Copy cat

Re-inventing John Tamihere as a leader who could win the Auckland mayoralty was always a tough ask. Doing it by copying Donald Trump, it turned out, made it a whole lot tougher, writes Simon Wilson

Re-inventing John Tamihere as a leader who could win the Auckland mayoralty was always a tough ask. Doing it by copying Donald Trump, it turned out, made it a whole lot tougher.

When JT decided to run for mayor late last year, he called in old friends and made some new ones. Matt McCarten, union activist, former chief of staff for Labour leaders David Cunliffe and Andrew Little, said yes. McCarten and Tamihere, along with mutual friend and political ally Willie Jackson, go way back, and for McCarten it was the request from an old mate he couldn’t refuse. He became a co-campaign manager.

Tamihere knew he’d also need “the blue side of town”, as McCarten puts it. So he got Michelle Boag involved. She’s a former National Party president and still an ebullient, very determined campaigner.

Until this year, if you’d asked either Boag or McCarten to name someone on the other side of politics who personified everything they stood against, they probably would have named each other. Yet there they were, working together.

Neither of them liked middle-ofthe-road Labour, as personified by mayor Phil Goff. Both loved the thrill of the chase. It was enough.

Jackson was not directly involved. He’s a Labour MP and Cabinet minister these days, and JT, himself a former Labour Cabinet minister, is estranged from the party. Jackson had to stay in the background.

Labour made its views plain by taking the unusual step of endorsing Goff for re-election and then declining to renew Tamihere’s party membership.

He spun it to his advantage. “I’m a boy from the wrong side of the tracks,” he would tell audiences on the campaign trail, “and I asked for their support. You know what they told me? ‘No, sonny, you go and sit down the back of the bus. We’ve already got a driver.’”

And then, bristling with mock astonishment, he would stab his finger at Goff and say, “It was this guy! But I’m standing because I believe people like me have a right to stand.”

Great story, replete with reference to Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat for a white person was a spark that lit up the Alabama civil rights movement. Few people would have missed the allusion.

Tamihere is not Rosa Parks, but he does have a strong base among Ma¯ori. Even those who don’t personally support him were on side. One Ma¯ori political leader I talked to spent half an hour telling me what was wrong with JT, but when I asked him to go on the record, he expressed solid praise.

In my experience, there’s a great hunger in Auckland for a mayor who is not a comfortable middle-class Pa¯keha¯ man of a certain age. Tamihere offered the chance to break that mould and it should have been the best thing he had going for him.

ONE OF the things that unites Tamihere, McCarten and Boag is that they’re all familiar with defeat. Tamihere stood for mayor of Waita¯kere in 2007 and was soundly beaten by Bob Harvey. McCarten did not get a Labour leader elected and badly mishandled accusations of sexual assault at a party youth camp. Boag presided over National’s worst election defeat, in 2002.

Three very hungry political animals.

Also in the mix: Christine Fletcher, a three-term councillor, single-term mayor of Auckland City before amalgamation, a minister in Jim Bolger’s National-led Government, whom he didn’t want in Cabinet. She signed on to become Tamihere’s deputy, should they both be elected.

Fletcher’s hungry too. She’s popular in her Albert-Eden ward but she’s a loner on council and she feels slighted. All the other National Party members on council have a working relationship with Goff. Fletcher told me they were “not out of their comfort zone”.

Tamihere, Fletcher, McCarten, Boag: was it a supergroup, ready to sweep aside old alliances and antagonisms? Or was it more like a double-blind date organised by a malfunctioning Tinder?

AT THE Manurewa Marae in late September, Tamihere made a speech in which he berated the Herald in general and me in particular. He complained about “bias” and not getting a “fair go”. He said it was “fake

When Tamihere repeatedly suggested ‘someone’s going to jail’, it was a clear echo of Trump’s ‘lock her up’ slogan against Clinton, and it was clear he meant Goff.

news” that he was being compared to Donald Trump.

The marae is in Clendon, one of the poorest parts of the city, and it was a little surprising to hear Tamihere ranting about someone that surely no one in the room cared about.

But only a little. He made those accusations right through the campaign. I had written a piece in March comparing him to Trump and Goff to Hillary Clinton, and he couldn’t let it go.

Was that because it wasn’t true, or because it was? When Tamihere repeatedly suggested “someone’s going to jail”, it was a clear echo of Trump’s “lock her up” slogan against Clinton, and it was clear he meant Goff.

