Election 2023: Yoga with Top’s Raf Manji, winning Ilam, and Labour and mosque attacks

Raf Manji is Top's best shot at winning a seat in Parliament. Photo / George Heard

Ilam is a splendid electorate. One of the country’s best - if not the best.

I make this entirely objective assessment based on the fact I grew up there and quite like it (Burnside High School if you’re from Christchurch and wanted to ask).

It has a solid political pedigree. John Key went to school in the electorate (see above).

In electoral terms, however, it’s never been a nail-biter - with one exception.

Since it was created in 1996, the seat has had just one MP, National’s Gerry Brownlee, until Sarah Pallett took the seat in 2020′s red wave. Pallett’s convincing victory was perhaps the most shocking of all National’s losses. Unlike seats like East Coast or Rangitata, Ilam wasn’t being contested by a new, unknown candidate and had not suffered the indignity of its incumbent MP disgracing themselves that term. It was simply a case of Brownlee, a longstanding MP, losing.

It’s interesting this time around, not just because for the first time in the seat’s history it won’t be contested by anyone called Gerry Brownlee, nor because Pallett is trying to win hold the seat against a resurgent National Party, represented by Hamish Campbell who must win the seat to enter Parliament, but also because Top and its leader, Raf Manji, is using the seat to defy the odds and enter Parliament.

Manji’s creditable performance running as an independent in the seat in 2017, where he came second on 23 per cent of the vote, means, at least on paper, he has a shot of taking it (the other two parties will say this was a quake-fatigued anti-Brownlee vote rather a groundswell of support for Manji). It’s possibly the best shot Top has had since 2017 of getting into Parliament, and the best shot any new party that hasn’t had a parliamentary history has had of securing even a toehold on a seat since the Conservatives scored 3.97 per cent of the nationwide party vote in 2014.

But despite being the leader of the numbers-heavy Top, I’m not in town to crunch statistics with Manji, I’m here to do yoga.

Well, actually, I’m in Christchurch for a holiday and my mother’s birthday (a significant one, which I’m too polite to print), but work offered to buy me a later (off-peak) flight home if I could squeeze in a day with Manji for our series on hanging out with political leaders, which I gratefully accepted.

We do yoga at Manji’s suggestion. He says he’s a regular - in fact, I subsequently learned he took another journalist along for a feature just like this one. He thinks it’s good to clear your head. I used to be a regular too. In fact, I discovered on file at his chosen studio, my last visit was nearly nine years ago, in more enlightened times.

I’d met Manji a little earlier, at his house in the suburbs round the corner from Avonhead mall, where I used to work. He’s running the campaign from his living room, where I spent a pleasant hour drinking green tea with his campaign team - a bookend to our time together which wrapped up at Tom (a restaurant at the more salubrious Merivale mall on the other end of the electorate) for post-yoga ramen.

Present are James, his campaign manager, who has put his PhD on innovation ecosystems on hold to help out, William, a former Young Nat who interned with Nicola Willis who jumped after he thought Christopher Luxon showed a lack of leadership during the Sam Uffindell scandal, and Larissa, an intern.

Manji is a hustler. He speaks with a London accent. Only his isn’t clipped. He’s a sort of political Del Boy, but soft, and languid - charming. He used to do something financial in London, which gives him an easy confidence when talking about numbers, a bit like John Key, but without the baggage.

He reads a lot, but like the few politicians who manage to read keeps to political and economic stuff and fiction with a political application - something speculative or sci-fi.

Raf Manji on the campaign trail. Photo / George Heard

He’s read Birnam Wood, the latest Eleanor Catton (alumina of one of the electorate’s schools, Burnside High - see above), but wasn’t so sure about it.

“I wasn’t convinced,” Manji says over lunch.

“I think because that’s an issue I’ve been deep in for so many years - you know, the structure of society and the economics and stuff,” Manji says.

The “issue”, well, there are many issues. In Birnam Wood a clutch of environmentalists and a would-be incel citizen journalist happen upon an American tech billionaire’s shady mining operation somewhere in the South Island. Mystery and murder ensue.

