Mike Williams: Prepare for an election worth watching

Mike Williams reckons this year's election will be well worth keeping an eye on. Photo / File

When the coronavirus scare passes there will still be a general election to enjoy.

The three general Hawke's Bay electorates of Napier, Tukituki, and Wairarapa plus the Māori seat of Ikaroa-Rawhiti are going to be worth watching on election night.

Two of them could change hands on September 19 and I'll be fascinated to watch the campaigns roll out over the next seven months.

Virtually all the candidates who could get elected are now selected with one very notable exception which points us in the direction of the most interesting contest of the four.

The National Party has yet to select a candidate for Wairarapa to succeed retiring MP Alastair Scott.

When Scott announced his resignation from Parliament in June last year, one reason he gave for this early decision was to give his successor as National Party candidate plenty of time to get established.

This has not happened because National has so far been unable to attract a decent field of candidates from which to make a choice.

This is a clear clue that within the National Party, Wairarapa is not seen as in the bag for a National Party candidate in 2020.

If it was classified as a good prospect for an ambitious National Party activist, there would be a queue for the nomination and a candidate would have been in the field months ago.

The electorate has an interesting political history and has been held by both parties for significant periods since the 1930s when the National Party was formed.

In my early days as a Labour Party organiser I worked on an electoral petition brought by the National Party when one-term Labour MP Reg Boorman held on to the seat by a single vote after the votes were counted and recounted following the 1987 general election.

This court action, which involved the then National MP Winston Peters, was successful and the winner, Wyatt Creech, went on to become a minister in the Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley governments of the 1990s.

Labour won back the seat in 1999 when Georgina Beyer, the first transgender MP on earth, defeated National Party candidate, the media star Paul Henry.

I was the Labour Party's campaign manager in 1999 and I have to concede that we had no idea that such an upset was on the cards and had judged the seat in advance as a win for Henry.

For the September general election Labour will again field Kieran McAnulty MP as its candidate and the seat is likely to be a gain for Labour.

In the 2017 election McAnulty slashed Scott's majority by more than half, making Wairarapa one of the most marginal electorates in the country. McAnulty attracted significant cross-party support.

Mike Williams

He'd impressed the Labour Party hierarchy and secured the Party List position which made him an MP in 2017.

McAnulty is one of Labour's strongest candidates combining youth, deep family roots in the region, a business background and an already advancing political career – he won the support of his colleagues and was elected as a Labour whip.

The electorate extends well into what is generally known as Central Hawke's Bay and includes Dannevirke, Woodville, Waipukurau and Waipawa.

For this reason, McAnulty has asked the Boundaries Commission (which also decides on electorate names) to call the new seat Wairarapa-Central Hawke's Bay to reflect the real shape of the seat.

This is a wise move and likely to be attractive to electors who don't feel that the current name accurately reflects the boundaries of the seat.

The precedents for this kind of electorate name are the local Maori seat of Ikaroa-Rawhiti, Clutha-Southland and Taranaki-King Country.

Much of the outcome of this contest will depend on tactical voting, and this phenomenon will possibly favour McAnulty.

If the polls carry on predicting a good chance of the Jacinda Ardern Government's getting re-elected, a key group of soft National Party supporters will choose to split their support and vote for McAnulty with their candidate vote and National with their party vote.

This "each way bet" makes sense if these voters decide that a McAnulty as a likely minister in a returned Labour-led Government is preferable to a back-bench National MP in opposition for the next three years.

Another wild card will be around NZ First MP Ron Mark's nearly 20 per cent of candidate vote in 2017.

It is probable that the 2020 contest will be seen by voters as more of a two-horse race than the previous election and with Mark as a successful Defence Minister and guaranteed a winning spot on the NZ First List his candidate vote support will logically drop.

Where these votes go adds to the unknowns that make a close election so interesting.

• Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.