Fa’anana Efeso Collins, in his mid-40s, is an experienced council politician with a charismatic touch. He belongs to the party that has easily won all four previous Super City mayoral elections. The election was his to lose and he lost it.
How did Auckland not elect its first next-generation, Pasifika mayor?
Wayne Brown had been semi-retired for 10 years. He’s a Pākehā businessman in his mid-70s with a controversial record in local-body politics, public entity governance and Government relations. He openly disdains the processes and the projects of local and central Government.
How did he win the mayoralty with the largest centre-right vote in the Super City’s history?
At the start of the campaign, neither outcome was predicted. But there was an obvious mood for change.
Brown was an outsider to council and he captured that mood. He was “Mr Fix-it” and he was going to “Fix Auckland”. It was a brilliant slogan: it reinforced the idea change was needed while promising he had the skills to make it happen. Voters didn’t need it explained. They got it.
In other respects, Brown wasn’t a change agent at all. He was from exactly the same demographic as his predecessors: a professional, male, Pākehā member of the Baby Boomer generation. Collins, younger and Samoan, living in Ōtāhuhu, would have symbolised enormous change in the political landscape of the city.
Nor was he a Goff insider. Although Collins was a two-term councillor, a Labour member like the mayor Phil Goff, he had no senior responsiblities. The two were largely estranged.
Despite that, Collins couldn’t find a way to articulate that he also stood for change. His fares-free policy for public transport was supposed to do it, but it wasn’t enough.
Collins supported Goff’s budgets, which made him the BAU guy: it would be “business as usual” under Collins, his critics said. And he was endorsed by Labour, which reinforced that impression.
I’ve talked to insiders and observers on both sides, throughout the mayoral campaign and afterwards. Nobody wants to go on the record, but there’s not much disagreement across the board about what happened and why.
FAR MORE than “change vs BAU” was in play. Collins was the only big name on the centre-left, but Brown was one of several on the centre-right. Before Brown beat Collins, he was going to have to beat restaurateur Leo Molloy, business advocate Viv Beck and businessman Craig Lord. And money would be important.
When he launched his campaign in March, Brown told me, “It’ll cost me half a million. Well, if you haven’t got half a million, you shouldn’t be a f***ing mayor.”
Former Act Party leader Richard Prebble said something similar in the NBR. Auckland is so large, he wrote, “only the wealthy can afford to stand”.
Brown didn’t rely on his own money, though. He courted support from the big end of town with a series of fundraising dinners, small meetings and other events. He liked to tell public meetings that Helen Clark and Sir John Key had both signed bottles of wine for him to auction.
In the previous two elections, Goff had a war chest, filled using the same fundraising approach, especially among Auckland’s Chinese communities. Some of it was unspent, but Goff told me he thought it would be improper to hand it on.
Collins didn’t have much money. He received some financial support from unions, and Labour put him in touch with some other potential funding sources. But his fundraising was much lower key and they lacked the resources to adopt a Barack Obama/Bernie Sanders model of mass phoning ordinary voters with appeals for a few dollars each.
BROWN WAS open about his strategy. He knew that homeowners aged 50-plus are far more likely to vote than others, so he targeted them. “He went fishing where the fish are,” as Leo Molloy describes it.
That determined the suburbs and events he focused on, the places he spent his money and the issues he talked about. He kept it narrow: rates, housing density, the “unaccountable” council and the “arrogant and out of control” Auckland Transport. Road cones, which became a symbol of the way our lives are disrupted.
Criticisms of his past record and appeals for him to explain what “fix Auckland” means were brushed aside. On the campaign trail, says Molloy, admiringly, “Wayne was the only one who refused to answer questions he didn’t want to answer.”
Collins didn’t follow that template at all. He targeted south Auckland, hoping to activate the poor, the brown and the young. He talked about the things he personally thought were important, especially equity issues and climate change. He answered the questions that were put to him.
Brown didn’t invent his own campaign. He had a heavyweight team of National Party campaign operatives, including former ministerial adviser Tim Hurdle and, in the background, political commentator Matthew Hooton.
