KEY POINTS:
Tenderfoot Auckland City councillor, Aaron Bhatnagar, has scored an embarrassing own-goal against his conservative Citizens and Ratepayer mates in the opening minutes of the Avondale-Roskill byelection.
He's attacked the Citrat's City Vision rivals for selecting incumbent community board member Catherine Farmer as their candidate on the grounds that if she were to win, this would trigger yet another byelection, costing $40,000, to replace her.
"For her to even represent that kind of risk probably disqualifies her from even claiming to a be a careful steward of the ratepayers' money," he thunders on his blog. "Whoever was responsible for the strategic thinking that made them choose someone who would cause another election if successful ought to be put in thinking jail."
Mr Bhatnagar must have the attention span of a goldfish. Has he forgotten who was responsible for causing the upcoming $90,000 city council byelection in the first place? The one which, if Ms Farmer is successful, will spark off a community board byelection in its wake. The guilty men are his Citrat leaders who towards the end of last year, chose to stand a gravely ill woman in the triennial council election.
Councillor Linda Leighton was re-elected last October and was so ill that at the subsequent council meeting, she had to vote by holding up a card with "yes" written on it. She died just a month after her re-election. She was much liked in the local area, not least for her tireless work for Plunket, but I did think at the time, that a more caring and responsible political organisation would have considered the very factors Mr Bhatnagar raises, before deciding who to put forward as their representative.
If risking a $40,000 community board byelection "disqualifies" the left from "claiming to be a careful steward of the ratepayers' money" then where does that put the Citrats who are not just costing ratepayers more than $90,000 for a council by-election, but have also left ratepayers exposed to the $40,000 possibility as well. Earlier this year, Citrat campaign manager, Nicholas Albrecht, told me that "we knew she had cancer for the last year and a half and she'd always battled through it and it was the council stuff that kept her going. She was committed to it, so at the back of our minds we knew this day might come but we never expected it to be so soon".
By way of amends, as it were, he said they would disqualify recently elected Citrat community board members from throwing their hat in the ring for a council seat. This was so the Citrats could not be blamed for the cost of a community board byelection, if one of their board members moved up to councillor status. At the time, I thought that rather unfair on the loyal board members, and short-changed the public of choice, but decided to let the whole matter drop.
But the Citrats seem to want to have it both ways. They're happy to bluster on about their rivals wasting ratepayers' money on byelections, without seeming to accept if anyone is guilty, it's them.
As to banning community board members from aspiring to higher office, that's not just undemocratic, it's also daft politics. It's telling potential councillors-in-waiting they're rubbish. The Citrats won only one of five seats on the Avondale community board last October. I wonder how Lily Ho feels, being told to butt out. Across on the Roskill community board, all five elected members are Citrats. All were told to sacrifice their ambition because the Citrat hierarchy were trying to hoodwink voters into believing that husbanding the city's finances was really uppermost in their minds.
If that were true, they would never have got themselves into the situation where a byelection was needed a month after election day.
That said, the Citrats have pulled a heavyweight candidate out of the bag in long-time local resident John Lister. Chief executive for the past 14 years of the Spirit of Adventure Trust and before that general manager for Watties Export and president of the Export Institute, he talks of the chance of a new challenge. He's been in the youth business for a long time and believes a lot of our problems would go away if bored youth became more involved in community activities.
I wonder what he thinks of his new team's decision to mothball the planned local swimming baths.
* The eight candidates for the byelection are: Gillian Bagnall, Paul Davie, Catherine Farmer, Stephen Greenfield, Feleti Key, Mohammad Tauqir Khan, John Lister and John Williams. Voting documents will be posted to the 63,000 electors of the Avondale-Roskill ward from March 18.
