For Christchurch, My Local Election Lowdown

The First Half: The Candidates of Christchurch

It turns out that local elections are a lot easier to suss out than I thought. Which is good, because voting has already opened, and you have a month to get it done. Here's who, what and why.

Much of my interest in politics at the national and international level is as a morbid sort of soap opera - the cut and thrust of rise and fall, factions aligning and falling out, nerves found and pressed. Local politics has little of that across the country and none at all in Christchurch. Widely derided as dull and disengaging, a fact reflected in some downright diabolical turnout stats - only two in five Kiwis voted in their local elections in 2022, with the general election two years prior producing double that turnout - local elections struggle. 

And I think that’s a pity. We all care about what’s going on around us, not just the big-picture policy in sectors like health and education set by the central government. It’s the roadworks in your way and whether you have to jog for fifteen minutes to the nearest liquor store, the infernal ever-breaking pipes of Wellington and whether the mayor’s ready to lead in response to a cyclone or earthquake. It’s housing. Oh, my goodness, it’s so important when it comes to housing. Where it gets built and whether it gets built and what kinda housing gets built - if you can afford it and if the infrastructure is there to support it. So much of what we see when we go out to work or study or just make the most of our cities* is shaped by local politics. And I want you to be a part of shaping your city - to participate in your community.

I’ve promoted before all the reasons why I want you - even and especially the voter who doesn’t know much about politics - to go vote. But even getting an idea of who you’re voting for - not just the individual candidates running, but also literally just the actual jobs you’re voting on - can be tricky. The last local elections I voted in, I was in a Wellington environment whose councillors I did not know and whose little blurbs and occasional billboards were far from enough to introduce me to them. 

But I have splendid news for those of you who live in Christchurch, because earlier this week I finally knuckled down and did my research. Not only have I produced links to all the candidate biographies for your area, I’ll do you one better - I found a reserve of videos, predominantly two minute introductions that make it far easier to get a basic sense for who your next local representatives will be. So let me walk you through who you’re voting for, complete with those juicy links to put an hour towards brushing up on your picks so you’re happy with them. And once I’ve given you the full picture, I’d like to take a little while to talk about the mayoralty - the one position that, wherever we live in Christchurch, we can all have a say on. Voting papers are already going out, early voting’s open - it’s time to get amongst it!

If you are in Christchurch or the Banks Peninsula, there are four different positions for you to vote on. To see which individuals are running for those positions in your ward (region of the city), please click on this link, select your ward on the map or enter your address, and you will find how many candidates are running for each position, how many spots are free for each position, their biographies, and two minute videos - the ward pages each have a link to your ECan region and candidates, whose biographies, in turn, link to their two minute YouTube videos that serve the same introductory purpose. Some candidates choose to affiliate to a “ticket” that roughly signals their sense of values. In Christchurch, that mainly looks like “People’s Choice” candidates sitting on the centre-left, and “Independent Citizens” candidates on the centre-right.

1. A councillor who will represent your ward (a region of the city) and sit alongside the fifteen other councillors on Christchurch City Council, to deliberate and vote on what the council chooses to do

2. Community board members who, within your ward, handle the even more granular details of your ward, such as reporting on, discussing and contributing to specific public facilities like libraries and fitness centres, i.e a community board member is a step below a councillor on the hierarchy

3. Environment Canterbury councillors who, as the name suggests, specifically handle environmental matters - there are also sixteen councillors but instead of coming out of the sixteen wards, there are two councillors each for eight bigger reasons across both Christchurch and the wider Canterbury.

4. A mayor who leads the City Council, at the very top of the local government hierarchy (and, given Christchurch’s size, the most important political leader in the South Island†)

I apologise if there are any other positions I am not familiar with as weird edge cases do exist in spots around the country, like the liquor trusts in a couple spots; I am only going off of my own experience in my own ward researching who to vote for. Note also that in many places in the country, nobody has stepped up and been nominated to run against whoever's already in the job, so in some cases the incumbent will simply have been automatically reelected unopposed. It’s not ideal, but there’s nothing we can do about it this election. 