Whenever journalists presented evidence he had misrepresented the facts on something, such as Auckland Transport’s plans to lower speed limits or the sale of the old Council Administration Building (CAB) in Greys Ave, he doubled down, repeating the falsehoods and complaining angrily we were out to get him. He stopped only if he had to — when, for example, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled against him.

Tamihere was Trumpian in other ways. He had a record of unpleasantness with women and was cavalier when asked about it. In our first interview, I asked him about calling women “front bums”, which he’d done while a Cabinet minister under Helen Clark in 2005. He was dismissive. I asked if he regretted trivialising the experience of rape victims in the Roast Busters scandal, which he’d done on radio in 2013. Again, he brushed it aside.

McCarten says they talked a lot in the team about how important it was to “clear the decks”. Make it clear JT accepted those things were wrong, that they were not who he is today. But he didn’t do that. When I asked him again during another interview, he walked out.

Perhaps he thought there were votes in it. Everybody likes JT the good ol’ boy, right? He may still not understand how untrue that is.

He never adopted Trump’s phrase “drain the swamp”, but he hammered the idea the council is out of control, acting against our interests and corrupt. He was, he said, going to “shake things up”.

He referred council agency Panuku to the Serious Fraud Office, but the SFO rejected the complaint.

This wasn’t merely an attack on inefficiency or poor decision-making. Tamihere promoted the idea that the institution at the heart of local democracy was subverting the interests of citizens for the personal gain of those who run it. Goff, he said several times, was using council funds as “his personal ATM”. It was so Trumpian.

I asked McCarten if he was comfortable with the approach. He defended it and then called me back the next day. “I think you’re right,” he said. “I want to acknowledge that. I think we have to try to tamp down the rhetoric.”

PERHAPS THAT happened. Tamihere never went full Trump, threatening to build a wall or lock immigrant children away in concentration camps. He’s not that guy. He’s more Trump-lite.

He produced ideas with little or no substance behind them. His proposal to sell 49 per cent of Watercare slipped out at the end of a breakfast meeting in Takapuna, in response to a question on a different topic. It wasn’t planned: JT was just thinking aloud.

Inside the campaign, they were aghast: the idea had been discussed but definitely not agreed to. Fletcher declared publicly that she didn’t support it.

Tamihere then compounded the problem by saying he’d talked to the NZ Super Fund and ACC and it was likely one of them would buy the shares. But when pressed on that at a candidates’ meeting in Meadowbank he fessed up: he hadn’t talked to them.

Being populist isn’t as easy as you might think. What issues fire up voters right now? Tamihere promised zero rates increases, a policy with Boag written all over it.

But no one swung in behind him. The National Party-aligned C&R group, which included Fletcher, floated the vague promise to “keep rates under control”, but stayed well away from Tamihere’s zero promise.

When Goff launched his campaign with a promise to make climate change a priority, Tamihere immediately wrote it off. “People don’t care about that,” he scoffed.

Was he tone deaf to the popularity of environmental issues? He kept criticising Goff’s “stealth taxes”, which was an attack on the targeted rates for water and environmental protections. He talked about Goff ’s “war on motorists”, saying public transport and cycling were important but “you have to get the sequencing right”. He meant, stop all that and spend the money on roads.

In Auckland, that’s the direct equivalent of Trump’s enthusiasm for fossil fuels. Did JT know that? Did he care? Maybe the biggest difference between Tamihere and Trump was that JT just wasn’t very good at populism. Often, he’d sit there on the platform next to Goff looking like he wanted to be somewhere else. He feared the humiliation of losing, but did he really want to win?

THEY COOKED up a five-step plan. And in the heat of the campaign, at a function hosted by the Public Relations Institute, Michelle Boag spelled them out.

She called the strategy “Reframing the Political Narrative”. Step one was to get noticed. Step two: establish JT as “a viable challenger”. Step three: make him “the viable challenger”. The fourth step was to build momentum. And the fifth? That was to win.

Steps one through three went exceptionally well. Step four, momentum, was their unravelling. Step five was a disaster.

Step 1: Get noticed

Tamihere was first-in bestdressed. He announced early and generated strong media attention with his first policy: to sack the board of Auckland Transport. It didn’t matter whether the mayor could actually do that. It was a bold promise that he really was going to shake things up.

He put his billboards up early, spending a lot of money all over the city. They were visually arresting, in red, white and blue, and they carried a clear strong message and photo promoting the candidate. The experience of Boag and McCarten shone through.

