Andrew Little is running for the Wellington mayoralty. Photo / Marty Melville
Andrew Little is running for the Wellington mayoralty. Photo / Marty Melville
Opinion by Thomas Coughlan
Thomas Coughlan, Political Editor at the New Zealand Herald, loves applying a political lens to people's stories and explaining the way things like transport and finance touch our lives.
Former minister and Labour leader Andrew Little announced he will run for Mayor of Wellington at the local elections in October.
His main opposition will be the incumbent, Tory Whanau.
The contest between the two parties follows a month of friction between Labour and the Greens in national politics.
There were only two parties that mattered in 2021: Labour, who just four years earlier were contemplating an MMP-era record fourth term in Opposition, and their friends in the Greens.
Labour had won 50% of the party vote in 2020, a victory thatmight have destroyed the Greens, their main competitor, but the two parties’ canny “co-opetition” saw the Greens increase their vote too, to 7.8%.
In and about Wellington, those two parties were, in practice, two wings of one party.
The parties socialised together too. Greens would go to Labour parties and vice versa; the Greens’ 2020 election night after-party on Auckland’s K Road was full of senior Labour folk (back then, everyone knew the Greens were more fun than risk-averse Labour).
But there was a fly in the ointment: the capital, Wellington, run by longtime councillor, Andy Foster – a centre right-ish one-time NZ First candidate (now an NZ First MP).
As the whole country lurched left, the mayor and councils of one of its most left-wing cities were an irritant, frustrating the Government on one of its key policy areas: housing.
During Foster’s 2019-2022 term, the council and its mayor couldn’t seem to work out whether it was progressive or reactionary – even its progressive councillors struggled to work out where they stood.
Meanwhile, central government was trying to upend years of wilfully allowing councils to drag their heels on freeing up land for new housing. Minister Phil Twyford’s bold NPS-UD planning change issued a stern direction to councils: intensify.
But Wellington, which was then in the midst of an unsustainable house price boom, threatened to spoil all that with the potential for conservative left and reactionary right coming together to blunt the full potential of the policy.
Foster’s last-minute plan amendment was something of a middle-finger to Twyford’s housing agenda.
Capital was a popular GR shop during the pandemic. Its deep connections with the Labour administration were useful to firms navigating the ever-changing regulatory environment.
Back in 2021, as the niceties of government forced a merging of the Labour and Greens social scenes, Whanau’s candidacy was lauded and encouraged by Labour members and staff in the government, who did not yet have a candidate.
Before Whanau announced her bid, it was an open secret among everyone in leftwing Wellington circles.
Eagle was then the MP for Rongotai. Though failing to fire in Parliament, he was expected to romp home to the mayoralty, mainly thanks to the power of the Labour endorsement and his pedigree as an ex deputy mayor. His victory would have freed up a place in Rongotai, then a safe Labour seat, for party stalwart, Fleur Fitzsimons, then on the council.
But things didn’t quite work out like that.
Eagle’s candidacy drifted to the centre, and eventually the centre right.
Labour volunteers were dismayed to see what looked like collaboration between Eagle’s campaign and rightish independents.
Paul Eagle's candidacy drifted right. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Part of Eagle’s issue appeared to be a desire to shift to the centre to create an unbreakable centrist coalition of voters behind him.
He also appeared to be trying to ingratiate himself with independents he might need to form a workable majority on council.
The problem is that these concessions appeared to come at the expense of his stand on housing.
Labour members and volunteers, who had been lukewarm on Eagle’s candidacy to begin with, saw him compromise on the issue on which they cared most. Some quit the campaign and quietly backed Whanau.
Even the big Labour names in Wellington like Neale Jones were felt to be tacitly supporting Whanau, despite their Labour links (Labour members are prohibited from openly backing candidates running against someone from their own party).
A rumour started that Jones was even running Whanau’s campaign (he wasn’t).
Labour members’ homes were used for meetings with Green volunteers. The grassroots organisational networks that had sprung up to lobby for more housing during Foster’s term abandoned Eagle and swung behind Whanau.
Eagle’s campaign collapsed before polling day, swept away by a tide of red voters going Green.
Whanau followed in the footsteps of Chlöe Swarbrick’s Auckland Central victory in 2020, proving that Greens could make deep forays into red territory.
In 2023, the Greens added the Wellington Central seat to this list, with Tamatha Paul beating Labour list MP Ibrahim Omer and Julie Anne Genter taking Rongotai from Fitzsimons.
Labour’s reversal of fortune between 2020 and 2023 was historic. The party felt bruised and bitter – and the Green wins in the capital were salt in the wound.
That’s when the fightback began.