*I apologise for the erasure of any good reader who lives in the rural reaches of Southland, Tokoroa, and anywhere in between.

†Don’t let Maureen Pugh know I said this.

The Second Half: A Mayor

Here’s a video I was fortunate enough to snag that gives you a thirteen minute look at the two candidates with a shot at becoming mayor. It’s these kinds of details to fill in the blanks that I live for. Mauger’s material kept referencing the work on the wastewater plant after the years of internal stench and recent fire to boot, and that was great, but I was slightly surprised to see him put so much emphasis on it. And then you watch this video and you find out that not only did he actually personally work on the plant four decades ago, but the whole story behind his negotiations with the insurance company to build back better! These are the kinds of insights we should be able to produce more of in a small country and most of all at the local level.  

So what’s my insight for you to chew on? The race for the Christchurch mayoralty in 2025 is two solid candidates and six cookers.

Okay, that isn’t entirely fair. Thomas Healey seems like a perfectly well-meaning centre-righter who just has no point of distinction from the mayor past a love for community gardens, and Blair Anderson is your perfectly typical Legalise Cannabis leftie who has admirably been talking about climate change since the 70s, and running for mayor for almost as long. But every two candidates we descend another tier: from these two laudable no-hopes, we go to perennial "the government is laserbeaming me" Tubby Hansen and Social Credit-coded Area 51 pilot Peter Wakeman, who in a demonstration of incredible energy is also running for the mayoralty of Auckland. 

I have no desire to be mean to these conspiracy theorists - after all, both genuinely just seem like they need better mental health support. But take the last step down past that, and we find ourselves with two legitimately terrible people. Nikora Nitro might seem like he's making a passable pitch until you google his history of scams and worse. And he pales in comparison to Phil Arps, surely the incontestable worst candidate in Aotearoa in the 21st century. In a sea of billboards and flyers, all I have seen of his is a single printed-out pithy sheet of paper slapped on a power box**. Christchurch's skinheads might still be able to deface my local park, but their political machine gets a FAIL grade from me.

I have maintained for the past three years that Mayor Phil Mauger is probably going to be reelected by a wide margin. He is not a huge presence but he is in charge of a city on the upswing - so much construction has finally come to fruition. A city once derided as a sleepy sinkhole, whose denizens competed to see whether their racism could outdo their schools-centric classism, has quietly become one of the most optimistic and liveable places that Kiwis can choose to live in. NZers have persistently recorded in polls since 2021 that the country is on the wrong track, after two decades of good times, and Christchurch is the place where you can feel that at least somewhere is on the right track.

Voters tend to reward good times and progress. And a unclesque businessman who has pledged to only run for two terms is easy to cast as a calm, steady hand at the tiller of a council that actually functions quietly. He’s not a right-wing ideologue who’s going to significantly worsen the existing imbalances between the east and the rest. It’s easy for voters to compare this success to the diabolical headlines coming out of the rest of the country - not just the constant struggles of Wellington and Auckland, but dramas elsewhere like the Gore council back-and-forth and Tim Shadbolt’s sad last grasp for the keys. 

Above all, Phil Mauger likes this city. His appearances clearly show that he is not a whiner and moaner like Wayne Brown or David Seymour who always seems to resent being called upon to do the job they stuck their hand up for. He fizzes at what he can see out the window. That's precisely the right temperament for the Christchurch I have described, and it’s perfectly captured in the fantastically produced campaign video summing up the case for his reelection - perhaps the best I have seen in Aotearoa’s politics. I'm not acting like Mauger has actually been some transformative leader or masterful manager, but I'll be perfectly fine with his reelection simply because I'm perfectly fine with the trajectory Christchurch is on. He's not going to be the guy to foul it all up.

Just don’t mention the Commonwealth Games.

