How money gets spent without a clear purpose
I don't usually write in response to a news story or a report. Yeah, I've got an opinion like most of us, and this one got me thinking, so here goes.
Money gets spent without a clear enough purpose, expectations or scope behind it. Sometimes that looks like too many hands reaching for the same pool, good organisations all doing similar things instead of working together, not because there's no purpose behind it but because it's not a cohesive one. It's a bit like different teams in the same business each buying their own version of the same software subscription, instead of one shared licence. Same intent, duplicated effort.You see it in funding rounds where similar organisations all pitch a version of the same idea, competing for the same pot of funding, when a shared approach might have gone further for everyone.
The money doesn't always follow the best use. It follows whoever gets in the room. Not bad faith, just no clear purpose behind where it lands.
Sometimes the same root problem shows up the opposite way. Instead of money spread too wide, it's one big spend, unchecked because nobody set out what it actually needed to achieve.
Wellington's $600,000 library website is a good example of this: one spend, no one checking it, and it's relevant right now, current news, publicly documented with a fairly thorough independent review behind it.
This isn't really about the website, though. It's about accountability and whether a decision can hold up when someone asks why, and they will.
Based on publicly available information, the council spent close to $600k on a marketing site, procured from May 2025 with a targeted delivery in September, roughly five months, with no specification document the review could find and no success criteria set before or after launch. The spend sat comfortably under the council's own delegation threshold, so it never made it to the programme board for a proper look.
None of that means the vendor necessarily did a bad job or that anyone set out to do the wrong thing intentionally. It just means the process that should have kept the spend accountable wasn't really there. No scope to check delivery against. No way to measure whether it worked.
Two shapes, one root cause. Without a clear purpose steering it, money doesn't disappear; it just ends up in the wrong place.
One of these will show up again soon enough: the next spend, the next review. The other's a bigger machine, too big to turn quickly. That's not an excuse. It's just the harder one.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya