Desperate need for strong candidates
The dynamics of the Invercargill and Southland district mayoralty campaigns have become more complex. Some will lean forward and say more intriguing. Others will lean back and say more muddy.
Former Southland Federated Farmers president Geoffrey Young has made the district mayoralty a three-way contest. This will add flintiness to the campaign.
Seven-term city councillor Darren Ludlow becomes the seventh contender for Invercargill.
He finds himself jostling with the defending Sir Tim Shadbolt, fellow councillors Nobby Clark, Ian Pottinger and Rebecca Amundsen, the exiting Southland district mayor, Gary Tong, and Bluff Community Board member Noel Peterson. This could be depicted as a wealth of options.
But for those seeking an alternative to the undeniably famed, undeniably fading, Sir Tim, the others are in peril of being collectively seen as an amorphous mass, struggling to emphatically distinguish their superiority from the other non-Tim options. They will need to campaign well, indeed, to do so. And perhaps hope that their rivals don’t.
Most of them have their own longstanding records to invoke, from which the public – if it is so inclined – might search for the right combinations of stability and dynamism.
But the capacity to energise their individual campaigns, rather than to coast on a here-I-still-am basis, is something voters are entitled to look for from all these candidates.
Ludlow goes into this campaign knowing his polling record is stronger than most. He was top or second-top polling candidate for six of his previous terms. He chairs the powerful performance, policy and partnerships committee, and he is a former deputy mayor and – alongside present deputy Clark and former deputy Amundsen – has the scars to prove it.
The Southland district mayoral election is looking more focused. With Tong departing the district mayoralty to focus on his city bid, Young now emerges in a contest with sitting councillor Rob Scott and Te Anau businesswoman Kirsty Pickett. While there is still time for more challengers to emerge, as things stand this is shaping up as a campaign involving well-defined candidates, not that hard to separate in terms of where they stand and what they potentially bring to the table.
Young and Pickett are not steeped in local body experience, though with the district council adopting a 9.25% rates increase that won’t necessarily be seen as an inherent drawback.
Young’s Fed Farmers history has been controversial at times, and his resistance to government policies that he, in common with many farmers, does not like has extended to the provocative (and from a governance point of view, problematic) approach of urging farmers to boycott some aspects of the new nationwide freshwater rules, by not applying for resource consents.
Southland district does not have a reputation for being an excitable one, in terms of election results. But in times of great change nothing should be taken for granted. As we have said more than once: there is little point in electing a steady hand on the tiller of a ship that is not going anywhere. Setting the sails right in response to the winds is what matters.
And the best mayor in the world is going to achieve little if the council is gormless. It is the collective vote around the council table that matters most.
Which is why these elections, in such challenging times, desperately need the emergence of strong candidates, new or old.