Green MP Chloe Swarbrick MP. Photo / Michael Craig
Felix Poole, from Act, implores the crowd: “Think of the Mums and Dads! People buy houses as their retirement plan and it would be wrong to undermine that.”
Sitting MP Chloe Swarbrick, from the Greens, is not impressed. “There are 120,000 landlords in this country. That’s 2 per cent of the population who are holding the rest of the economy to ransom.”
Welcome to the Auckland Central candidates’ debate at Whammy Bar on Karangahape Rd, hosted by the K Rd Business Association on Wednesday, September 13.
“Housing is the big one,” says Damian Sycamore, from The Opportunities Party (Top). “I’m sorry if I sound like a single-issue guy but everything else depends on housing.”
Top wants a land tax to help rebalance the economy.
“Labour has done a terrible job,” declares National’s Mahesh Muralidhar. “They promised 100,000 houses and they haven’t come through.”
Labour’s Oscar Sims bristles at that. The 100,000 goal was abandoned years ago and now, he says, “I’m proud that Labour has built more state houses than at any time since the 1950s.”
K Rd reflects a lot of things about this electorate. It’s business-oriented, still vibrantly countercultural, with bike lanes on both sides of the street and a cluster of big new apartment blocks. Businesses here bounced back from Covid faster than in any other part of the city. An enormous underground railway station is set to open soon(ish).
It’s an electorate of contrasts: a quarter of all dwellings have no heating, according to the Census, but it also contains the wealthiest suburb in the country: Herne Bay. There are fewer children than anywhere else, very low home ownership and more than half the population was born overseas.
Housing, transport, street crime, the cost of living and the legacy of the pandemic: the big topics of this election all play out right here.
Of the seven candidates welcomed to the stage by moderator Russell Brown, three come from the tech sector. Muralidhar is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Sims is a software engineer and both he and Sycamore have worked for startups; they’re both also housing activists.
In contrast, Chris Coker, from the Legalise Cannabis Party, is a builder. Tall and rake thin, with shaven head and magnificent beard, he’s dressed tonight in a bespoke suit patterned with bright green marijuana leaves. The others wear ordinary clothes.
“Maybe,” he suggests when asked how he would improve K Rd, “we could change the colour of the lights to green.”
Then there’s Ted Johnston, big and brash, a lawyer from south Auckland, former mayoral candidate and until recently co-leader of the New Conservatives. He wants to unite the parties on the outer fringe of conservative politics.
“I’ve talked to Brian Tamaki, eh, I’ve talked to Matt King,” he told the Herald. “But they’re not interested.” So now he’s abandoned his old party and set up a new one. It’s called Unity.
“It’s like herding cats,” he told the meeting.
Act’s Poole stood in 2020 and hadn’t been planning on it this time, but was roped in “after a search party failed to find the previous guy”. He’s 25th on his party list and says he’s not looking for the electorate vote.
Top’s Sycamore lives on Waiheke Island, which is part of the electorate. “People think it’s all rich people there,” he says. “But there’s a lot of poverty and it’s papered over by the helicopters.”
Muralidhar calls K Rd “my happy place”. But he’s spoken to “hundreds of businesses who are struggling, and there’s all the homeless, they’re struggling too”. He and his wife rent “on the edge” of Herne Bay.
Swarbrick is the only MP in the race. She thanks the event organisers by name and reminds the crowd her electorate office and much bigger campaign office are both on the street. She and her wife own an apartment nearby. K Rd is her happy place, too.
“We’ve faced big challenges,” she says. During the pandemic, “I worked with 60-plus businesses to lobby for more support, and we won.”
Along with Sycamore and Sims, she argues for denser housing and a better deal for tenants. Muralidhar, Johnston and Poole are worried about apartment blocks where they’re not wanted – and tenants where they’re not wanted, too.
Muralidhar gets a barrage of criticism when he says National’s housing policies will lower rents, and again when he suggests the state-house tenants it wants evicted for bad behaviour will be looked after by the party’s social-investment programmes.
His leader Christopher Luxon has not gone so far with either policy.
“Mahesh,” says Sycamore, “you seem to speak outside party lines. And your cut, cut, cut mentality is insane.”
Brown asks if the real aim of National’s housing policy is “to keep apartments out of Epsom”. Muralidhar says that’s not true.
Coker, from the Cannabis Party, says he has the skills to make a good living “flicking houses”, but “I’ve got a moral compass”
Almost everyone praises Te Mātāwai, Kāinga Ora’s big new social-housing complex with support services on Greys Ave.
“Greys Ave is a phenomenal model,” says Swarbrick.
Johnston says no. “Why house the poorest people in the middle of the city?”
“Because it’s too hard to send them to Antarctica?” asks Sycamore.
Muralidhar pulls them onto Government spending. “Labour has wasted so much money,” he says.
“On what?” asks Sims.
“Well, $60 million on phantom light rail.”
“It’s a big project,” says Sims. “You don’t just start construction. You plan it first.”
Sycamore says the issue is not “wasting money”, it’s “building a better economy” and “we won’t be able to do that until we shift away from the focus on property”.
Muralidhar responds, “Damian is right, we need growth, but wrong about housing. I know from my work that the capital for growth exists but we need to be braver and bolder.”
There’s a question from the floor: “Is Chris Coker high right now?”
Coker stands up, raises one foot to rest on the inner thigh of his other leg, and holds the pose without moving.
“I’m a VIP,” he says. “A Very Informed Patient. So I guess I’m high right now, yes.” He stares inscrutably at the crowd.
They’re talking drug reform. Johnston, who works in the Manukau Court and sees a lot of drug-related harm, says he would decriminalise minor use of marijuana.
“I like the new Ted!” says Swarbrick.
“Can we move on?” asks Muralidhar. “These are not the big issues. We should be talking about crime and the cost of living.”
“Substance abuse is closely related to crime,” says Brown. “Effective policies on crime have to address this.”
Swarbrick says, “There are 600,000 New Zealanders who currently use cannabis, which means they interact with the black market, often with criminals who upsell their customers to harder drugs.”
Sycamore says, “It’s a good example of National being out of touch. The Alcohol and Drug Court in Auckland is really successful, but it’s expensive. Will you fund more intervention programmes?”
Muralidhar tells him, “I’ve talked to a dairy owner who’s had a machete held to his neck. I’ve talked to a young woman with a job on Queen St whose parents say she should quit. My number one commitment would be to make sure Auckland Central is safe again.”
Brown asks him how.
“For starters, with a downtown police station and more cops on the beat.”
Labour’s Sims says, “We’ve created 1800 new cops. There are more now than ever before. The Fort St police station was closed under National, not Labour. And National now has a dodgy tax plan which does not add up and will require cuts to things like police and prison services.”
Swarbrick says, “It costs $200,000 a year to keep a person in prison. Imagine what you could do if you invested $200,000 a year in a streetie.”
It’s hard to see this race as anything other than Team Chloe vs Team Mahesh: the outsider incumbent vs the big blue machine.
Both of them do worry and anger, and hope, and they both have a grin that frequently splits their face in delight. Brown asks them about their best experiences on K Rd.
Swarbrick: “Election night 2020, baby!”
Muralidhar: “I always end up at Family Bar and rock out of there about 3.30.”
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Three of the whales succumbed on the shore.