Mayors are not Prime Ministers. A single vote around the council table, they cannot guarantee support for anything they campaign on.
Whanau did not compromise on the central theme of her 2022 campaign. She held firm on housing and intensification, although much of the legwork on intensification was accomplished prior to her term. She did not compromise on housing when signing off the district plan.
But Whanau’s mayoralty changed forever when she backed a plan to sell the council’s share of Wellington Airport, a long-time fetish of council officers.
The plan (which would have helped the council fund an insurance shortfall) split the Greens, but united Labour.
The Labour-Green coalition that had swung behind Whanau in 2022 fractured. The alliance of left-wing, pro-housing organisers who helped propel her to victory began marshalling against privatisation. This time, instead of swinging from Labour to Green, they swung the other way. Labour’s relationship with Whanau began to sour.
Jones, who has known Little since he worked for him in his union days, was one of a number of figures who began urging Little to run.
Little had initially decided against running, but a flurry of calls from people across the political spectrum in mid-March persuaded him to change his mind, which was mostly made up two Sundays ago. The issue that changed Little’s mind was the council’s decision not to approach the Government for a regional deal (although this was a decision of all the region’s leaders, including Regional Council chair Daran Ponter and Hutt City Mayor Campbell Barry, both of whom have Labour affiliations).
Around that time, he received a call from Labour leader Chris Hipkins, who told Little that he too had been receiving calls for Little to run.
Little is a strong candidate. In a selfish business, he’s best known for the uniquely selfless act of stepping aside to make room for someone else.
Wellington, a city in the grip of Long-Jacindamania, is the ideal city for a candidate who is arguably Jacindamania’s patient zero.
He’s getting the gang back together. He’s got Jones’ backing, and Jones’ partner Alex Marett, formerly a staffer in Chris Hipkins’ ministerial office, is likely to be announced as Little’s campaign manager.
Other former staffers from his days as Labour leader and minister are said to be likely to play a role.
The change is widespread. CTU economist Craig Renney, who worked for Labour during the Little years before joining Grant Robertson’s ministerial team, will likely volunteer and next year, Renney is almost certain to seek selection for the Rongotai electorate in an attempt to wrest it back from Genter.
Labour’s swing against the Greens is sweeping up its own candidates. Matthews was rolled as Labour candidate in her ward, potentially over her strong backing of Whanau.
The Greens extended an offer to Matthews and will likely announce some arrangement with her next week, likely adding her to the ticket.
A 2017 snap of Andrew Little's team, from left; Phil Twyford (seated), Neale Jones, then chief of staff, campaign manager Andrew Kirton and senior adviser Rob Salmond. Photo/ Audrey Young
There’s enmity and bad feeling between the two camps, particularly on the Green side, who feel like Whanau has been fed to the wolves after inheriting a basket-case council and basket-case books.
For term after term, Wellington’s councils have played a game of pass the parcel with the city’s long-term challenges – Whanau was the unlucky mayor holding the parcel when the music stopped.
Whoever is mayor after October will inherit this unlucky fiscal and seismic reality.
There’s a sense of betrayal on the Green side – a sense that Whanau was abandoned by the left at the same time as she was weathering attacks from the right over implementing Labour-Green intensification plans and hiking rates to spend fixing the city’s pipes.
The Labour side is keen to play down any sense of civil war and keen to frame the election as one of stasis versus change.
For Labour, winning the city back is an important first step on the path back to power nationally.
They think the Wellington Greens, isolated from mainstream opinion in the rest of the country, are driving away the soft National voters Labour needs to win back.
Tamatha Paul’s comments on policing and subsequent war of words with Hipkins is only the latest example of this.
Hipkins called Paul’s anti-cop comments “stupid”, while Paul took to social media, saying: “I’ll never understand why Labour tries to compete for the same voters as National. They’ll never win.”
For their part, the Greens see Labour as staid and prone to compromise.
Neither side seems to trust one another and both see the battle for the city as the springboard for a revival of their fortunes nationally.
Particularly Labour, which aims to take back not just the mayoralty, but the two electorates as well.
Little has saved the Labour Party once. A victory in Wellington may set the party on the way to salvation again, but he will face the same fiscal and seismic challenges as Whanau – and unless some new revenue tool is sourced from the Government, he’ll be equally as hamstrung as her when it comes to dealing with them.
Whether the mayoralty goes red or green in October, there’s one part of the city that will remain stubbornly blue – and it’s the part of the city both sides would be well advised to pay attention to: the Beehive.
Winning that back will require the two parties to work together again – and that seems further away now than in 2023.
Thomas Coughlan is the NZ Herald political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
