Anyone concerned about public money being squandered on council vanity projects received more evidence for their discontent this week. On Monday, Wellington City Council released the independent review of how officials came to spend almost $600,000 on a website promoting the refurbished Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui central library. The findings are damning. A costly promotional project went ahead without clear measures of success, adequate scrutiny or a convincing explanation of why something cheaper would not do.
The council has apologised and promised to learn. Wellingtonians have heard that before. The question is what, beyond another report and another assurance, will change.
The website looking for a reason
Responding to the review, deputy mayor Ben McNulty told The Post: “The website seems to have been built as a solution to an undefined problem and Wellingtonians are $600,000 worse off for it.”
The council spent $595,801 on a website that does not itself let you join the library, reserve a book or search the catalogue. For those services, visitors are directed to the existing Wellington City Libraries website, wcl.govt.nz.
The separate Te Matapihi site is essentially a brochure for the building. As chief operating officer James Roberts told Newstalk ZB’s Nick Mills yesterday: “It’s really a visitor attraction website.” It provides information about visiting, accessibility and events. But Dave Armstrong asked the obvious question in The Post back in June: why couldn’t the existing libraries website provide this information?
Armstrong described what visitors get: “You are welcomed to the website by a skip-able karakia and can learn all about Te Matapihi: its kaupapa, the many events on, things tamariki can do – there’s a lot – and information about the building.”
The site also attracted criticism for a Maramataka Māori link that sent visitors to a business selling lunar calendars, workshops and video lessons. The council said it had intended to explain a feature and acknowledge its knowledge source. It accepted that the destination was inappropriate and removed the link after inquiries from The Post’s Julie Jacobson.
Jacobson deserves credit for bringing the spending to public attention and pursuing an explanation. The Post was initially given a figure of $13,961 for the cost of the site, later explained as the cost of an interim mini-site. A separate official-information response to a member of the public disclosed the full $595,801 bill.
What the new report says
The review was conducted by former Government chief digital officer Colin MacDonald. As Jacobson and RNZ’s Bill Hickman report, it found weaknesses in procurement, oversight and value for money. Almost $600,000 had been spent without establishing how the council would judge whether the website was a success.
The procurement process was rushed. The council used what the review calls “procurement-in-a-day”, assessing proposals and selecting a preferred supplier in a single sitting. The job was not advertised through GETS, the Government’s tendering service. Initial approval was based on the $75,000 first phase rather than the likely cost of the whole undertaking.
RNZ reports that MacDonald cited an expected broad range of $100,000 to $350,000 for a government website. Such comparisons cannot settle what this particular site should have cost, but they hardly make a bill approaching $600,000 look modest. Nor had the council established what extra benefit the more expensive option would deliver.
Roberts told Mills he had personally signed off a $384,000 commitment because it exceeded his team’s delegation. Asked whether the number had scared him, he replied: “Absolutely.” He approved it anyway, explaining that he had been thinking about the wider investment in the precinct.
That wider context was a $614 million programme for the library and civic square (renamed “Te Ngākau civic precinct”). Against such a budget, the website amounted to less than 0.1%. It seems that a sum substantial enough to matter greatly to a community organisation or library service could appear administratively trivial inside a megaproject.
The council’s executive leadership team had delegated authority to approve spending of up to $750,000 without taking it to elected members. So, the website cost did not need to slip through a loophole to avoid their scrutiny. Its cost sat comfortably below that threshold. According to the review, the website was never discussed by the programme board overseeing the wider library and Civic Square redevelopment.
Roberts’ account of what happened is disarmingly simple: “The team got excited, tried to do something fabulous, it didn’t work out, it’s cost too much money.”
In his written response, he also accepted that he “didn’t pay enough attention to this element of the project”. Tom Hunt reports that Roberts did not discover the overall cost until late in 2025, when most of the money was committed. That leaves an obvious question. If approving a commitment of $384,000, while being alarmed by it, did not prompt sufficient attention, what would have?
The larger the project became, the smaller $600,000 apparently looked. A broad ambition to regenerate Wellington became permission for expensive promotion, while procurement and senior management did too little to challenge it.
The council’s contracting out model
Roberts made another revealing concession to Mills: “We could have done something a lot more modest that probably would have achieved the same end point.”
He estimated that the council employed between 70 and 90 people in IT. Could its own staff have built a website instead of contracting the work out? “They absolutely could have done that.”
That makes the failure harder to excuse. The council had the capacity to pursue an alternative, yet committed itself to an expensive external build without demonstrating why that was necessary. Internal experts did raise concerns. Those warnings did not produce the reconsideration of scope and cost that the project needed.
The contract went to Auckland agency Journey Digital. The decision to commission the work, and the responsibility for demonstrating value for money, remained with the council.
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