A mountain to climb

David Shearer with Labour leader Phil Goff on the campaign trail. Photo / Chris Skelton

Turfed from office after nine years, Labour is planning ahead. Joining candidate David Shearer on the campaign trail this week, leader Phil Goff peered into a pushchair on the platform of Kingsland railway station.

Straight-faced, he told the baby boy inside: "We need your vote in 18 years."

A couple of hours later, the two men enjoyed a mince pie each for lunch in a Kingsland cafe.

Turning their winning politician smiles on a young mother at the next table, Goff asks her little daughter how old she is. "In 16 years time, we'll want your vote," he quips again.

Goff and Shearer figured they had Mt Albert won, but they had their eye on a bigger goal. And to achieve that goal – a return to the offices of Government – they may yet have a long wait. The Mt Albert by-election, you see, was a masquerade. Much was not what it seemed.

Politicians campaigned on the Waterview connection, the Supercity, John Key's record in Government – knowing all along that the by-election was about something else entirely. Let's start with Mt Albert itself. It's not a mountain at all.

The views are good, but there are no tourist buses on the puny 134m summit, no monuments, not even a proper carpark. Lichen-spotted signs explain the area's history, if you can read the words through the water and weather damage.

It's the middle of the day, and the only people on Mt Albert are a couple of drunks and Sandringham resident Paul Edmunds, doing his stretches after a run. A resident for six years, Edmunds is voting Labour – but looking forward to life after Helen Clark. "As she said, she has had her time. I think it was time for a fresh start."

There's the thing. The colossus that is Clark overshadows Mt Albert and the by-election in a way that the so-called mountain never can. Twenty-eight years as the local MP. The pram-pushing young mums that Shearer and Goff were wooing can remember no one else as their representative on the national political stage. One of them, 20-year-old Lauren Bogle, was voting for Green Party co-leader Russel Norman for little reason other than the offer of change, of something new and fresh. "I'm just young and idealistic," she says. It must have been strange, during the campaign, to be pursued along the streets by leaflet-waving Parliamentary candidates.

Clark, prime minister for the past nine years, never had to pursue anyone. She was bigger than that. As Labour leader for 15 years, she campaigned nationwide. A leader does not have much time for electoral clinics, dealing with constituents' complaints about the drainage and kerbing outside their homes.

When she ducked down to the corner dairy for a litre of milk, locals approached her – she did not approach them. And this was something that the people of Mt Albert understood. They knew that the pride in having one of your own stride the international stage entails some sacrifice. Clark was busy running the country. And so, this by-election could never be about replacing Clark.

Though voters were electing a local MP, they were not anointing a future leader. Just as Mt Albert is not a mountain deserving of the name, neither was this an election deserving of that name.

One Tree Hill and Mt Eden were gazetted as recreational reserves in 1886. But despite the entreaties of Mt Albert Borough Council as far back as 1880, their "mountain" was not regarded as worthy of the same status. Instead, a ballast pit was opened on Owairaka – to grant it a more appropriate name – to supply scoria for the building of the Auckland-Kaipara railway line.

The Government promised that once the line was completed, Owairaka would become a reserve. Then, in 1910, another quarry was opened to provide construction for the Northern Motorway. That did not close till 1959. Now, Mt Albert is needed again for a motorway, as a through route for the Waterview connection motorway link.

That was where things started going wrong – it appeared – for National candidate Melissa Lee. She appeared on TV espousing the merits of running the motorway through the electorate above the ground, only to be wrong-footed when her own colleagues in Government announced a compromise plan that still involved tunnelling some of the route.

Lee had unnecessarily angered residents who feared losing their homes to a big concrete trench. She only worsened things with a gaffe in which she tried to reassure them that the motorway would channel away South Auckland criminals who might otherwise have prowled their streets. Labour's Shearer, whose party developed the Waterview tunnels plan while in government, discovered a sudden loathing for a motorway through Mt Albert.

Green candidate Russel Norman, too, was opposed. They sought to turn the by-election into a referendum on a motorway that, they suggested, might destroy a community. Shearer said this week that he was backing the residents: "They are just fighting to stand still, fighting against tunnels, fighting against supermarket expansions."

In the path of the Waterview connection is the leafy residential street of Hendon Ave. Peter Koh, who lives there, says the whole community respects Clark. Unsure whether his house will be demolished, Koh is angry that the National Government is proposing the cut-price Waterview option. He can't understand why the Government wants to pay $50 million for a national cycleway but won't spend the extra money to put all more of the connection beneath the ground.

