blame for business closures on bikes, rather than thousands of public servants losing their jobs during a recession and a cost of living crisis.
One story by its national affairs editor Andrea Vance announced the council had ploughed "$518 per household" into cycleways over the last two years.
It didn't mention almost half the funding was contributed by the New Zealand Transport Agency. (Using the same measure, roads cost $1587 per household in the last two years.)
Some of the most stinging criticisms have been penned by Vision for Wellington's own Luke Pierson, who's written columns for The Post calling cyclists the "new elite" and arguing the council needs "an adult in the room".
The Spinoff's Wellington editor Joel MacManus concluded The Post is doing what Vision for Wellington has been accused of - pursuing an agenda under the pretence of objectivity.
"Advocacy journalism and advocacy groups can be positive forces for civic discussion, but let's drop the bullshit. Vision for Wellington is not a non-political group, and The Post is not behaving like neutral media," he wrote.
Stuff's Sinead Boucher told Mediawatch she saw Vision for Wellington as a positive and relatively innocuous effort to improve Wellington.
She said it was formed when a series of conversations with fellow business leaders coalesced into a collective desire to take action.
"I got involved because I love Wellington. I'm a business owner in Wellington. I live in Wellington, and you feel like you want to be able to contribute what you can to help with that."
Boucher said everyone in the group was firm that it was apolitical.
She didn't see statements on its website about "ideology-fuelled decision-making" and the need to "rein in spending" as being too political.
"The inability to rein in spending is a fact. There are massive problems in Wellington, including seismic rebuilds and things to do that have caused a huge amount of money to need to be spent there."
Boucher also dismissed the possibility that the group could be a Trojan horse for any of its members' political ambitions.
"It does make me laugh to be accused of being far-right or somehow taking our papers into a far-right direction. Mostly I have to spend my time defending ourselves from being too far to the left."
Owners calling the shots?
Boucher told Mediawatch she disagreed with the actions of billionaire press owners like Jeff Bezos or Patrick Soon-Shiong, who recently went over the heads of editorial leaders to stop their papers - the Washington Post and the LA Times - endorsing Kamala Harris as US President.
While editors of papers at Rupert Murdoch's News Limited company denied the proprietor called the editorial shots while they worked for him, several changed their tune afterwards.
David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun in the UK likened his boss's mindset to a "prism" through which news editors saw the world. In August, he admitted he campaigned to close down the BBC "to curry favour with Rupert".
"You look at the world through Rupert's eyes," another Sun editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, once admitted - adding that if Murdoch told him to print the paper in Sanskrit, he would do so without question.
But Boucher told Mediawatch she had never directed her newsroom on how to cover the council or encouraged The Post to print stories that align with Vision for Wellington.
"If I tried to go down to our newsroom and tell them what to write or what not to write, they would write about the fact that I had tried to do it and so they should," she said.
"We have a code of ethics around editorial independence that I adhere to and that everybody else in the company has to adhere to, and I think that's really precious and important."
The Post's reporting of civic and council issues and the activities of Vision for Wellington are sure to be scrutinised closely now that the group - and Boucher's backing of it - have been made public.