Well before Goff got started, Tamihere was working the weekend markets and every other meeting and event he could get himself into. He met a lot of people. Everywhere he went, he told his audience: “Go to jtformayor.co.nz.”

On the website, he put up his policy, links to his Facebook posts and media coverage he liked. On Facebook, he kept up a string of attacks on Goff and media coverage he didn’t like. That’s how you campaign now.

He kept saying audacious things and it didn’t matter if they were true. If he had to correct mistakes later, so what? He’d get another round of media.

Eventually, he outdid himself. He said “sieg heil” to Goff.

It wasn’t the first time Tamihere has said something fascism-related. In 2008 he told an interviewer, “I’m sick and tired of hearing how many Jews got gassed.”

Tamihere is not a fascist, so why does he say these things? Is it because he doesn’t know when to stop? Or does he go too far on purpose, because he likes the mayhem he causes? Which answer is more Trumpian?

Step 2: A viable challenger

There were 21 candidates for Auckland mayor this election and 19 of them never had a chance. To not be among those 19, Tamihere had to produce some real policies.

He did that. His proposals to sell the port, sell half of Watercare, enlarge the harbour bridge, clear beggars from the streets inside 18 months and not raise rates were all big ideas about big issues.

He also demonstrated his viability with a real ability to connect. He could be effortlessly witty at Goff’s expense and he demonstrated his fluency in te reo by joking with organisers in the language. He was a charmer and he knew there was an edge to his charm. He worked on it.

Step 3: The viable challenger From the start it was clear that if Tamihere was to face a serious threat it could come from only one source: the National Party. They’d love to have one of their own in the job. Michelle Boag even said, after signing on with JT, that if a viable National candidate emerged she would jump ship.

But who would it be? The best option was probably a current or former MP. John Key was not in the race. His former right-hand man

Steven Joyce was said to be keen, but the party was not keen on him. Maggie Barry’s name was in the mix, along with Paula Bennett and Judith Collins. None of them wanted it. Simon O’Connor mused aloud about it. Who? Exactly. (He’s been the MP for Ta¯maki since 2011.)

In the Tamihere camp they thought it would be Murray McCully, but he didn’t want it either. Then John Banks announced he was “thinking about running”. He had no chance of winning but he was capable of siphoning off 50,000 votes. Boag talked to him and he did his own poll, which confirmed he wasn't going to win.

John Palino actually did enter the race, a third-time candidate, but they worked their blunt magic on him too. No money, no chance. Palino withdrew in favour of Tamihere. Ensuring there were no other serious candidates was part one. Trying to avoid JT lining up with the rats and mice was part two.

A schedule of 30 mayoral debates emerged, and then grew to 40. Boag and McCarten leaned on debate organisers to keep their invitee lists to two, and it worked: nearly all the debates featured only Tamihere and Goff. This was in marked contrast to all previous mayoral contests, when the stage would routinely fill up with a row of candidates.

Step 4: momentum Fletcher went overseas on a prearranged holiday, which limited her ability to introduce JT to influential people at house meetings in the eastern suburbs. In Remuera and Epsom and St Heliers they expect that. In return, some of them will give you money and all of them can be asked to spread the word through their sports clubs, schools, charities and all the other groups they belong to.

These are people who vote. They probably don’t like Tamihere but they definitely don’t like Goff. It was Fletcher and Boag’s job to present JT in a way that made them like him. It didn’t happen. Fletcher’s absence wasn’t the only problem. There was also Desley Simpson. As the local councillor and former chairwoman of the local board before that, she’s the senior National Party member on council. She also happens to be married to Peter Goodfellow, president of the party.

Simpson is extremely popular, very widely connected and much listened

Build to. And she didn’t rate JT. Was she influential? “Oh yes,” one source told me. She’s the queen of the eastern suburbs.

She never officially declared for Goff, but she helped block a proposal for C&R to endorse Tamihere. They wouldn’t even help him put up hoardings.

Momentum also suffered as JT struggled with the detail of his big policies. He launched his plan to build a bigger harbour bridge with a promise to get it done within three years. Then he seemed to back away from it.

The policy was put together by analyst Will McKenzie, and it had credible expert support. But Tamihere told a business breakfast in Newmarket that “who knows, maybe it will be a tunnel. You can’t blame me for having ideas.”

