Former Auckland Mayoral candidate Viv Beck. Photo / Greg Bowker
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 today, 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]," said Bhatnagar.
The former Auckland City councillor said he first discussed the mayoralty with Beck in September last year and met with Beck's campaign manager Anthony McGivern in February this year 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 in many areas: "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," said Bhatnagar.
On March 7, Beck, the chief executive of Heart of the City business association since 2015, announced in the Herald she would be contesting the mayoralty being left vacant by Phil Goff, on a pro-business, centre-right platform.
This was followed by a media event at the Sir John Logan Campbell statue in Epsom where Beck said the mayoral job was not for the "faint-hearted" but for someone passionate about the potential of Auckland, with a track record of getting things done and a passion for change.
By then, she had a talented National Party member, Liam Kernaghan, on board as a media adviser, and the advertising agency Hello Ltd signed up to work on her campaign. Kernaghan didn't last long and was replaced by another media manager with National Party connections, Josh Beddell.
By late March, businessman Wayne Brown had entered the race on a platform to "Fix Auckland" 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.
In the field for "change", Beck rigidly stuck to policies remarkably similar to those of the National Party, but in front of the camera and at debates, the mayoral wannabe rambled on and struggled for cut-through when crisp answers would do.
And while having some good policies, like scrapping expensive light rail for building rapid bus routes as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible, and to as many people as possible (her best line of the campaign), too often she got bogged down in minutiae.
Beck's weaknesses were reflected in the monthly Ratepayers' Alliance-Curia polls, which saw her popularity slump 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 for mayor on August 12, saying it was largely because Beck had not pulled out before the noon deadline date to confirm as an official candidate.
The night before that, Molloy had also learned he had dropped from second to third place in the latest poll, erasing plans to cement himself as the sole challenger to Collins.
Days later, the drums started beating for Beck to stand aside when former Auckland City Mayor John Banks called on her to throw in the towel to give Wayne Brown a pathway to win the Auckland mayoralty. Beck labelled it misogynistic behaviour and carried on.
Then came the bombshell. 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.
Beck said little about the bill - she later claimed it was not in her name but would not say whose name it was in - and 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.
Two senior C&R members, president Kit Parkinson and board member Nick Albrecht, were adamant that much of the bill had been paid several days before the release of the email revealing the $353,000 figure. Parkinson ran for the hills, insisting the bill had nothing to do with C&R.
Other members of the society were Hello managing director James Polhill and property developer Andrew Krukziener, who said he had supported Beck with a "six-figure pledge" which had been paid in two tranches. He said he had also organised for "other parties who have made substantial pledges".
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, a highly respected advertising veteran who had worked on campaigns for Auckland Mayor Phil Goff and his predecessor Len Brown, could not stomach a social media advertisement attacking her rivals Collins and Brown on the issue of co-governance.
It was created by the social media company, The Campaign Company, owned by Jordan Williams, who heads the Taxpayers' Union.
The advertisement was taken down and Beck said: "This is not a Trump campaign but it is a very important election for Auckland and the messages need to be firm."
For the past week, Beck's 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."
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