Former MP Chris Carter returns for elections
Former Labour MP Chris Carter is to represent the party that once ousted him, in this year’s local body elections.
Carter will stand as one of eight Labour team members for Auckland Council’s HendersonMassey Local Board.
He served as Te Atatu MP for 15 years starting in 1993, and told Stuff the return to politics was a ‘‘way of being useful to my former electorate’’.
Carter returned permanently to his Te Atatu home last year after seven years in two senior roles with the United Nations.
He said local Labour Party members had approached him about standing for the local board nomination.
Carter became the country’s first openly gay male cabinet minister with a range of portfolios in the Helen Clark-led government over six years from 2002, including conservation, education, housing, local government and ethnic affairs.
His parliamentary career ended in controversy, ironically under the Labour Party leadership of Phil Goff, who is now Auckland’s mayor. Carter and two other MP’s were demoted by Goff in June 2010 after the release of credit card records for ministers in the former Labour government showed personal spending, and Goff criticised the MPs’ travel costs. Carter served nearly a year as an independent MP, before leaving politics to take up the UN role in Afghanistan.