Muldoon had his ageing, working-class "Rob's Mob". Now, a new generation of conservatives has wrested our biggest city from the left. They're blue-collar, not just blue-rinse. They're just as likely to wear black jeans as business suits. They work in shops and factories as well as high-rise offices. And, reports Matt Nippert, they're young.
Rob Muldoon must be cackling in his grave. With the fervent backing of supporters who called themselves "Rob's Mob", he stormed Auckland to dominate the political landscape for a decade. Now, more than a quarter-century on, a new working class is laying the foundations for a retro-conservatism that could last for years. They may not answer to Rob, but this mob means business.
Almost one in 10 Aucklanders voted National for the first time in the 2008 general election. Head-to-head, there was a 15 per cent swing to the right, and four middle-Auckland electorates changed their political colours.
It was part of a dramatic tip towards economic and often social conservatism.
This movement was particularly pronounced in the city south of the bridge and north of Manukau: young Nikki Kaye unseated Judith Tizard in Auckland Central; Pansy Wong crucified the opposition in the newly created Botany; leopard-skin-clad Paula Bennett stormed home in Waitakere; and burly Samoan rugby player Sam Lotu-Iiga claimed Maungakiekie from old-school unionist Mark Gosche.
Repeatedly, Labour MPs interviewed for this story refer to their electoral defeat as a movement of tides. The implication is that if the tide of support went out in 2008, it'll come back in eventually. But, a year and a half later, there is little sign of a sea change that will wash the left back to power.
Witness the incombustibility of John Banks, who alienated enough Aucklanders to earn himself an ignominious defeat in the 2004 mayoral election. Now Banks' appeal has extended beyond the wealthier enclaves of central Auckland - and there's the possibility of him becoming the mayor of the new Auckland Supercity.
According to an October Herald-Digipoll, 54.7 per cent of Aucklanders would tick National's box again in a general election. This is a significant increase on the 47.2 per cent who favoured John Key's mob in a poll immediately before the election.
Nikki Kaye was 29 when she won the Auckland Central electorate seat held by Labour since the formation of the party in 1916, with the sole exception of 1993 to 1996 when Sandra Lee took it for the hard-left Alliance.
Kaye says the conservative sweep in Auckland was heady. "It was a pretty amazing moment coming up to the party at Sky City and seeing everyone there - including the new Prime Minister," she says of the night of November 8, 2008.
"I remember being hugged so much that I think I had bruises the next day."
The bruises have faded, but the blue smudge over the Auckland political map looks far more permanent.
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So, who is this emerging generation whose change of mind tipped Auckland from liberal bastion to conservative castle?
No longer can conservatives be characterised as farmers, or businessmen, or wealthy Remuera socialites with their old money. This is not the meat-and-two-veg conservatism of the past. If anything, in 21st century Auckland it's more likely to be the diverse flavours of fusion cuisine conservatism: racism and xenophobia are not sustainable now.
According to the most recent census in 2006, Aucklanders (average age 33.4) are younger than the rest of the country. Other parts of New Zealand are ethnically homogeneous, but the City of Sails is only just (54.4 per cent) majority-Pakeha.
The switching voter will own 1.5 cars, be married with children - or a family on the way - and have post-school qualifications.
Yesterday, Chanel Duff took her two-year old daughter, Amelia, to watch her husband Gowan play league. Gowan's Maori, studying law with a sideline helping roast coffee for cafes; Chanel's an immigrant from South Africa with twins due in October.
She's only 20, but in other respects she ticks many of the boxes that typifying the average Aucklander - and the new conservative.
The couple have only one car, and with her being a mum and her partner studying, their income doesn't get anywhere near the top tax bracket.
In 2008, living in the Maungakiekie electorate, both ticked the blue box at the election.
Chanel says she doesn't follow politics, but she wanted some simple, aspirational changes to economic policy.
"My partner and I recently had a baby and we were looking long-term," she says. "Our plan one day is to own some businesses, and so I made the vote for National, not Labour. We weren't interested in benefits."
Nearby Onehunga Mall is at the heart of Auckland's new conservatism. In Remuera to the north, they always tick blue, and Mangere to the south is ironclad Labour. Onehunga is in the Maungakiekie electorate, which turned blue in 2008. The slightly dilapidated main street has bargain stores, cafes, fabric shops and the office of local MP Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga.
