This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
This week:
A complaint of electoral fraud has been lodged with police by Election Services chief electoral officer Dale Ofsoske. The complaint includes allegations of ballot theft and standover tactics used against voters in Papatoetoe.
The police have confirmed they are investigating.
The complaint relates to the Papatoetoe subdivision of the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board, where four candidates from the brand-new Papatoetoe Action Team recorded a clean sweep in what’s been, to date, a Labour stronghold.
For two reasons, the victory of Kunal Bhalla, Kushma Nair, Sandeep Saini and Paramjeet Singh has raised eyebrows. First, while voter turnout was down in every other local board area, it rose in Papatoetoe.
On preliminary results, the citywide average was –6.7% and in the neighbouring Ōtara subdivision it was –1%. But in Papatoetoe it grew by 7.1%.
Second, the Papatoetoe winners received 50% more votes than winners on that board have received previously. Other candidates this time, who had stood before, received much the same number of votes as they did last time.
It could be that a well-organised team of enthusiastic fresh faces managed to jolt a lot of new people into voting. That would be good: it’s what everyone always hopes will happen.
But the complaint to the police includes allegations of a group of boys stealing voting papers from letterboxes and community leaders in temples and other venues standing over people to instruct them who to vote for.
The Action Team has declined to comment.
Handsomely re-elected Mayor Wayne Brown talked a very big game in his post-election statements to media last Saturday. He indicated he’s a bit sick of the pace of change from the Government and intends to position himself, and Auckland Council, in national leadership roles.
As the leader of a third of the country, he said, more people have voted for him than for any other politician. He was going to push Auckland to the forefront of economic development, including trade. He mentioned the Tech Alliance he has set up and chairs, and said trade is “city-to-city not country-to-country”. He’s led trade delegations and will lead more, especially as he is “well known” in China and India.
As for transport, he said tunnels for a new harbour crossing, the cornerstone of the Government’s thinking on transport in the city, “won’t happen for 10,000 years”.
He also had another dig at the Roads of National Significance, which include a new east-west highway connecting SH1 and SH20 from Penrose to Onehunga, and a four-lane highway parallel to SH1 connecting Papakura and Drury. They’re designed for “electoral advantage”, he said.
Brown wants transport planning to focus on efficiency on the existing roads, putting more freight onto rail and improving public transport.
Will he get his way? He reckons he will, because there’s a general election next year and as everyone knows, to win it the Government must win Auckland. Buckle in.
The final count was due yesterday but has been delayed until 10am today, on account of the high number of special votes. But here’s what we do know:
There are five new councillors. Bo Burns (Howick), John Gillon (North Shore), Sarah Paterson-Hamlin (Whau) and Matt Winiata (Manurewa-Papakura) all replace councillors who retired, while Victoria Short beat Wayne Walker in an Albany upset.
This leaves the gender balance on the 21-person governing body the same: 13 men and eight women. There are now three Māori councillors (up one) and three Samoan councillors (the same). The remaining 15 are Pākehā.
The sole Chinese-New Zealander ever to sit on council, Paul Young, lost his Howick seat to Maurice Williamson in 2022 and did not regain it this time. He came third in the two-seat ward.
The biggest shift is in age, where the boomer generation (born before 1965) has, for the first time, dropped below half: from 12 down to nine. Generation X also has nine councillors, while three are millennials. Generation Z (born this century) is not represented.
All five of the newbies were previously the chair or deputy chair of their local board. This is not the only route to becoming a councillor in Auckland, but it’s the main one and it has some obvious advantages. Board members learn how council works and the good ones learn how to make it work, collegially, for their part of town. They get tested.
The Labour Party has six councillors, of whom five ran on a Labour ticket, although as in previous terms they’re not expected to caucus as a party.
The National Party has slightly more, but none of them ran as party candidates and they’re unlikely to caucus either.
Act Local ran a few candidates and there was an occasional Green in the race too, but none came close to winning a seat on council. Act ran several more people for local boards and had a win in Ōrākei, which includes much of Act leader David Seymour’s Epsom electorate.
Voices for Freedom, the climate-denying anti-vaxx group, was also successful on a couple of local boards, although its candidates did not run under that banner.
