How mayoral tilt slid to its demise

Hopeless, hapless and penniless from the get-go is how one centre-right observer sums up Viv Beck’s tilt at the Auckland mayoralty.

Aaron Bhatnagar had an outsider’s view inside the Beck campaign, which abruptly ended yesterday, the same day postal voting starts. Her name will remain on the ballot.

“At no stage did Viv Beck demonstrate getting out of the starting blocks, or scaling up her campaign in August [when nominations closed].”

The former Auckland City councillor said he first discussed the mayoralty with Beck in September last year and met Beck’s campaign manager Anthony McGivern in February to talk about campaign issues.

He claims to have met Beck in late July to review her campaign plan, which, he said, was dreadful and deficient: “There was no money for TV ads, no well-crafted messages and she was behind the eight-ball in terms of a campaign launch”.

“I sent her a document that tried to show what a plan should look like, but in hindsight, it would have been next to no help because she clearly had no money for a campaign,” he said.

On March 7, Beck, the chief executive of Heart of the City business association since 2015, announced she would be contesting the mayoralty being left vacant by Phil Goff, on a pro-business, centre-right platform.

She later said the mayoral job was not for the “faint-hearted” but for someone passionate about the city’s potential, with a record of getting things done and a passion for change.

By then, she had National Party member Liam Kernaghan on board as a media adviser, and advertising agency Hello Ltd signed up to work on her campaign. Kernaghan was replaced by another media manager with National ties, Josh Beddell.

By late March, businessman Wayne Brown had entered the race and self-confessed “hospo legend” Leo Molloy was in full flight with a constant barrage of bombastic headlines and grand policies.

This created a crowded field of fiscally conservative candidates to challenge Efeso Collins, endorsed by the Labour and Green parties, with a progressive, climate-focused agenda.

While having some good policies, like scrapping expensive light rail for building light rail as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible, and to as many people as possible (her best line of the campaign), too often Beck got bogged down in minutiae.

Her weaknesses were reflected in the monthly Ratepayers’ AllianceCuria polls, showing a slide from 20.5 per cent in June to 18 per cent in July and 12.5 per cent in August.

Molloy was the first to blink. He abandoned his run on August 12.

Days later, the drums started beating for Beck to stand aside. Former Auckland City mayor John Banks called on her to throw in the towel to give Wayne Brown a pathway to win. Beck labelled it misogynistic behaviour and carried on.

In late August, the Herald broke the story of an alleged unpaid $353,000 bill from advertising agency Hello Ltd. Her campaign team was locked out of their Facebook account and website as a result.

An email seen by the Herald included the claim the projected budget for Beck’s mayoral campaign was $4 million, later revised down to $2.2m.

Questions were raised about her ability to manage a council budget of $7 billion a year when she could not manage her own campaign finances.

The unpaid bill matter got messier when it turned out that members of the National Party-aligned Communities and Residents (C&R) ticket, which had endorsed Beck, were members of the Auckland Society, incorporated on March 31 as the collection point for donations to Beck’s campaign.

Beck’s campaign went from bad to worse when an advertising adviser, Mike Hutcheson, brought in after the fallout with Hello Ltd, parted ways with her over what he alleged were “Trump playbook” tactics.

Hutcheson could not stomach a social media ad attacking her rivals on the issue of co-governance.

It was created The Campaign Company, owned by Jordan Williams, who heads the Taxpayers’ Union.

For the past week, her Facebook campaign page has been strangely quiet, except for two posts, one expressing her “profound sadness” at the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the second saying she is quitting the mayoral race with a “heavy heart”.

Said Bhatnagar: “This has been such an unedifying shambles to watch.”