But as I did more research, I found myself increasingly impressed by a centre-left challenger: three-term councillor, former teacher and, inexplicably, a one-time small business operator whose business I cannot actually determine the nature of - Sara Templeton. At first, her presentation failed to impress me - she doesn’t outgun the mayor in that Frank interview, and her campaign video feels vague without carrying nearly the same energy’s as Mauger. 

But past style, she deserves a closer look at the substance. It's always hard to gain a definite impression without being in the room, but Sara comes off on inspection as a quiet workhorse. When Phil Mauger motioned to let hospital nurses park at Parakiore, that was her push several months prior. That wonderful coastal pathway? She was the one those pushing from outside Council trusted to make it happen.

The political analyst in me thrills to her presentation: despite a history that aligns with what you'd expect of a centre-left female teacher - she's confronted misogynistic abuse and trolling by Young Nats, and fought the scourge of climate change too - she has chosen to eschew the kind of ideological branding that even Tory Whanau in 2022 was fairly leery of. The political environment might be decent for the left bloc at the moment, with lots of voters primed to deliver a middle finger to the government, but we're just not the kind of country where people particularly associate their feelings about the prime minister with the nuts and bolts of local government. 

There isn't a huge bloc of Let's Do This liberals or Jim Anderton leftists waiting to descend on the polls - local elections skew old and homeowning and all the sorts of demographic blocs who care more about “common sense” and “consensus” and “sensible management” than social issues and worthy causes. The one solidly left-wing issue on which she happily reports her alignment is public transportation, one which is both enormously animating for voters at the University of Canterbury and Ara amongst others and which is not nearly as antagonistic to centre voters: homeowning boomers still like to see the buses run on time and to the 'Saders games, even if only they use them once in a blue moon. 

But unlike my misplaced belief in MANJIMANIA!!!, I don't think her disemphasis of cycleways - and that Park Terrace cycleway is going to be absolute deadweight on People's Choice this year and the Greens the next, mark my words - and promotion of chlorine-free water stations across the city is going to be enough to win. I'll happily add her to my slate of endorsements‡, alongside Raf in Central and Xavier in Fendalton, but I fear she lacks the profile to take down a weakness-free incumbent or the vim in her public appearances - she's a thinker, not a firecracker.

So I find Sara Templeton interesting not because I think there’s a storyline brewing about the left surge in Christchurch, auguring a bloodbath next year. (Not that I’m in the camp of the “Wigram will go blue” believers either.) I think she represents two of the things I care about most when it comes to the outcomes we get from local elections. 

Number one: she wants to plant a million trees. I am perhaps Aotearoa New Zealand's number one political commentator on the subject of trees, good trees and bad, and I am a huge believer that critical homeowners talking about shade and views should be overruled when it comes to all the good that trees can do for our city. (That’s one of my favourite long-form writeups I’ve read in years. I love it.) It's not just about the climate stuff, though that's wonderful. 

It's that there's a big quality of life benefit that comes from living in literal leafy suburbs that you just don't get pounding the concrete out east. No shade in public spaces sucks in summer when it comes to getting young people to go out and stay outside, and if we're serious about fighting skin cancer, we can't keep accepting that great southern glare. See, this is the kind of granularity you can drill down to when you get into the nitty-gritty of local politics! (Somebody please bless us with the Red Zone City Walkway plan, I had this concept pitched to me yearsss ago and I’ve been waiting for it to be fleshed out ever since. Instead we got the $1 portable housing lease, which is both a genuinely great idea and also sounds absurd on every level.)

Number two: when asked what she cares about most, she replies with water renewals. She notes that it’s unexciting, and yet it should instantly grab the attention of anybody who hears the shocking charge that fully a third of Christchurch’s water is lost due to leakage. Like so much of New Zealand’s infrastructure, we have let our pipes that carry our three waters (sound familiar)? loosen and decay and break because local politicians who claim good governance and no politics just getting on with business get in and get back in by refusing to front up with their voters about the bill.