Brown is likely to have only four of the 21 votes on the new council, including his own, that he can rely on in almost every situation.
Conversely, there are perhaps eight councillors who, on previous history, could vote against him much of the time. How will he get anything done?
The nine or so councillors in the middle split to the left and the right and will not vote as a bloc. But all of them share Brown’s desire to get things done. So they look for points of contact. They build relationships, with Brown, with each other and with officials. They promote ideas that are workable and can win support. They do trade-offs.
A classic example of this came with Brown’s 10-year “long-term plan” budget last term. He complained about spending on libraries, the art gallery, community services and even surf lifesaving. But between his draft and the final result, councillors shifted him on all that.
Everyone compromised, and Brown himself declared, “No one has compromised more than me”. But they found the basis for a working majority, and on they went.
The same is likely this term.
The approach of those who oppose most things is different. As a commentator on council affairs in another city wrote recently: “When people fail to influence change, it’s usually because they just complain without attempting to understand. They give speeches berating councillors, fail to consider trade-offs, imagine that everything is simpler than it is and assume the only reason anyone would disagree with them is because they’re corrupt and/or stupid. They accuse the council of not listening, but they don’t attempt to listen either.”
Behaviour like this dragged out many meetings of the Auckland Council last term and there was a lot of bitterness.
But away from the shouting, the underlying decision-making process, with negotiation, public input and non-partisan cooperation, was highly functional.
And for the most part, the decisions they made probably have wide public support. We got rates rises that weren’t too high (for most) and service cuts that weren’t too steep. Auckland Transport is getting much-needed structural reform and there’s agreement on more housing density, but in the right places.
The election last weekend points to this public support. It wasn’t just that Brown did well. The councillors who work with him did too.
Meanwhile, as all that electioneering was going on, the council has installed a new artwork along the “linear park” on Daldy St in Wynyard Quarter. Graham Tipene’s Waka Moana is a series of nine waka-shaped sculptures that rise six metres high over the walkway.
Tipene (Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Hauā, Ngāti Manu) has collaborated with waka builder Hine Waitai Dye to create two hull shapes. Five represent waka hourua, the double-hulled ocean-going canoes, while the other four are waka tētē, depicting localised vessels used for transport and fishing. All nine contain taonga referring to punga, or traditional anchor stones.
The council says Waka Moana was “brought to life with the help of architectural rigging experts SRS Group in collaboration with council’s Auckland Urban Development Office (AUDO), Public Art team and landscape architecture and urban design experts LandLab”.
The AUDO is the council’s new development arm, still being established in the wake of the abolition of the placemaking agency Eke Panuku and parts of Tātaki Auckland Unlimited. This project originated with Eke Panuku.
Sandra Coney retired from Auckland Council at this election, aged 80. Coney is an environmental activist, historian, author, founding co-editor of the great feminist magazine Broadsheet and co-author of the Metro article The Unfortunate Experiment, which completely changed the way patients’ rights were viewed in our healthcare system.
She has also been one of the most influential, knowledgeable and determined politicians in the city, first as a member of the Waitematā District Health Board and Auckland Regional Council, and then on the Auckland Council, where she represented the Waitākere ward for a term, the Portage Licensing Trust and, for four terms, the Waitākere Ranges Local Board.
If you like our regional parks, Coney is one of the people you have to thank.
Other local board members have also retired, including Cath Handley, who steered the Waiheke Local Board so deftly for so long, Pukekohe champions Angela Fulljames and Logan Soole, and the urbanist Peter McGlashan, who tried and tried to calm the streets, and the emotions, of Onehunga. You will all be missed.
And yet, despite the local board elections skewing heavily to older folk, it’s not all like that. The Waiheke Community Housing Trust’s Damian Sycamore was elected to his local board, and the avowedly youthful Caitlin Wilson won a spot in Waitematā.
And at the Marist clubrooms in Albany during the campaign, I listened to 22 candidates mostly get confused when asked what they would do for young people. The genuinely young Upper Harbour board candidates Rebecca Huang and Selena Wong were shining exceptions.
Wong told the crowd that most politics is “full of jargon and not accessible to youth and ethnic communities”. There was a low voter turnout, she noted, and she was determined to change that.
Wong and Huang were both voted on to the board.