Further up the road neighbour John Bustard, a Justice of the Peace and resident of 21 years, thought the Waterview connection announcement was a sign that National had given away any hope of winning the safe Labour seat. "They're just saying to Mt Albert, 'we know we're not going to win Mt Albert, we will never win Mt Albert, we don't really care'. They pulled the rug out from underneath their own candidate. They're thumbing their nose."

But, despite opposition candidates' claims to be voicing the unhappiness of all, residents and businesses are divided on the Waterview connection. And beyond that, the decision is one that impacts on a far bigger community than just Mt Albert.

Access to the whole of west and north Auckland would be fundamentally changed – many would argue for the better – by the motorway. Packaging company Huhtamaki sales manager Ron Hill wants the project to go ahead to relieve the logistical transport problems his business has. "All our major customers are at the opposite end of town from us," he says. "It must have a big economic impact on us all." And Lee insists the rug was not pulled from beneath her with the Waterview announcement.

Speaking outside the Lim Supermarket on New North Rd, she said National had opted for the "pragmatic solution". Lee has a history in the electorate, having lived in Wolseley St off New North Rd when she arrived in New Zealand with her family 21 years ago. "This has been my playground." But there has been little time for play recently. By June 7 she was trailing Shearer by 38 points.

Lee had a difficult campaign. The playground that is Mt Albert is different in many respects from the rest of Auckland, never mind the rest of New Zealand. Its streets contain some of Auckland's most vibrant nightspots, but turn a corner and you find some of the city's poorer areas. It is young: an unusually high 20.4 per cent of the population is aged between 20 and 29.

Almost a quarter of the population identify as Asian, and nearly a sixth as Pacific Islanders. Oscar Kightley, a creator of television cartoon bro'Town, set the cult series in Morningside in the Mt Albert electorate, where his mum still lives. "It's got some real old-school people with some old-school values," he says.

Through various incarnations and names, Mt Albert has been a Labour seat for 63 years – a long time to be associated with a set of values, according to Kightley. He did not expect it to change its colours: "It's too steeped in its own tradition and history." But corners like Kingsland are increasingly becoming the next Ponsonby, inhabited by musicians and actors and artists and people who can be a little set apart from more traditional Kiwis elsewhere in the region and the country.

While the people of Mt Albert are a vibrant, diverse bunch, they are not representative of wider Auckland or New Zealand – and not able to make the big decisions about transport infrastructure, the Supercity and the competence of John Key's Government on behalf of all New Zealanders. Sitting in that busy Kingsland cafe, David Shearer rubbed his head in his hands. He too was feeling the strain. "I've found it really tough, actually," he said. "I've found the scrutiny really tough."

Shearer bought a house on First Ave in 1988, but since then he and his family have spent many years in Wellington or overseas. He worked for the United Nations in Baghdad. Like the other leading candidates, Shearer was not enrolled to vote in Mt Albert yesterday. And he feels the place has changed since he last lived here.

The cafes and restaurants have arrived, many of the houses have been renovated as part of the gentrification process. And more change is coming. There's the demolition of up to 365 homes for the Waterview connection. There's the proposed expansion to the Westfield St Lukes shopping centre. And there's the absorption into the much bigger Supercity.

The electorate Shearer sought was different from the one Clark first represented in 1981, different from the one in which he bought a home. Further up New North Rd, Lee and fellow National MP Pansy Wong enter the local Vodafone shop and chat with staff member Vicki Carrington.

With Mt Albert changing, Carrington believed the MP should change as well. "It's a huge, huge melting pot. I think we need someone who definitely understands what it's like to be a minority." She felt that the presence, the magnetism of Clark, had distracted attention from the lack of work she had done for the electorate. "She lived and breathed the area for so long," Carrington says. "People lost sight of the question: because she was Prime Minister was she doing anything for the area?"

This is why the politicians' spin about the by-election's significance so misrepresented the reality. This by-election mattered not a jot to decisions of national significance. It was about two things: it was about finding someone who could represent the new and different faces of Mt Albert, and it was about the extent to which our political leaders could resist the temptation of pork barrel politics.

So far as that goes, the Government's decision to run much of the Waterview connection above ground (whether that decision was right or wrong) does at least show a willingness to put the public finances ahead of the interests of a few people who happen to have access to a ballot paper this month.

Labour, as an opposition party, was not forced to make any such tough calls. But Goff is avoiding controversy, positioning Labour as an opposition, playing the long game. That may be about the 2011 election. And it may be about 16 years' time when that little girl in Kingsland is allowed to vote.

Goff surely knows that, for all the posturing, yesterday's by-election did not and could not deliver the nation's verdict on John Key's Government.

This was no more a real election than Mt Albert is a real mountain.