Hooton had a point to prove, having played an instrumental role in the short and ill-fated term of Todd Muller as leader of the National Party.
Collins had a different kind of team. It was led by Max Harris, a legal and political activist and author of the book The New Zealand Project. Harris advocates for “decolonisation, people power and the progressive values of care, community and creativity” and is known for the slogan “the politics of love”.
It was his first election campaign in charge. The experience of most of the others in the team was limited to community-level campaigns, mainly in south Auckland. Harris consulted frequently with experienced political operatives on the centre-left, but none of them was directly involved.
And there was no bagman able to work the fundraising magic, the way former Labour president Mike Williams has done so successfully in previous campaigns.
Harris also had something to prove. He and Collins wanted to win in what they might have called “the right way”: with what they saw as the important issues, by being open and honest, and by motivating the people who are reluctant to vote. That’s the poor, the brown and the young, who should have been their base.
Postal ballots discriminate against those people, because they move house more often and therefore are less likely to receive voting papers. The Collins team knew that and wanted to confront the problem, not hide from it.
They weren’t going to ignore the centre, the east and the north, and they never did. But the south and west were their central target.
It was a very high-risk strategy, especially against an opponent who was laser-focused on the people who do reliably vote. If they’d pulled it off, they would have transformed politics. But was it possible? All round town, hard-bitten Labour campaigners were shaking their heads.
BEFORE BROWN entered the race, he commissioned a sophisticated voter analysis, apparently from the Australian polling expert Michael Turner, formerly with pollster heavyweights Crosby Textor, who visited New Zealand as a guest of the law firm MC.
MC has a close relationship with Hooton and currently has a partner advising the mayor’s office.
That analysis told the nascent team around Brown about a prevailing mood among voters: we’re fed up with plans and policies and we just want things to get done.
“Fix Auckland” responded to that mood. It was a fabulous promise that could mean whatever you wanted it to mean and therefore could appeal to everyone upset by anything city-related. Potholes? Bureaucratic wastrels? Traffic jams? Crime? Mr Fix-it is on to it.
Brown’s team used it in everything, including the voting paper, where “Fix Auckland” was given as his party affiliation. Local-body election rules allow you to adopt a name without actually having a party and the practice is widespread.
Their billboards featured bright colours, bold lettering with Brown’s name and the slogan, and a big photo of the grinning candidate. They saturated the city and dominated every roadside lineup.
Collins’ campaign featured a more thoughtful image, muddy purplish colours and a slogan very few people will have remembered.
It was “For the People”, the name of the 2002 Nesian Mystik song Collins used in the campaign. It has the same open meaning as “Fix Auckland”, but it just didn’t fly.
Collins also updated a hip-hop song from his local-board campaign nine years earlier and it did well on TikTok. But there are not a lot of voters on TikTok.
Brown’s team had advertising blitzes during the TV News, on NewstalkZB and in the Herald: environments they knew were magnets for older voters. They didn’t worry much about social media.
Collins’ team bought some effective strip ads on the bottom of the Herald’s front page, but they couldn’t compete with Brown’s well-financed coverage. There were far fewer billboards.
In 2016, Chloe Swarbrick proved you don’t need a big budget, or lots of paid advertising, to do well. She was unaffiliated and previously unknown when she stood for mayor that year, spent less than $5000 and came third with 29,000 votes.
You can break the rules, but only if you do something better. Swarbrick did it with strong, constantly newsworthy statements. Collins didn’t manage to do that.
Worth remembering, though, she didn’t win. It’s one thing to be a successful minor candidate, quite another to get enough votes to come first.
THE BROWN campaign didn’t start well. He launched in a bathroom showroom in industrial Avondale, because, he told media, the Rosebank Business Association was a go-ahead organisation that put Viv Beck’s Heart of the City to shame.
But few members of the RBA turned up. Instead, there was a handful of old mates with National and Labour connections, some friends who’d driven down from Northland, and media. Brown hesitatingly read his speech and seemed a bit lost.
He was introduced by Sir Bob Harvey, who then sat down the back, muttering, “He’s not very good, is he?”
