Justin Lester: Where did it all go wrong for one-term mayor?
New Wellington Mayor Andy Foster can finally pop the champagne but where did it all go wrong for former leader Justin Lester?
Three words dominated the Wellington mayoral race: Smile. Wave. Stuck.
The first two were used by aspirant Andy Foster as stinging dismissals of incumbent Justin Lester’s record over the previous three years.
They stuck.
So did the sense of a region ‘‘going backwards’’. A capital city ‘‘stuck’’. That vibe was revealed in The
Dominion Post’s Wellington Report, and it became a theme of many candidate debates. It continued after the election while the city’s top job was held in legal limbo during Lester’s bid for a recount.
Yesterday, almost a month after the election, District Court judge Kevin Kelly denied Lester’s application and the now former mayor finally conceded ‘‘the matter is . . . at an end’’.
It was an anti-climactic but somehow appropriate end to a mayoralty that had promised so much but delivered little.
Three years earlier, Lester was doing plenty of smiling and waving to rapturous applause.
He was a young, articulate mayor; a surprise star at the Labour Party’s annual conference. Even before we were dazzled by Jacindamania, there was a little Lesterphoria.
He had that most precious of possessions: political capital.
Even the rumblings of the earth could not shake that. When the Kaiko¯ ura quake hit, Lester played a key role in getting the city back on its feet within a week. His stock rose even higher.
But over the next three years, the mayor, those around him and even the Labour Party, would spill those gifts, like water poured on hot ground: promises not kept, spin replacing substance, dysfunctional leadership, and little achieved.
It became an inexorable, slow-mo political car accident. Lester should have seen that in the numbers.
In his first year as mayor, a Curia poll gave him a net favourability rating of +28 per cent.
He had promised a film museum and convention centre, to make concrete progress on extending the airport runway and fixing the capital’s transport woes. Even a wet house for the city’s homeless alcoholics.
Lester wanted to build hundreds of houses a year in a city with a significant housing shortfall.
He had the team in place, including Labour hotshot Hayden Munro, and what many regarded as a ‘‘compliant’’ Left-leaning council.
But the man who had been such an astute, approachable, outgoing councillor became very different as the city’s chains rested on his shoulders.
Courage and boldness in the aftermath of the quake appeared to be replaced by timidity in the face of conflict, a desire to be liked that led to a path of least resistance and the occasional flip-flop.
As one councillor saw it, ‘‘he was not dealing with substantive issues, he didn’t like tackling big problems’’.
He could be brilliant one moment, shy and difficult the next; colleagues often didn’t know which version would turn up.
One described him as an ‘‘introvert’’ who struggled to build the relationships and networks needed to get things done. Others were upset at his apparent disregard for the ceremony, decency and seriousness of the office.
And, as time went on, the increasingly closed doors.
That might explain why, despite his political riches, a friendly council and Government, Lester was unable to advance the runway, get Wellington moving rather than just talking about transport, even build that wet house.
A public crying out for meaningful change, sick and tired of waiting for buses that didn’t show, had to make do with a rainbow crossing, bilingual street signs and a little al fresco dining.
Rather than growing city business, as Lester had promised, he was fronting a council closing so many doors – the town hall, St James Theatre, its main library among many others.
A stronger mayoral team might
have helped accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
But Munro left, to be replaced by then Labour Party vice-president Beth Houston as the mayor’s public affairs adviser.
She out-ranked Lester in the party and now, as one insider points out, ‘‘often orders came back from the Labour Party, rather than the city’s agenda being pushed at the party caucus’’.
That confusion over Lester’s allegiance would become a confusing irritation for voters, party and the prime minister. In the end, he had a number of masters but somehow heseemed to serve none of them.
The departures of Munro, Houston and others exposed a dysfunctional office without the political clout or nous to deal with movie moguls, and political and business leaders.
Shelly Bay became a legal quagmire that undermined Lester’s credibility and integrity, the movie museum and spat with Peter Jackson descended into nearfarce, and by 2018 the mayor’s favourability rating had fallen to +12 per cent. If the politics outside his office were difficult, that going on inside it was becoming toxic and untenable.
Insiders claim decisions were often made on emotion rather than reasoning.
And as a new year dawned and the local body elections neared, Lester’s stock had plummeted, his rating now in the red at -11 per cent.
Incredibly, despite an electorate bristling at the lack of action and seemingly not buying the rapid-fire press releases claiming any victory, no matter how small, Lester could, maybe should, still have won.
But the Labour machine that had swung behind his campaign three years earlier, including co-ordination out of party offices, volunteers pounding the streets and Grant Robertson robocalls, was nowhere to be seen in 2019.
Details are unclear. Lester either declined offers of support or it simply wasn’t there.
The former suggests a certain level of arrogance in the face of a very real risk of loss, the latter posits a fear of political contamination in failure.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle but the prime minister’s postelection dismissal of Lester as merely an ‘‘independent’’ – later clarified as a blunder – speaks volumes.
Success has many mothers but it appears Lester, for now, has become a Labour orphan.
Ultimately, the blame rests with him. Three years ago, a video promoting his mayoral candidacy told punters ‘‘Justin Lester has the solutions.’’
Turns out, he didn’t.
Mayor Foster, you have been warned.