The issues: capitalism, environmentalism, New Zealand’s investor visa regime, the tension between those on the Left who tire of the enthusiasm their movement shows for cancelling everyone, and those on the Left who know most of the cancelled had it coming.

“There were a few bits in there that didn’t come together for me. Sort of like, is it Andy McNab or is it Tom Clancy? It just didn’t get the thrill of it right,” says Manji.

He reckoned McNab, a former British SAS serviceman turned novelist, would have done a better job.

“He wrote this book, which was based in New Zealand… it was an extraordinary story: Essentially, rich people in their bunkers, and it was set in, in Akaroa, in Queenstown, you know, Speargrass Flat, all this stuff. And that felt almost more plausible than what Eleanor had written,” he says.

Controversial. From SAS Andy McNab to yoga. Yoga is something Manji does to relax. He’s quite good at it actually, managing to contort himself into whatever shape the instructor requires.

I’m terrible. Terrible at posing, terrible at moving, terrible at disconnecting. I’m meant to focus my mind on a mountain but all I can think about is the likelihood of retailers passing GST cuts onto consumers - a symptom of unsolvable chakra misalignment.

I’m alone in my strife.

Everyone at Top seems to be good at yoga. Even the intern.

Raf Manji speaking to students. Photo / George Heard

I castigate myself for agreeing to this activity. I’m meant to be interviewing the man - instead, I’ve found myself lying next to him in enforced silence for an hour.

All I can do is monitor Manji’s breathing, which is very good. Tick. Mine, a symptom of lifelong asthma, is very bad.

The instructor comes over to assist me. I’m meant to be doing something called matsya kridasana or “flapping fish” pose. I prostrate myself, then turn my head outwards (easy) and follow this by arranging my knee at an inhuman perpendicular (hard).

I gyrate my hips. Attempting smooth, automaton-like precision, I’m instead stilted, imprecise, seizured. Contort yourself into these shapes around any other politician and you may find yourself arrested.

The instructor comes over to help. She kindly offers me a foam support. It doesn’t help, but gives me some respite.

She comes back to assist nearly every subsequent pose - even shavasana, the corpse pose. I castigate myself again. At least assisted dying is legal.

Where I am dreadful, Manji is exquisite. I’m clearly no judge, but his movements are fluid, flawless and balanced. He’s precise, rather than stilted. His limbs float automaton-like through the air. His fish flaps where mine flopped.

He owns lululemons. I’m in an old hand-me-down.

“I just do yoga”, he says, discussing religion over lunch afterwards.

“My best friend is Jewish. I went to a Church of England school. You don’t want to take a side. I don’t feel I need to really, I just do yoga,” Manji says.

Religion was a much larger part of his parents’ lives.

His father was a Muslim born in a town in Gujarat, India known for its textiles (his grandfather was a textile merchant), and being the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. His mother is Catholic, born in Ireland, and entered a convent, becoming a Carmelite nun.

Manji’s father, Salim, was one of 20 million people displaced by partition in 1947. Hindus and Sikhs went east to India. Muslims, Manji’s father among them, moved west, to Pakistan.

Manji said his father’s family had to “literally leave within an hour - like tens of millions of people”.

“They ended up in Karachi, which was in what is now Pakistan, which is basically a made-up country, which has not been very successful for lots of reasons - and a good example to people that separatism is not always a good idea,” Manji says.

Eventually, Manji’s father packed his bags again and left for the UK.

“He got the boat to London,” Manji says.

“He had three jobs: he worked at a bank during the day, he was a short order chef at a milk bar in Marble Arch, and then he was a night porter at a hostel in Russell Square, which is where my mum met him,” he says.

Raf Manji meeting students at Canterbury University. Photo / George Heard

“Back then everything was quite segregated. So my mother had come over from Dublin, having been a nun… she left that and had to get written permission from her father to work,” he says.

One night, Angela, Manji’s mother, walked into his father’s hostel and that was that.

Manji talks a good game. The Ilam race is his fourth in a decade. He ran twice successfully for council, representing the local ward, and once for Parliament as an independent.

He’s realistic about Top’s chances (zero) of entering Parliament by crossing the 5 per cent threshold, but Ilam presents an opportunity.

He reckons the demographics in the electorate are changing. Parts of the electorate have been “infilled”, with more dense housing.

