At the campaign launch Fa'anana Efeso Collins is telling jokes. All the way through his official speech. Up on stage in his good suit, mauve shirt and purple tie, he pokes fun at half the people in the room, including his mother, politicians who support him, his doctor, well-known local
Auckland mayoralty: Efeso Collins - the wannabe mayor with multi-part harmonies
Auckland mayoral candidate Efeso Collins speaks at his campaign launch at Tangaroa College in Otara. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
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Fares-free is uncosted and won't work. He'll double the rates. He's out of his depth. He's a Labour stooge. He's a council stooge. He's anti-abortion and homophobic. He's lazy. Also, he's too nice.
Is any of it true?
Cabinet minister Willie Jackson makes a keynote speech at the launch and even he seems a touch equivocal. "Secretly," he says, "I wanted a Māori."
He notes that Collins' slogan is "Care, Compassion and Courage" and reminds the room that Collins voted – and spoke eloquently – against the Auckland regional fuel tax (RFT). "There's your courage. It takes courage to do that."
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This is true. Efeso Collins is a member of the Labour Party but his stance on the RFT, which he correctly said would hurt the poor the most, cast him into the wilderness. Senior figures in the party were reportedly furious.
"He's a smooth talker and I mean that in a good way," says Jackson. "He can talk to anyone." Collins believes in this: you get somewhere when you sit down and talk to people. In his second term on council, he chose to sit next to Councillor Desley Simpson, a National Party bigwig and chair of the finance and performance committee.
"I wanted to work with her and learn from her," he says.
Simpson says she was "pleasantly surprised". They both say they get on well and she thinks that's worked out to the benefit of everyone.
Collins also believes in not backing down on principle. He spoke out against the Government's initial vaccine rollout last year and, at the campaign launch, he took the chance to remind Jackson and the other Labour MPs in the room about it.
Ask Efeso Collins how it's going and he'll tell you, "Yeah, good!"
Like your kids do when you ask them how school was today. Ask him again and he says, "I feel like I'm talking to a million people in groups of 30."
Jokes aside, it's not all fun. Last Wednesday night he came offstage after a mayoral debate to discover his 2-year-old daughter was in hospital. He rushed away to be with her and since then has been cancelling some engagements.
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It's a long slog, the race to be mayor. Especially when no one knows how it will turn out. This race has no high-profile politicians, no clear frontrunner and almost no previous form by which we can judge the candidates.
In the few polls we've seen, "Undecided" has topped the list, followed by Collins, but with all the uncertainty we don't know how reliable they are.
The Collins team has a rolling poll of four weeks' worth of responses, updated weekly. Collins has been consistently ahead, they say, and that didn't change when Leo Molloy dropped out. Their data suggests Collins, Wayne Brown and Craig Lord have all benefited from Molloy's departure.
But Collins is not cleaning up the way his predecessors Phil Goff and Len Brown did.
Last Friday he was in Manukau for a visit to Grid/MNK, a Southside offshoot of the council-initiated incubator for tech startups and other youth-oriented businesses. Tan shoes and ivory chinos, an untucked white shirt and blue check sports jacket. He's a big guy, maybe 195cm tall, and he's also wearing a small black backpack.
"It's my schoolbag," he says. His minders want him to take it off.
Collins is supposed to be doing a tour of Grid/MNK, but he's got stuck just inside the door with Mel Tautalanoa and Manawa Udy, who run the place. They tell him about the mentoring on offer, the computers and other tech, the help with financial management and marketing and a place to work.
"When people come in here and they're working alongside each other," says Tautalanoa, "something incredible happens."
Why is that? asks Collins.
Tautalanoa talks about community. Udy suggests it's also a good space to be Māori.
I've see Goff in situations like this: his default is to tell stories. Collins doesn't do that. Instead, he keeps asking questions.
Grid/MNK is one of several initiatives of the council agencies Tātaki Auckland Unlimited and Eke Panuku, which work to boost economic and community resilience in parts of town that all too easily get left behind. They're core business for Collins, central to his view of the good work council can do.