Next door is the mall complex housing Dress-Smart, where lower- and middle-income shoppers - formerly reliable left voters - come from all over the city to cut costs on clothes. They can buy their black denim at the Levi's store, or last season's suits at Working Style.
Sara Stythe, a 36-year-old mother-of-three, lives in Auckland Central. She and her husband Gareth returned from the UK in 2001, and found themselves increasingly drawn to voting blue. In 2008, Gareth volunteered for the first time to help canvass for a political campaign.
Sarah's reasons for switching sides, like those of many others interviewed for this story, are more bread-and-butter than Beltway. "I voted National just because I wanted to get more people paying tax, and New Zealand needed a bit of a shakeup."
Michelle Sayer says something similar. She's 35 and works in retail, selling coats. She lives in Manukau East, and recently adopted eight abandoned kittens, which are "all spayed now".
"I voted Labour when I was a student. I voted for them because I was on a lower income, and I thought National was for people on higher incomes." But, even though she hasn't moved income brackets, she changed political sides in 2008. "It was for things like tax cuts, and what they're doing with people on a benefit," she says. "I thought it was fairer."
But, living in the suburb of Mt Roskill and working as an accountant in Takapuna, is the man who put John Key in power. Amit Patel is 34, married and soon expecting his first child. And it's his home suburb that is telling.
Phil Goff, the Labour leader, comfortably held his seat in the electorate of Mount Roskill, but the swing to National slashed this once-reliable storehouse of party votes for the left. Goff's majority for the electorate seat was 6500; Labour's advantage in party votes over National was fewer than 200.
Patel arrived from Fiji in 1990, and when he was first able to vote he went with Labour. "When I came here originally I did, but for the last two elections I've gone National," he says.
Swimming against the current is never easy, and Patel says his decision raised eyebrows among friends and family in 2005. "In my family, I was the only one voting National." But, by 2008, Patel was no longer the odd one out; even his wife now ticked the blue box.
Chris Carter, whose electorate seat Te Atatu swung almost 20 percentage points to National from Labour, is almost blase about Patel's change of allegiance: "By and large the Indian community is still with us - and the South African one is for the other guys. That's the way it's always been."
But staunch left commentator Chris Trotter was almost crying into his red wine on election night when he realised his home city was decisively backing his opponent's horse. "It's a trite observation, but true nonetheless: as Auckland goes, so does the country."
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Patel is representative of a shift in the economic ideology of Auckland, of how the middle classes are taking a more individualistic approach to personal finances that prioritises paid work and tax cuts over government assistance. As Patel puts it: "The middle-wage earners, the middle-class citizens, were not getting help they needed."
He's also scathing of Working for Families: "I don't believe in that, you should have to have four kids to get this. This is not the right message to our society."
Trotter has long had a theory about the new conservative voter, which he called "Waitakere Man" and "Waitakere Woman" in a much-discussed column last year. "Waitakere Man values highly those parts of the welfare state that he and his family use - like the public education and health systems - but has no time at all for 'welfare bludgers'," he wrote.
The big difference between the so-close-and-yet-so-far result for National in 2005, and the storming of the barricades in 2008, was the decision of whole households, like the Patels, to switch sides:
"Winning over Waitakere Man turned out to be a great 'twofer' deal for the Right. To its immense satisfaction, the highly skilled, upwardly mobile working-class blokes who began trooping into National's camp following the 2005 election were bringing their wives with them."
Trotter agrees that his analysis is trite, but that doesn't mean it's wrong: "Never let triteness get in the way of analysis. It can't explain everything, but it can explain an awful lot."
While Trotter has been bitterly attacked by Labour backbenchers for his diagnosis, their leader concedes he may have a point. "I think that's probably right," says Goff of the loss of 'Waitakere Man': "There's a group of people out there who thought that Labour had become too nanny-statist, telling people what to do and not to do."
Goff is also pained that Patel, his local voter and a migrant to boot, deciding to go with the opposition.
"You come here as a migrant, and Labour stands alongside you. Most Fijian Indians were Labour and continue to be," the Labour leader says. "But, by the time you've been here 20 years, you've built up assets and have a family - your socio-economic levels rise."
He remarks wryly of Patel's profession: "If I went through the electoral roll and went through every accountant I don't think I'd find my strongest supporters."
Labour in general, and Goff in particular, put the shift down mostly to an overwhelming feeling of 'it was time for a change'.