The vote wasn’t at a record low everywhere. The Auckland average was a measly 28.8%, after the preliminary count posted on Monday. But even on election day numbers, the highest turnout was on Aotea/Great Barrier (41.3%), followed by Waiheke (38.9%) and Warkworth (37.6%).
The lowest vote was in Ōtara (17.8%), followed by Flat Bush and Papakura (both 19.6%) and Mangere-Otahuhu (19.7%).
Why was the vote so low? How many fingers does it take to count the ways?
One: Using the post is an alien activity to a lot of people now.
Two: The council voted against in-person voting. When they met the media on election day, Mayor Wayne Brown and Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson both addressed this issue. She said it was “a question of cost”; he said it was “out of our hands” and the Government had to fix it.
But that’s not true. The council could have set up voting booths for in-person voting but in June last year voted 11:10 not to do it. Brown and Simpson both voted against.
Three: The media, perhaps believing public interest is low, gave less coverage to the election than it used to. That’s an unvirtuous circle, because lack of media attention drives down public interest.
Four: Many local papers have been shut down, and the work they traditionally did covering local elections and carrying election advertising wasn’t picked up elsewhere.
As a sidebar to that, candidates in Albany, North Shore, Waitematā and Manurewa-Papakura produced advertising that looked very like a newspaper, and distributed them to letterboxes. It seems to work: nearly all the candidates who did it won.
Five: The election itself was misrepresented. I heard one TVNZ news item in which it was said repeatedly that “ratepayers” were having their say. But voting isn’t only for ratepayers, it’s for everyone over the age of 18. I asked TVNZ about this and was told it was “a long-standing convention” to say “ratepayers”, even though it isn’t true.
Here’s a hot tip. If you think more young people and low-income people should vote, stop suggesting they can’t.
Six: In Auckland, the lack of a hot mayoral contest must have suppressed the vote. Brown’s widely reported failure to turn up to candidate meetings would not have helped.
Seven: Do we even care? Apart from tragics like me, that is.
In my view, while the other factors are important, there’s an indifference to council politics that runs deeply beneath all of them. I’m not sure anyone knows what to do about this, but boosting community engagement will have to be part of it.
Name and face recognition is supposed to be a big bonus in council elections. Didn’t didn’t work so well this time.
Anne Batley Burton, the self-professed champagne and cat lady from Real Housewives of Auckland, came 12th for the seven-member Waitematā Local Board. Former TVNZ reporter Mark Crysell was a few slots lower.
But actor Peter Elliott did win a seat on that board, while Oscar Kightley, actor and filmmaker, easily won re-election to the Henderson-Massey Local Board.
Voters didn’t want either of the two leading protagonists in the high-profile battle over streetscape designs around the Karanga-a-Hape CRL station.
C&R’s Muy Chhour, the businesswoman who opposed pedestrianisation plans for the Mercury Lane area, and City Vision’s Connor Sharp, who advocated for them, both missed out for the Waitematā board. The board itself, however, now has a 5-2 majority of members who support those plans.
And in news of a different kind of celebrity, former MP Jami-Lee Ross failed to get himself elected to his local board. Ross burst into public life in 2004, as an 18-year-old elected to Manukau City Council. He rose quickly, chairing the MCC finance committee from 2007 under Mayor Len Brown, then being elected to the Super City in 2010 and to Parliament as a National MP one year later.
Ross became chief whip under John Key, but later faced allegations of inappropriate personal behaviour and faced criminal charges over a party-funding scandal. He was acquitted of the fraud charges, but left the party.
Ross contested the 2020 election on an anti-vaxx platform but failed to win re-election, and later launched an escort agency. He stood for one of three seats in the Flat Bush subdivision of the Howick Local Board, but came fourth.
Ross is still only 39.
I’ve reported previously on the dog-walking dispute at Monte Cecilia Park. Dog walkers used to let their dogs run around off leash in a part of the park, quite a steep bowl, not much good for anything else except looking beautiful and walking round on the paths.
Centre-right majority on the local board voted to require dogs to be kept on leash. Centre-left were all for wild and free. Public submissions overwhelmingly agreed (88%), plus a 1000-signature petition.
Everyone assumed the centre-right would be swept from office. The reverse happened: they consolidated their hold on the board.
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