McKenzie sat there not knowing where to look. And what the business crowd heard was a candidate inviting them to wonder if he was committed or just having a bit of a laugh.

Inside the camp, they were arguing: was it better to produce the detail to support a policy like that, or should they stay vague? Tamihere stayed vague.

He was going to fix homelessness, but apart from the gimmick of inviting people to phone 0800 JACINDA to dob in a rough sleeper, he couldn’t say what he would do.

He was going to deal with the problem of human excrement on the beaches when it rains, but couldn’t say how, given Goff had already fasttracked that project. He said Eden Park would remain the venue for big sports events, but that’s council policy too.

He supported the campaign to save the Chamberlain Park Golf Course in Mt Albert, but he almost never talked about it.

He didn’t even pivot back to Auckland Transport, identified early as a weakness in the Goff armoury. “Everyone hates Auckland Transport,” McCarten told me months ago. “It doesn’t matter what for. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong. That’s a winner for us.” But after the bridge was mocked Tamihere largely stayed away from transport issues.

Step 5: Win

They had some good ideas. Tamihere invited his audiences to organise “voting parties”: occasions when, at work or the sports club or the school, people could have some fun and cast their votes.

It’s a very good idea. But as political organisers know, if you want supporters to hold meetings, you have to help them do it. Even if they say they will, they usually won’t. You have to take their names, get back to them, encourage them, go and see them, make it happen.

Tamihere didn’t have the ground game to do that. Despite the fabled talents of his team, they didn’t make it happen.

“Reframing the political narrative”, as Boag dubbed their strategy, also meant reframing what Tamihere and Goff stood for. “I’m the change agent,” JT would say. “The other guy is the status quo. The donothing mayor.”

Yet, if you take transport, Goff is introducing the biggest changes seen in this city since they ripped up the tramlines in the 1950s. Many town centre makeovers are under way. The declaration of a climate emergency will have a far-reaching impact. Goff ’s a cautious guy, but he’s overseeing enormous change.

Tamihere’s nostalgia-tinged thinking was far more about stopping that change. And his team knew it. “Yeah, well please don’t tell anyone that,” McCarten said to me in September.

Voters knew it anyway. JT won just 80,903 votes: the worst result of any principal challenger in the four Super City elections to date. Last election, for example, Vic Crone won 110,000 votes. When Tamihere discovered that, he was incredulous and called her “a nobody”.

Goff won 180,146 votes, which was only 7000 short of his 2016 total.

Tamihere said afterwards the leafy suburbs weren’t ready for a brown mayor. We don’t know that. It does seem clear they weren’t ready for any kind of Trumpian. They’re not committed to zero rates rises. They’re not all that susceptible to the blandishments of Michelle Boag and Christine Fletcher.

What the Boag-McCarten strategy overlooked is that it’s not enough to get noticed, or even to make it all about you. Voters want to respect their politicians. Tamihere didn’t give them the means to do that.

Tamihere, Fletcher, McCarten, Boag: was it a supergroup, ready to sweep aside old alliances and antagonisms? Or was it more like a doubleblind date organised by a malfunctioning Tinder?

From top: Christine Fletcher, Matt McCarten and Michelle Boag. Photos / Michael Craig, Brett Phibbs

HE BEGAN election day with a champagne breakfast. Late in the afternoon he finally appeared. In his speech he took some pot shots at Goff before saying the general election was “around the corner” and he had “awoken a monster”. Was he going to run? He said if he did it wouldn’t be for National or Labour because “the old oligarchy has failed”.

“We’ve had a great brand build, but we’ll leave it at that.”

I suggested in this paper in March that Tamihere’s long game might be focused on a return to Parliament, by winning the Ta¯maki Makaurau seat for the Ma¯ori Party. He scoffed then that I wasn’t privy to his plans, but he didn’t deny it.

Meanwhile, Jackson, friend and supporter, is still there in the wings. In 2017 Jackson decided only at the last minute to join Labour, rather than contest Ta¯maki Makaurau for the Ma¯ori Party. That decision got him into Parliament and into Cabinet, but he was not given the prized portfolio of Wha¯nau Ora.

Now, perhaps, in the election next year, it’s Tamihere’s turn to have a go. He’s close to the K¯ıngitanga movement and has aligned himself with the Ihuma¯tao protest. He’s not done.

He came into the mayoral race to “shake things up”. He broke conventions, he hogged the headlines and he was angry. Voters said no thanks. He still hasn’t phoned Goff to concede defeat.