An unscientific survey of election hoardings shows a predictable sea of blue in well-heeled Fendalton and Merivale, but a creditable wash of teal about Canterbury University and Avonhead.

The electorate is changing.

A parliamentary report from 2021 using 2018 census data showed that 31 per cent of the electorate was born overseas, compared with 22.1 per cent in 2005 - a fairly large change in a decade and a half. This figure is slightly above the national average.

He’s got a strong record here too, gaining a national profile for his work with survivors of the 2019 mosque attacks. The Al Noor Mosque sits just outside the electorate. The day of the attacks, Manji sprung into action, seeing that New Zealand, and particularly Christchurch’s Anglican mentality, might be slow to recognise the particularities of Muslim burial traditions, which typically see the deceased buried as soon as practicable.

He claims Labour was weighing him up to be a second Commissioner for the Royal Commission into the mosque attacks, but he was rejected at the last minute (Cabinet sources say they don’t recall Manji’s name ever coming up). Manji says Labour has blackballed him from other appointments too.

Manji is uneasy with how the shootings have played out. He reckons Labour used the response to the attacks to recruit members and supporters.

“It was bad practice to essentially recruit people from a traumatic event into politics,” he says.

The years since the attacks have seen, he says, only a few official voices heard, creating a unified narrative from survivors that doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground.

“Everyone has the right to be heard. It’s still a highly sensitive subject,” he says.

Raf Manji was involved in allocating funds donated after the mosque shootings. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Eventually Manji grew so frustrated with the response, he completed his own report - a mini-Royal Commission on the aftermath.

“I did a report for the PM and I went to see Jacinda [Ardern],” Manji said, meeting her in November 2019 wearing his hat as a member of the group that helped get donations to family members.

“[I] made six recommendations and she said, ‘I agree with all of these’” he recalls. None of the recommendations, he said, were implemented.

Ilam is more like the rest of the country when it comes to housing. It has relatively high home ownership - 49.4 per cent of people own or partly own their homes (compared with a national average of 51.3 per cent), and a further 17 per cent own their homes in a family trust. Just 33.6 per cent of households don’t own their homes, lower than the national average.

This makes Ilam quite unlike electorates like Auckland Central, Wellington Central, Rongotai and Mt Albert, which the Greens have flipped or are trying to flip partly because of discontentment with Labour and National’s record on housing. The theory in Wellington goes that these electorates are uniquely flippable because of their high proportion of renters.

This is a problem for Top, whose main tax policy is a tax on residential land, which might be great for the economy, but not so great for Ilam.

The campaign is admittedly downplaying the policy on the doorstep.

“People ask me about it. I talk about it... If you want to solve the housing issue, this is the best policy,” Manji says.

Manji admits he isn’t a fan of the traditional doorknock, saying “it’s intrusive”.

“I prefer to talk to people on the streets, out and about, like in their gardens. Of course in Ilam, everyone’s out in their garden on a Sunday afternoon. And often they are,” he says, estimating that as of August 14 they’d knocked on about 1200 doors.

The other campaigns will tell you this is nonsensical. A figure bandied about by the parliamentary parties is that a doorknock with the candidate has a one in three chance of turning someone in that household out to vote for you.

It’s stuff like this, and comments about having AI candidates, and depoliticising highly political tax policy, that has the Wellington swamp pondering whether Manji is simply another flavour of the failed Top experiment. The party is not unfairly pilloried for thinking itself just a bit too clever for the cut and thrust of ordinary politics. It can itself feel like an AI candidate, spouting desiccated Regulatory Impact Statement-like policy in an age of populism.

He’s learning fast. The campaign is pivoting to talk about the alleged neglect of Christchurch by Labour and National, as evinced by the pithy rashers cast southwards by Labour and National’s transport policies compared to the gluttonous porkbarelling of Auckland and Wellington. A far more retail pitch than AI candidates and a land tax.

The party is pivoting rightward too, positioning itself as a more palatable centrist ballast to National and Act than the other party fishing in that pool, NZ First.

Getting there will be hard. Dealing with National and Act may be even harder. Requiring political contortions beyond even a yogi.

Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.