The other candidates saw it the same way. In the Collins camp they thought Leo Molloy or Viv Beck would be their main opposition.
Collins started his own campaign by winning the Labour endorsement, despite his fellow councillor Richard Hills making it clear he also wanted the nod. Hills withdrew when party polling revealed Collins was popular and he was largely unknown.
Collins also became the first non-Green to win endorsement from the Green Party. His campaign kicked off with a party at Soap Dancehall, just off Karangahape Rd, with keynote support from Labour’s Michael Wood, the Greens’ Golriz Ghahraman and AUT dean of law Khylee Quince.
Both teams had their own polling. Brown used Turner’s company Freshwater Strategy, which claims to “shape opinion, manage risk, and identify opportunities in shifting environments to help our clients gain a competitive advantage”.
Collins piggybacked on Labour’s regular weekly polling by Talbot Mills.
THIS ELECTION was a golden opportunity for the National Party: for the first time since 2010 they really believed Labour could be beaten.
But with Paula Bennett ruling herself out, they didn’t have an obvious candidate. Debate raged and an endorsement from Communities and Residents (C&R), their front organisation, was delayed. Eventually, they chose Viv Beck, who was photographed on Queen St campaigning with former party leader Simon Bridges.
The polls showed Brown, Beck and Molloy together had about half the vote, but Collins was ahead of each one of them on around 30 per cent. Molloy says he was getting calls from well-placed party people and wealthy backers all the time.
“They were telling me, ‘This is a disaster, you have to sort it out.’ I’d say, ‘Yep,’ but I expected Brown to withdraw. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it much.”
Then it all went wrong for Molloy. By mid-July he was stuck in the polls: some people loved the laddishness, most hated it. He did a foul-mouthed and abusive TV interview with the comedian Guy Williams and then, at a public meeting in Ellerslie, he got into an angry slanging match with a man with gang associations.
Molloy sent an apologetic explanatory text to his “four main financial backers”, but the text was leaked to Twitter. He was cooked.
Then it emerged that Viv Beck had problems of her own. Her campaign had run up enormous marketing bills for what seemed like very little work. Both the blame and the liability were in dispute.
Her own backers were not impressed and, in mid-September, just days before the postal ballot opened, she withdrew. It was “to avoid splitting the vote on the right”, she said, but she didn’t endorse Brown and some of her billboards stayed up for quite a while.
National and the centre-right finally had their candidate, although Brown himself is not party-aligned. He’s a genuine maverick, with connections to both Labour and National. But he became the guy who could beat Labour, and that made him National’s guy.
C&R never endorsed him, but they didn’t need to. The tribalism was strong. Late in the campaign, Brown ran into Simon Bridges in the green room at one of the TV stations and ridiculed him as a failed politician. Bridges still went on air straight after that and talked Brown up.
THINGS WERE entirely different on the centre-left, where the Labour Party did not regard the mayoral race as a must-win at all. If they’d stayed out of it, Collins could have run as a more credible independent. But they endorsed him and then did very little to help him. It was the worst of both worlds.
Where was Phil Goff? In 2016 and 2019 he won most voting districts all over the city, including in the centre-right strongholds of the east and north. He might have played a vital role, introducing Collins to his voter base and assuring them of his credentials.
Goff endorsed Collins but then stayed away, telling me he didn’t think it was “appropriate” to get involved.
After Wood’s early outing, where were the party’s big guns? How much did the marquee names from Collins’ south and west Auckland base do? Jacinda Ardern turned up for a photo-op in the final week, but by that time it only reinforced the idea their heart wasn’t in it.
The Greens didn’t really show up, either. Chloe Swarbrick, now the MP for Auckland Central, has a small army of volunteers. They weren’t deployed.
How much of that was to do with accusations Collins was “homophobic” and “anti-abortion”? Collins, raised in a conservative church, had spoken against marriage equality less than 10 years ago.
He doesn’t hold that position now, as he explained many times during the campaign. He’s been on a journey, he says, from the conservative teachings of his church to a liberal worldview, and he’s worked hard to bring his family and community with him.