Tautalanoa tells him they have strong connections with Manurewa High School and they're building them with other local colleges, too. Later, Collins says, "We have to be working with the kids. We have to turn school leavers into entrepreneurs. And we need more housing. There's just so much to do."
After Grid/MNK he spends two hours with the police. Then we sit in a cafe in the Westfield mall. "Talking with the police, you know, we're all worried about the ram-raids and gang violence. But it all links up, doesn't it? What they do and what Grid/MNK does. Giving people better pathways."
He orders a pink milkshake. His minders aren't there, but he tells me this is another thing they don't like him doing. I suggest there are more substantial complaints against him and they basically boil down to: he's a lightweight, he'll cost us all a lot of money and he's a social reactionary.
We start with the fares-free policy, which he's had costed at about $200 million a year. That assumes the existing level of service. But to work well, doesn't the policy require a lot more buses and priority bus lanes?
Collins talks about a "staircase" approach. You launch the programme and as it gains traction you build the service. More people catching the bus will lead to more buses to catch. Collins thinks there's about $700 million in transport funding that could be reallocated: more than enough to cover fares-free.
This is true and not true. True that there's always money to spend on the priorities; not true if he means there's $700 million hanging around unallocated. It'll have to come out of something.
Khylee Quince, another keynote speaker at Collins' launch, has another perspective. "A free bus," she said that day, "is more than a free bus."
Quince (Te Roroa, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) is dean of law at AUT and is the first Māori to hold that role at any New Zealand university. She talked about how their own surveys have shown that transport – the cost and the efficiency – determine whether students go in that day.
Collins often points out that people in poorer communities are spending on average 27 per cent of their income on transport. For many people, therefore, a free bus will unlock the future.
Fares-free is Collins' One Big Idea. It addresses everything: congestion, poverty, the climate crisis, confidence in council, the muddle that calls itself Auckland Transport and where to spend the money.
And it's about the power of an idea. Fares-free, he hopes, will change the way we think about this city and what we can do in it.
Wayne Brown says it's a distraction. What Efeso Collins really plans to do, he says, is introduce an "eye-watering rate hike". Brown has picked up on Collins' observation that Auckland rates are on average 2.2-3.6 per cent of household income, well within the 5 per cent limit recommended by Local Government NZ.
Brown says Collins will "double" the rates for some households and raise them by "up to 50 per cent across the city".
Collins responds that Brown has "a complete lack of understanding of the measuring tool I'm referring to". Being under the limit, he says, doesn't mean you will go to the limit. He says he is "comfortable with where we're sitting at the moment".
I push him. Would he raise rates close to the LGNZ ceiling? He says again, "No, I'm comfortable where they [rates] are."
Brown himself has declined to say what will happen to rates if he is mayor, but acknowledges they could rise.
According to some of the wisdom of the internet, Efeso Collins is "a hopelessly inexperienced, unqualified candidate" who could not handle a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Collins has a lot to say about this. First, that he does know his way around a balance sheet and has done so since his days as president of the students' association at the University of Auckland. He's the chair of Ōtara Health and a former chair of the Ōtara-Papatoetoe Local Board. "We had a larger population in that one local board than in the Far North where Wayne Brown used to be mayor," he says.
And with two terms as a councillor on top of the local board experience, he points out he's attended nine years of often intense workshops and debates about council finances. "I think I have a much better understanding than my opponents of where the money goes and why."
There's another thing about this. The mayor is not the CEO. The mayor doesn't lead the executive or the staff, sign off on the spending, manage the resources or keep things humming.
A mayor doesn't need to be an accountant, lawyer, business person, social worker, career politician, community activist, economist, engineer or any particular thing. But they do need the personal skills not to be bamboozled by "experts".
The mayor is the leader. The person who sets the vision, wins colleagues and the wider public to that vision and inspires the staff to make it work.
