Wellington’s new water entity has just shown ratepayers exactly how institutional memory goes missing. Tiaki Wai paid nearly $100,000 to recruit Michael Brewster as chief executive, using international search firm Hobson Leavy. Three years earlier, the Department of Internal Affairs used the same firm and spent $377,212 recruiting four Three Waters chief executives, one of whom was Brewster, hired in 2023 to lead the South Island’s “entity D”. Tiaki Wai’s own establishment costs ran to $16 million last financial year.
Same firm. Same candidate. Near-identical job. Two bills.
The second search found the first search’s answer
This is not really a story about whether $100,000 is too much for a chief executive hunt. Taken alone, it probably isn’t. In 2025, Wellington City Council’s recruitment of Matt Prosser cost $114,305 excluding GST, more than double the 2019 figure, and at the time Tribe Leadership Executive Search’s David Hammond called that “in the realm of normal” for a role of that size.
The problem is duplication. Split evenly, DIA’s fee works out at roughly $94,000 per chief executive, so taxpayers and ratepayers have together paid somewhere close to $190,000 to identify one man as suitable for running a regional water entity. Add the full DIA bill and the combined upfront recruitment spend touches $477,000. Any business owner who hired a recruiter to fill a role, then hired the same recruiter three years later to find the same person for a similar role, would want to know why nobody picked up the phone first.
Both sides of politics own this one
It would be easy to pin this on Labour’s abandoned Three Waters project, and the context there is ugly. A 2023 analysis found DIA spent $94 million on Three Waters between mid-2020 and the end of 2022, more than half on contractors and consultants, with top daily rates of $3,500 and $2 million on communications in a single year. The original search was one line item in that consultant boom.
But the second search happened under the current government’s Local Water Done Well model, which was meant to be the leaner, more locally accountable replacement. The failure mode survived the policy change intact. That is the point: this is a systems problem, not a party problem.
An organisation with no systems still found money for search fees
Tiaki Wai inherited a hard job. When it was set up, it took over about $9 billion in assets and $1.7 billion in debt from five councils. In April 2026 it was also defending board fees set at nearly double those of Wellington Water, and households faced average water charges of $2,418 a year. At the time, Local Government Minister Simon Watts said only that he expected the board to have “appropriately considered” the fees, which is hardly a minister rattling the cage.
The entity now plans to spend $799 million this financial year and $25 billion over 30 years. Brewster, to his credit, has been candid, both about the billing fiasco and about what he walked into. “We have no billing system. We have no customer care system. We have no asset management system. No finance system,” he told The Post in August.
He is right that systems are the backbone. Recruitment records are a system too, and nobody in the reform chain appears to have used them.
The Auditor-General already wrote the diagnosis
In 2024, the Office of the Auditor-General warned that public sector staff are “often under pressure to make decisions quickly and show tangible actions”, and that procurement planning was “significantly underinvested in or treated as a compliance exercise”. It said that without adequate planning, processes can “cost more, fail, or later be challenged”.
A new entity, a billing crisis, an asset emergency and a need for a credible leader fast. That is precisely the pressure the Auditor-General described, and the result was a full international search for an answer the system already had.
The tools to check this exist. The government’s talent acquisition benchmarking and MBIE’s open procurement data on GETS contract awards should allow anyone to compare the scope and timing of both Hobson Leavy engagements. Whether anyone inside the sector does so is another matter.
Receipts before reform
Water reform will cost tens of billions, and households and businesses will pay for it through charges that are already north of $2,400. A duplicated search fee is small change against that. It is also the cheapest possible test of whether these entities can manage money with any discipline.
The questions for Tiaki Wai’s board are simple. Did it know DIA had already assessed Brewster? Was the search scoped or priced to reflect that? And for the Auditor-General, is there any mechanism to stop the next council-controlled organisation repeating the exercise? Until someone answers those, Wellington’s pipes are not the only thing leaking.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Tiaki Wai paid nearly $100,000 to recruit Michael Brewster in search that mirrored earlier DIA spending (2026-10-22)
- The Post: Wellington City Council paid over $100,000 to recruit chief executive (2025-03-19)
- NZ Herald: Thirsty Work, Three Waters consultant and contractor spend gushes past $50 million (2023-03-31)
- NZ Herald: New Wellington water entity Tiaki Wai defends salary spend for top officials (2026-04-13)
- The Post: Tiaki Wai boss mea culpa over Wellington billing fiasco, ‘I shoulder the responsibility’ (2026-08-11)
- Office of the Auditor-General: Strengthening government procurement, lessons from our recent work (2024)
- NZ Government Procurement: Contingent labour benchmark data
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