Ohariu without Dunne
Henry Cooke goes doorknocking with the two men wanting to replace Peter Dunne in the Wellington hot seat of Ohariu.
Greg O’Connor is used to dealing with dogs. The Ohariu Labour candidate worked as a cop for years, knocking on doors all over the place, and has learnt a simple trick.
‘‘You rattle the gate before you come in. That way you’ll know if there are any dogs around,’’ he tells me, as we step into the patio of a Newlands home.
He knocks on the door, it opens, and his tactic is immediately disproved. Three dogs come rushing out, yapping and jumping up to paw at our legs. Luckily, none are any larger than a particularly beefy cat.
Just as their owner begins to get them back inside, her husband - a staunch National voter, unlike his wife - arrives home behind us, but the chaos of three animals, one woman, one reporter, and one aspiring politician completely block his entry.
‘‘I love this,’’ O’Connor tells me, as he switches his electoral pitch between the two, and I believe him.
A week ago, Ohariu was the most important seat in the country.
The Wellington-fringe electorate captures Wadestown, Johnsonville, Tawa, Khandallah, Newlands, all the way from the harbour to the Tasman Sea.
It’s one of the richest seats in the country, with half of the families making over $100,000 and well over half living in homes they own.
And for 33 years, those owners have mostly voted for Peter Dunne. Not any more.
But let’s go back to Monday morning, before everything changed. Letters were still going out from the National Party asking supporters not to vote for National candidate Brett Hudson, but to instead vote for Dunne, a key government support partner.
Why? Because thanks to a quirk of MMP, Dunne could have been the difference between a hung parliament and a Labour-led government. If National won the electorate outright it would just be subsumed into their party vote share, but if Dunne won it he would create an overhang, providing a crucial extra seat to the government.
Labour Party higher-ups were keen to stop this, so they recruited high-profile former cop O’Connor to run in the seat.
That afternoon, everything changed. Dunne put out a press release announcing he would be standing down at the election. National immediately responded by saying Hudson would be running for the seat vote, but Labour had already won by default: even if they lose the race the government will not have Dunne’s vote to rely on.
Yet, despite the electorate becoming just another seat, where both major party candidates will likely make it in on the list, the interest remains.
Hudson, a 49-year-old former IT professional who entered Parliament in 2014 on the list, got a call from Dunne just before he sent out the press release.
Hudson immediately put in an order for more corflute boards to make electoral signs, saying ‘‘whether we use them or not, I’m going to have some stock of signs with my face on them’’.
Once that was done, he called National Party HQ and confirmed that, yes, he would be running to win the seat as well.
But signs come with a steep price. Hudson gets up at 5am every day to do a drive-around of all the signs in the electorate, making sure none of them have been damaged by the weather - or anything else.
‘‘I am surviving on fewer hours,’’ he says of his sleep schedule, describing the change to his campaign quite euphemistically as a ‘‘slight focus adjustment’’.
I met him on Thursday afternoon, in Churton Park, a sleepy dormitory suburb full of wide open streets and huge houses.
Our second house is a hit - a guy sitting in his parked boat was ‘‘quite happy’’ that Dunne was finally leaving, telling Hudson that he was a swing voter, but refused to take his card.
This isn’t Hudson’s first rodeo. He’s been a supporter of the party since he was 14, and after the shower-head debacle near the end of Helen Clark’s time, he decided to go along to a meeting or two.
He took a look around caucus and realised that most of the candidates were ‘‘just like you and me - which is actually a good thing about a democracy’’.
‘‘It made me realise I could do it. There was nothing about me that was any less worthy than them.’’
Up the road a bit and we get some better news for Hudson kind of - a voter who doesn’t vote on principle but told him she was praying for a National Party victory.
Then a meatier experience: a young guy who says he owns a small business so naturally leans National, but doesn’t seem all that enthusiastic. As the conversation progresses Hudson comes off the lines I’ve heard him use at most of the other doors - and we leave with someone who seems much more likely to come out on September 23.
Every voter we meet already knows about Dunne’s resignation this is an electorate used to being in the news - and none of them tell Hudson they are voting for Labour.
This isn’t because nobody in Ohariu is voting Labour - it’s because of a National Party computer system that draws together publicly available electoral data and its own information to create a list of addresses ‘‘where our message is more likely to be received’’, in Hudson’s words.
‘‘Believe me, Labour supporters don’t want to talk to us any more than maybe we want to talk to them.’’
National is far from the only party to do this.
Across the electorate in Newlands, O’Connor tells me he tries not to miss any houses - but he does have a clipboard with places not to go on it, and we’re in a much more Labour-leaning part of the electorate, with most of the folk we meet renting their houses.
Jane Ellen, the women with the dogs, has voted for Dunne for three decades - along with Labour. ‘‘Now I can say I will probably vote for you, thanks to you coming around here and meeting me,’’ she tells a beaming O’Connor, who almost immediately begins a long conversation with her Nationalleaning husband.
O’Connor is a much more known quantity than Hudson. After years as a policeman, he was elected as head of the police association in 1995, staying there until 2016 and making lots of news - particularly during his push to arm police.
His past helps and hinders. At one place, a woman who won’t be drawn on her party vote says she will definitely be giving O’Connor her seat vote. A few houses down a woman opens the door a very narrow sliver to tell him that she always votes Labour, but won’t be voting for him because of how much she hated the armed police push.
He tries valiantly to turn this situation around, with a long discussion about how he had to hold that position as the head of the police union, and how his current goal is to stop people having to go to prison in the first place.
She opens her door a lot more but offers no promise of her vote.
Every stop for O’Connor is like this, an extended conversation, even when we reach someone who clearly doesn’t intend to vote for him.
‘‘I find when I’m doorknocking you enter into a whole world, and then all of a sudden it’s dark - but you want to go to the next house!’’ he tells me, bounding down to the last place he can get to before a candidate meeting that evening.
Because of the favourable poll, and the switch that Hudson has had to go through, O’Connor feels like he has the momentum with him.
But in 2014, the National Party vote hit 18,810 in this electorate, while Labour managed only 8771. Now all of those voters have a clear candidate to vote for, while the Left’s vote could go to the Green or The Opportunities Party candidate instead of O’Connor.
If he wants to win, he’ll need to knock on a lot more doors.
Without Dunne, Insight
"I find when I'm doorknocking you enter into a whole world." Greg O'Connor