Local Focus: Napier electorate explained

Napier City has a busy port, a CBD tourists love, extensive suburbs and some rural properties.

But the Napier electorate is a lot more than Napier City. It stretches inland to the Kaweka Ranges, north to Lake Waikaremoana, beyond Wairoa to just short of Gisborne, running inland half-way to Ōpōtiki.

When it comes to votes, it is the people of Napier City's many suburbs that hold sway amongst the 75,000 people in the electorate.

They are slightly older, with fewer university degrees, than the rest of New Zealand.

There are more Māori voters and there's even more on the way - the ethnicity of school children is 40 per cent Māori. Currently about 15 per cent of New Zealand is Māori.

In the electorate about 24 per cent were born overseas, with the largest group from the United Kingdom and Ireland comprising more than a third.

Napier was a safe Labour seat until 2005 when son-of-an-All-Black Chris Tremain took it for National.

With Tremain's resignation Napier returned to Labour in 2014 with the victor Stuart Nash now the sitting MP.

His government's Provincial Growth Fund has found plenty of projects to the north in the Wairoa District, where there's a 50/50 mix of town and country people.

Wairoa Mayor Craig Little said he has gained a recent appreciation for his district's disparity of incomes, as is the case for many districts in New Zealand.

"I've been helping the taiwhenua out at the Covid hub over this period and there's a lot of needy people in our town."

He blames the growth of forestry for a loss of jobs and diminished communities, but pastoral farming still dominates.

The Napier electorate has chosen Nash by a comfortable margin in the past two elections and he is about to face his third National Party rookie in a row, Katie Nimon.

But Napier can't be called a safe Labour seat, with the electorate's party vote consistently going to National.

Napier general election candidates also include James Crow (Green party), and Judy Kendall (ACT). Crow, who is 21st on the Green Party list, replaces Damon Rusden as the Napier Green Party candidate, and Act have a presence for the first time since 2011 in Kendall.

Made with funding from