Rodney Hide: At last - a real mayoral race

Victoria Crone is running for Mayor

Three cheers for Victoria Crone. She's the former Xero boss now running for Mayor of Auckland.

In doing so, she's giving us choice, making the mayoralty a race, and serving our democracy. She has quit her job, dedicated herself to the campaign, and catapulted herself into public scrutiny.

On cue, the knockers have been after her in force: no one's heard of her, she has no experience, her launch was, oh, so terrible, they shout.

But her true crime is she's not Phil Goff.

Those who like to think they decide these things had decided Goff should be mayor even before he announced he was standing.

Crone has thrown a spanner in their works. How dare she. Heaven forbid: we may have a race; the people may get to decide; we could be proved wrong.

The commentators aren't happy and the usual honeymoon accorded a new entrant didn't last the time it took to tweet.

She should ignore her knockers. They are sideline Sams who lack her guts and determination to quit their jobs and stand for office. It's true Crone has no political experience - but the point of a representative democracy such as ours is to elect one of us to run the beast of government, not to appoint someone from the beast itself.

And Mayor of Auckland should not be a retirement job for MPs who have been in Parliament too long.

There's no doubt Goff is a good and experienced politician.

He has proved that by traversing the extremes of New Zealand's political spectrum from one side to the other and back again.

He knows politics. He was first elected to Parliament when Crone was 7 years old.

But politics is all Goff knows. Crone has lived in the world the rest of us live in. She has had to pay rates and taxes and had to budget. Taxpayers haven't paid her wages. She has had to earn them. She has lived in our world and excelled in it. She is a mother, a top businesswoman and athlete.

It takes more skill and work to run a business than be a politician. It means providing jobs and generating wealth rather than just talking about them.

I like Goff and I have never met Crone. And that's her challenge. She's got to meet and reach out to a lot of people through her campaign.

That she has quit her job speaks of her commitment. It would be rude to note that Goff is keeping his parliamentary pay and resources to help with his campaign and as back-up job in case he loses.

Thanks to Crone we have a race. It's going to be up to us. I can think of three good reasons for supporting her.

One, she's a citizen first, and a politician second; two, her election won't force a costly byelection and three, she can fix the council computer system.