On the right, Collins was trolled mercilessly about this. And while progressive commentators like the transgender non-binary activist Shaneel Lal backed him strongly, others were not so sure.
For whatever reasons, Labour and the Greens mounted no big co-ordinated attempt, even when he clearly needed it, to help the candidate they had endorsed win.
BROWN WORKED hard to generate support among Indian and Chinese Aucklanders. “They’re businessmen,” he told me, “and that makes them transactional. They want something and I’m going to give it to them.” He was talking about fighting crime.
He is also close to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, which wasn’t apparent during the campaign. NWO leaders Ngarimu Blair and Tom Irvine were both at Brown’s victory party, and in speeches he has named the iwi as the only mana whenua. That’s despite the official role of Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau, which represents all 13 iwi who claim that status.
This helps explain his antipathy to Paul Majurey, who chairs the group of 13 and the council agency Eke Panuku, and whose own iwi collective Marutūāhu is locked in dispute with NWO.
As for Collins’ community links, he had good relations with Unite, E Tū and other unions and as part of his campaign he visited a different church every week for a year.
But how connected is Collins really? He grew up in the Pentecostal Church but converted to Catholicism when he married. He’s the conservative who turned into an urban liberal when he went to university. He’s the Labour guy who didn’t fit into his party. His community relationships are complicated.
Lorde came out for him, along with David Tua and Oscar Kightley. Did they make a difference? Sir Bob Harvey also declared for Collins, despite having launched Brown’s campaign. That was a bit odd.
A group of doctors who’d worked under Brown when he was chair of the Auckland District Health Board came out against him, but they did it very late.
BROWN’S TEAM didn’t bother with doorknocking or phone calling, which breaks the cardinal rule of campaigning.
But it really is true you can break the rules, provided you do something better. He says he attended 300 meetings which, over the six months after he launched on March 29, is more than 10 a week. It’s possible.
Many of those meetings were lunches and dinners and sometimes it was possible to know when he’d had one: I’d get a few messages from people urging me to believe he was the best candidate.
That’s another big rule of campaigning. You’re not looking just for votes and money, you’re converting supporters into evangelists.
Collins’ team did tens of thousands of voter contacts – door knocks and phonecalls – but they thought they might need to do 180,000 and they didn’t have enough people for that.
There was an endless series of public meet-the-candidate meetings, most of them organised by local ratepayers’ associations, and mostly attended by elderly voters. Brown’s crowd. They were instrumental in setting the campaign agenda.
A key goal for the candidates in these meetings should be to make the news. Fares-free public transport helped Collins do that at the start, but he didn’t talk about it much and didn’t follow it with other newsworthy policies.
Brown would proclaim grimly that he was going to sack all the council agency board members, or “get rid of all the road cones”, and audiences often lapped it up. He got his tone right: angry, but not shouty.
Brown is not Donald Trump and you get the impression he’d be horrified at most of the behaviour and attitudes of the former American president. But with all that scorn for civic institutions, he did run a Trumpian campaign.
“Fix Auckland” was part of that. It’s a play on “Make America Great Again”, carrying the same message and the same emotional hook, while cleverly not sounding so toxic.
Meanwhile, minor candidates would rant against climate action and Beck and Collins would sit there trying to be polite and sound reasonable. Journalists would scratch their heads: it’s hard to report that.
Getting the tone right can be difficult. We don’t like it when our politicians are too full of themselves, but it’s not half as bad as their being a wallflower.
BROWN AND Collins are both shy. You could see it in their reluctance to work a room. Before events, Brown would huddle with his minder, away from the crowd, and he’d leave quickly after. Collins would trap himself in long talks with the organisers or one or two others.
Brown is not a natural speaker and didn’t seem to relish either the public attention or the contest. Molloy used to tease him onstage. “Can’t you speak?” he’d stage whisper to him.
But it played to his advantage. He presented as a man prepared to perform a public duty that few others could. He didn’t enjoy it, but he felt called to do it anyway.
Often, at the end of a meeting, he’d announce that he needed a beer. He even said it, at the podium, at his inauguration in the town hall.
