"F*** that was rough", Mayor Tory Whanau said she commented after the meeting. Photo / WCC
"F*** that was rough", Mayor Tory Whanau said she commented after the meeting. Photo / WCC
Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau claims she was “heckled and booed” by about 100 people at a residents’ association meeting to the point she said “f**k that was rough” on her way out.
“They didn’t want to listen to me anymore because they didn’t like what I had to say,” Whanautold the Herald.
“That doesn’t mean I deserve disrespect and what it felt like to me is that like many other women, I was just being shouted down by a group of men.”
Whanau ended up telling the Oriental Bay Residents’ Association president: “I’ve had enough of this”.
But a resident at the meeting said if Whanau couldn’t handle questions without losing her temper, then she was in the wrong job.
“If a question was asked and wasn’t answered specifically, people may have said: ‘Oh come on give us the answer’... I don’t see it as heckling, you’ve got to have thick skin in this game.”
Whanau posted on her Instagram story that she was heckled and booed after describing her vision for the future of the capital with affordable housing, cycleways and climate resilience.
Whanau acknowledged other people might have different definitions for those words.
“At one point the majority of them sort of yelled back at me in frustration and anger- that to me is heckling and that to me was disrespectful, so I do stand by how I characterised that part of the meeting.”
Whanau agreed to a ten-minute Q&A which she said went overtime and the questions became rude and turned into debates, so she called time on her appearance.
She said one man made repetitive statements about the $7.4b Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM) transport plan killing businesses and kept interrupting her.
People started making statements like “no one supports Let’s Get Wellington Moving” and “no one supports cycleways”, Whanau claimed.
“It derailed the meeting and took away the opportunity for others to get information from me.”
An artist's impression of proposed changes to the Golden Mile from Lambton Quay to Courtenay Place in Wellington as part of the Let's Get Wellington Moving transport plan.
Whanau reminded residents there were people who supported her transport plans, like the 34,000 Wellingtonians who voted for her.
But she promised to pass on residents’ concerns to LGWM and said she would go back to another Oriental Bay Residents’ Association meeting if some boundaries were set.
Lambton Ward councillor Nicola Young was at the meeting and said it was not hostile but people were upset, became angry, and felt the mayor was not addressing their concerns.
Resident Kevin Isherwood said the council was “blue sky gazing” over the reality of LGWM’s plan to remove private vehicles and car parks from the Golden Mile.
He told Whanau at the meeting it will bankrupt businesses.
“They are the beating heart of the city if you kill them off, the city becomes a ghost town.”
Isherwood accused Whanau and councillors who supported her of pre-determining the outcome of transport decisions.
“If the mayor goes to a public meeting, a town hall meeting, and cannot handle challenging, relevant, highly pertinent questions without being rattled and losing her temper, well then she shouldn’t be mayor. She’s in the wrong job, she should get a back office somewhere out of the firing line.”
Responding to criticism she was not addressing the concerns of residents, Whanau said that was the whole point of her being at the meeting.
Meehan stressed Whanau did not walk out on the meeting and she had previously advised of another engagement at 8pm.
“I stopped the questioning at that time and asked for an acclamation to thank her for attending which was given and then she left,” he said.
“There was some robust questioning about policies, which people clearly disagreed with but I don’t think there was any disrespect shown to her at all, no different from any other political quasi-political meeting.”
Meehan said many people in attendance were from an older generation.
“They are hardly going to bike into town, and with bus services the way they are, they’ll get in the car and they’ll go somewhere other than the CBD because you can’t park there.”