"That worked very strongly in the National Party's favour. But over time that wears off, and there are enough things out there that are irritants that build up and build up."
Trotter's response is caustic, and doesn't buy that argument in its totality: "It wasn't just New Zealand's unfortunate beach-cricket approach to politics - 'C'mon Helen! You've been in for ages, give someone else a go!'.
"If Labour had ... engaged the public [and] captured its imagination - even though they'd been in for a long time - it probably wouldn't have led to their defeat."
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Steven Joyce, National's election maestro in 2008, says there are plans to stop Auckland ever tipping back in to the hands of Labour - and the focus will remain on bread-and-butter economic issues. "The challenge for us in Government is delivering well for Aucklanders as a whole," he says. "Most of our decisions are about how we can grow the cake, and we're spending a lot of effort on that."
The war for the Beehive, he says, was been won in places like Waitakere.
"A lot of our vote growth came through central Auckland and the west," he says. "Auckland is always important. It's a third of the country in population and, if you're doing a political campaign, you're going to give it a huge focus."
Yet small cracks are emerging. In the Herald Digipoll, 5.6 per cent of respondents said they had voted National in 2008 but were unlikely to do so again.
On Onehunga Mall, just a block away from Dress-Smart, engineering consultant Wendy Keane is a remorseful buyer.
She had attended a business seminar run by John Key before the election, and liked what she saw. The new Government, however, hasn't impressed her and she won't be voting to return Key to power in 2011: "I don't think so, they just haven't hit the right balance between what people want and what's good for the company - sorry - country."
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Pressing the flesh with the new conservatives
Debbie Leaver runs the historic - and historically troubled - former Carnegie Library. She's turned the building into thriving cafe, and despite having been a fan of Labour MP Mark Gosche who retired in 2008, she threw in her lot with National at the last vote.
In Auckland's new swing to conservatism, Leaver's electorate of Maungakiekie is ground zero. The electorate, spanning Penrose, Onehunga and Ellerslie, used to be held by Labour. The erstwhile party of the working classes enjoyed a 13 percentage-point lead in the party vote in 2005, but three years later the pecking order was reversed, putting National three percentage points ahead.
The reason according to Leaver? Economic conservatism over tax and regulations. "As a business owner, National supports me and gives me a future that I'm looking for," she says.
Sam Lotu-Iiga also helped spread the word amongst communities that aren't constituted of your usual conservatives. An Auckland Grammar old-boy with Samoan ancestry and a background in financial analysis, he is the new member for Maungakiekie.
He's tried drawing Leaver into the National Party, but she says she's resisted giving more than her vote. She has, however, joined the board of the local business association.
At Leaver's Library Cafe, Lotu-Iiga exchanges greetings with the local police senior sergeant, Hirone Waretini. As a policeman, Waretini is wary about talking politics, but does confide they attended school together.
Despite being a year apart, they became friends because of their background. "For lack of a better word, there weren't too many brothers at Grammar at the time," says Waretini.
Lotu-Iiga says the new conservatives who helped propel him into office may not have been traditional National voters but their concern for bread-and-butter economic issues pushed them into his camp. "They're aspiring people, and they work hard," he says.
They also have universal concerns that don't depend on political philosophy. Onehunga father Mike Foster-Allen introduces the local MP to his son, Stan, and takes the opportunity to lobby for roading improvements to his street.
Referring to another neighbouring street's new go-slow additions, Foster-Allen says: "I want to know what grounds they got those speed humps in there, because we've got two kindies on our street."
Lotu-Iiga is painfully aware that the newfound base of conservatism, and support from voters like Foster-Allen, will depend on his delivering results. "I've gone to council for three other streets to get judder bars, and they always say we've got to prioritise our spending," he tells Foster-Allen.
Later, over an orange juice, the MP talks more broadly about making economic conservatism pay for its supporters: "It's about growing the pie, so people get bigger slices."
Former MP Mark Gosche suspects that the prominent blue bruise his former electorate now sports will fade: "I expected when MMP came in we might follow the patterns of European countries where things were very stable for very long periods of time."
Instead, despite astute coalition management by Jim Bolger and Helen Clark that led to three-term governments, support for major parties at election time has been volatile.
"Our thinking is 'Time for a change, chuck these guys out'," Gosche says. "I don't think we'll ever change from that culture of thinking in New Zealand."