Efeso Collins has an MA in education. Knowing how teachers relate to kids in the classroom will strike some people as irrelevant to being mayor; others may decide it's an excellent qualification.
The outgoing deputy mayor, Bill Cashmore, who is close to Goff but, like Simpson, a member of the National Party, has this to say about Collins. "In the time I've known Efeso I've found him positive to deal with and interested in any discussion, especially where he has limited experience. That includes financial, science and big picture issues like transport planning."
Everyone likes him. He's a nice guy. Around the council table, they all say it. Is that a big plus, or damningly faint praise?
Of course, it's not literally "everyone". Collins gets a steady stream of hatred on social media and most of it is explicitly racist. He doesn't hide that it grinds him down.
I ask him what he will do about Auckland Transport (AT).
"Consideration of others is paramount," he says. "All the studies show it. When you recognise the work people do, they give their best. But you also need to hold people to account and expect them to be responsible for their work. I'm not going to be soft. With AT I will use every mechanism available to me to ensure people are fully focused on where we're heading."
A little later, still talking about AT, he uses the phrase "scruff of the neck".
He backs himself to work well with Government ministers, especially in transport and finance, but he's not going to roll over. In addition to his stand on the RFT and the vax rollout, Collins supports the council's attempts to modify Government proposals for housing density. That doesn't please Wellington at all.
He claims some links with National, too. "I know [East Coast Bays MP] Erica Stanford well and we get on. Her husband was president of the students' association the year after me."
Collins grew up in the Pentecostal Church, where his father was a minister, and converted to Catholicism when he married his wife, Fia. Since then, he has talked often about the "journey" he's been on. "My theology has been challenged and I have responded. I have changed."
He's not anti-abortion. "I do not want to get in the way of women making deeply personal decisions for themselves, and with their whānau when that is relevant. And I supported the law to keep anti-abortion protesters away from abortion clinics."
Ten years ago he spoke against marriage equality: is he homophobic? "I have apologised for the hurt and the harm."
He talks about a niece who transitioned, and how he helped his mother overcome her own fear of this. "And she did. Mum's just back from visiting in Australia. She's been there to support her and I support her too. I recognise that she is me."
He wants to lead "a climate-change administration", and is the only major mayoral candidate who talks openly about this.
Does he support the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway (TERP), with its proposal to reduce carbon emissions by 64 per cent by 2030? "I'm confident we can make every effort."
What about his attendance record? In his first term, Collins was present for 59 per cent of meetings and workshops. Not the worst record for a councillor, but down there.
In the second term it's risen to 80 per cent, which is the mark that local government legal expert Linda O'Reilly says indicates a "positive" engagement. But all the councillors have improved their attendance this term. Collins is still at the bottom of the list.
He says he had time off with a new baby and when he got death threats after criticising the TV show Police Ten-7, and his mayoral campaign has interrupted his regular meeting schedule. Fair to say, if he wins he'll need to get that rate well into the 90s.
Back at the campaign launch, Khylee Quince drops a big statement: "If you can see it, you can be it. If Efeso Collins becomes the first non-white mayor of Auckland it means he will not be the last."
Is this the city we like to think we can be? Or are they just empty words?
"I want a city that dreams again," Collins tells the crowd. "I want us to imagine what's possible and make it happen. This is a launch not just for me to win office. It's for the desire for a new city."
Fa'anana Efeso Collins is not like any mayor we've had before. He's 48, a Samoan and Tokelauan New Zealander, with a matai title conferred in 2013. He was born and grew up in Ōtara and he lives with Fia and their daughters, aged nine and two, in an apartment block in Ōtāhuhu.
He finishes by thanking his family. "Honestly," he says, "a vote for me is a vote for my whole family. You'll be taking us all on. All our debts, the whole village, all of us." There it is, the love and the jokes.
Then he sings, leading off in a high tenor, and the crowd rises to sing with him. It's no dutiful anthem, no half-learned waiata. This is soaring multi-part harmony, a moment of beauty. Is that a thing to wish for from a mayor?
