Winds of change
Three cities, three new mayors. What will the changing of the guard bring and how did we get here?
Wellington City Council
Despite the brave face Justin Lester put on for the cameras over the weekend, he’ll likely be picking over what he could have done differently.
Did he campaign hard enough? Should he have spent more money? And did the people who told him Wellington was ‘‘a bit stuck’’ have a point?
Lester told Stuff he ran the best campaign of the lot. He did but he ran it three years ago.
His hordes of volunteers in T-shirts from 2016 were nowhere to be seen. At many meetings, Lester was left distributing pamphlets himself.
Then there was the mood of the city. As a Kiwibank regional scorecard put it: Wellington scores 7 out of 10 on economic indicators but ‘‘feels like a 5’’.
If voters were sending a signal that something had to change, then that message has been heard.
New mayor Andy Foster’s election puts major issues once considered settled back on the table: the movie museum, Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM), the airport runway extension, and Shelly Bay – to name a few.
When it comes to the second Mt Victoria Tunnel and the Basin Reserve roading changes, the timeframe for building those would always have changed after the business cases came back.
Changing the city’s financial commitments to the project is trickier: the three parties to LGWM have already agreed, in principle, to how the financial burden should fall.
For this, Foster is sitting down with the region’s mayors to pressure Phil Twyford as a united force but if Lester couldn’t do it, how will Foster?
Foster was an effective ‘‘opposition’’ councillor and his campaign speeches were full of things that weren’t done over the past three years.
Wellington will be hoping he can transition from that to someone who can get things done too. – Dileepa Fonseka
Porirua City Council
From a certain point of view, Mike Tana was a winner on the night of Porirua City Council’s elections.
Of course, in reality, he lost the mayoral chains to three-term councillor Anita Baker but if there were chains for determination in the face of overwhelming odds, he would be the chutzpah mayor.
Porirua has joined Wellington and Lower Hutt in electing a new mayor, and while the other results might have been a surprise, Porirua was always on a knife’s edge.
A week out from elections, an email from chief executive Wendy Walker to councillors and Tana leaked, revealing Walker had been in initial talks with police about some ‘‘unusual’’ petrol card transactions by the mayor. It only became (vaguely) clear by the end of the week that the whole thing went absolutely nowhere.
Against this, Tana, in his first term, almost won re-election – coming up 471 ordinary votes short.
We like to think that these battles are won and lost only in titanic individual fights between charismatic giants. Just as likely there was also the same old split of votes along class, ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographiccommunity lines. East, west, north (Porirua doesn’t have a south, it’s the coolest three-quarters of the compass) have their preferences.
When this whittled down the six candidates, we ended up with Baker and despite the thunderous distractions, Tana: each candidate
hoovering up the STV preferences. Baker outlasted.
There was apparently no massive haemorrhage of votes by Tana; maybe a mini migration of people, who might otherwise not have voted, to Baker.
We are all left wondering what the hell just happened. Which is a shame because despite the controversy, Baker was always an excellent candidate, with experience, knowledge and a ferocious work ethic. Now, after Tana’s messy departure, is her chance to put those attributes to good use. – Joel Maxwell
Hutt City Council
Ray Wallace’s tenure as Hutt City’s mayor has come to an end having been rolled by two-term councillor and fellow Wainuiomata resident Campbell Barry.
After nearly a quarter of a century on the council and nine years as mayor, it would be too easy to put his ejection down to his constituency wanting a change.
In previous elections, Wallace had not been hard pressed by challengers and Barry was able to orchestrate a relentless campaign to promote himself throughout the election cycle.
Barry forged out a reputation as a battler and was absolutely everywhere – getting out in the community and taking every opportunity to attend events and speak with locals.
He routinely set the agenda on local issues, which often put him at odds with Wallace, and in doing so convinced voters to deliver him 13,420 votes to Wallace’s 11,462.
Barry, now the country’s youngest mayor at the age of 28, targeted council spending on corporate welfare with the likes of the yet to be completed Sebel Hotel having become a major election issue. Voters also found it hard to stomach council money being spent on propping up the operators of Lower Hutt’s new event centre after a first-year loss.
The closure of the Naenae pool couldn’t have come at a worse time for Wallace. He was slow to react while Barry quickly identified it as an issue with implications for the entire city. Bizarrely, Wallace reprimanded Barry when he tried to pass a motion to make the pool a council priority.
Wallace also failed to promote the progress made under his mayoralty, such as establishing community hubs in Taita and Stokes Valley, Fraser Park Sportsville and the Naenae bowling centre. Barry’s policies on the environment and recycling are also likely to have appealed to changing attitudes. – Matthew Tso