Templeton clearly understands what, to me, is the central divide of local politics besides the NIMBY-YIMBY debate (within which Mauger tries to roadblock Chris Bishop’s housing progress, my biggest issue with my mayor, and Templeton talks a lot about developing SoMo). On one side are the candidates who usually win: those who promise to keep the rates down for the older homeowners who vote the most. 

And on the other are those who point out that, when you starve your council of the ability to fix the roads and fix the pipes and fix the city, the city breaks down and gets old, and the big red number of how much all of this is going to cost to fix some day keeps getting bigger and bigger. If the Sara Templeton pitch exists in a sentence it is this: sustainability is affordability. We all have the right as voters to get angry about cost overruns and project delays and demand answers and progress and better. This is my big issue with the last Labour government - they just didn’t get stuff done. 

But we cannot even begin to tackle New Zealand’s staggeringly many-billioned infrastructure debt if we do not start electing councillors and mayors who will vote to afford to fix now, instead of desperately scrambling to patch up worse and pricier consequences tomorrow. Phil Mauger got the value of that with the wastewater plant. What a shame that he can’t see that the same logic underpins everything local government has the chance to do to mend this country. Christchurch is on the mend, rising into a brighter future, but under the surface, and as always more out east, the problems of tomorrow are only multiplying.

Phil Mauger will probably be reelected, and he will probably ride off into the sunset moderately well-liked and not particularly well-remembered, a decent bloke in charge as Christchurch ascended after the gritty many years of Dalziel and the crisis leadership of Parker. Templeton, sadly, has moved from her ward into a city centre townhouse, and so this is her Last Dance: if she doesn’t win the mayoralty, she’s off the council entirely. 

It reminds me of the clash two years ago between Tamatha Paul and Ibrahim Omer in Wellington Central, where you’d be happy with both of these people in the picture but only one will remain in office at all if the election breaks that way. Omer lost, and fell out of politics entirely. I hope the same doesn’t happen to Templeton. But she’s probably going to ride into the sunset. And so all of us who care about the future of this country need to start looking for our next Templetons from here on out, at general elections and local: who understands that sustainability is affordable? Who will spend today to save tomorrow? 

**Between writing this line and publication, the poster has been vandalised by a good member of the public.

‡I typically avoid endorsing candidates or parties because I find that I start to tiptoe around the points I have to make once I'm stuck on sides, and I want readers to engage with me as my own perspective rather than any party’s standard bearer. But one of the advantages of local elections is that there isn't nearly as much of a sense of partisan alignment. Most readers won't be governed by these candidates even if they win anyway. 

In Conclusion: I Love To Be Informed, I Hope You Do Too

Thank you for the read. This is one of my favourite articles I've ever written, and I knocked it all out in three hours! The political climate really has deterioriated over the last several years - just in the last week we've had:

1. Benjamin Doyle's resignation in response to death threats,

2. Stuart Nash's private sector resignation over objectification,

3. Takuta Ferris’s unbelievably divisive racial rhetoric, the boldest by sitting MPs since NZFirst’s venom against Muslims in the 00s,

4. The Fortuynish assassination of an extremist in the States, and

5. While publishing this article and thanking my lucky blessings that we have at least avoided actual bullets fired at New Zealand candidates, I saw the latest headline about shots pumped into ACT candidate Matt Yovich's billboard at 2 am.

   
   

I hope that I can continue to remind us all that the headlines don’t have to distance us from our common humanity and the little virtues in our communities. It’s the banal, boring stuff that often produces the most satisfaction. I went to my local library the other day and it was not quiet and peaceful at all, the way I like it. It was full, particularly with kids, all yammering and excited and making the most of the sheer wealth to be found in a nice building full of free knowledge and fantastic technology. What higher goal is there to aspire to? In the days since, reading at home and taking the bins out at work alike, I have admired all the cherries blossoming. You sit in the shade of local politics. Best get to planting.