Early in the campaign, while he spoke, one hand would be trying but always failing to do up a button on his jacket. He seemed entirely unaware of this. After a few weeks, he would appear with the button done up. The nervous tic had been managed away.
Collins is a natural orator, eloquent and knowledgeable, modest and personable with it. While that infuriates some people, who find it false, it mostly works well for him.
But how well? Audiences would start sceptical, then find themselves being charmed. And then, as he sat there politely while he wasn’t speaking, the charm sometimes wore off.
Brown made the most of this. “I could be friends with Efeso,” he’d say. “I like him, he’s a nice guy and I’d like to help him.”
It was a devastating complisult: an insult masquerading as a compliment. Brown sounded like a decent bloke even as he condemned his rival to irrelevance. Collins never found a way to overcome it.
COLLINS BELIEVES he lost 20,000 votes to racism. There was some horrid abuse, notably in Warkworth and one or two other candidate meetings. A well-known businessman I know told some of his staff, “We can’t possibly have a Polynesian mayor.”
But most of the racism Collins faced was subtler. It wasn’t only his personality that made him unfailingly polite on stage: he knew he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t be angry like Brown or Molloy. If he was, he’d suffer the same fate as John Tamihere when he stood for mayor three years ago.
JT won a mere 81,000 votes. Collins did 54 per cent better than that.
At one meeting in Remuera Collins broke his own rule and criticised Brown directly. A man in the crowd promptly got up and told him off for being “undisciplined”. He was often called “lazy”. Both are racist code words.
And in this context, “nice guy” translates as another racist trope: happy-go-lucky.
Brown didn’t have this problem. His weaknesses were forgiven, because he was supposedly good at business, and he didn’t have to play identity politics. All he had to say was, “None of that’s important, I’m just a bloke who knows how to get things done.”
Collins was “a six-foot-four brown man” who knew many voters would think there might be a problem with what he was, so he had to prove there wasn’t.
Barack Obama has written about this. Some people will always hate you; others will not hate you at all but they will always be disappointed. You have to be perfect, but that’s not possible, so for one reason or another you will never be good enough.
WHY ELSE did Collins lose? Because the phone is off the hook.
Brown can’t take the credit and Collins can’t be blamed, but a lot of people have stopped listening to the Government. The mayoral election, featuring a member of the ruling Labour Party, just happened to be their chance to say so.
When Viv Beck pulled out of the race on September 25, it was the nightmare Collins’ team had feared: they now had a single main opponent. Craig Lord was nowhere in the polls. Brown’s support surged.
But Collins didn’t change tack. There was no new effort to win centrist and liberal votes around town, no campaign kickstart to generate news coverage.
And no cavalry came riding to the rescue. Goff didn’t turn up to do what Obama’s done for Joe Biden. No tough Labour operatives arrived to shore up the stockade.
Collins’ team doubled down, renewing their efforts to get out the votes in the south and west. By the time Jacinda Ardern turned up in the last week, it was all too late.
Brown won 182,000 votes and Collins 125,000. Brown had 44.9 per cent of the vote; Collins 30.9 per cent. The turnout was 35.5 per cent, up 0.2 per cent on 2019.
You can sum it up with the results from two areas: Ōtara, one of the poorest parts of town, and the eastern suburbs of Ōrākei, one of the wealthiest.
Collins went to school in Ōtara, based his campaign there, and won the suburb by a massive 86 percentage points: 3469 votes to 473. But it didn’t matter because the turnout was only 22 per cent: the lowest in all Auckland.
He actually got twice as many votes in Ōrākei: 6855. But Brown got 19,080 there and the turnout was 45.6 per cent, well above the city average.
The lesson? The older, wealthier, home-owning suburbs are a rich source of votes but not only for the centre-right. They’re rich for everyone. Because their citizens vote.
And what if the dream of Collins and Harris came true? What if you could get Ōtara to vote? Isn‘t that an important goal for democracy?
Economist Brian Easton has looked at what would have happened if the turnout everywhere had been as high as it was in the city’s best area (56.6 per cent on Great Barrier).
In Ōtara, he says, Collins wouldn’t have got 3469 votes. He’d have got 8294.
BROWN IS not likely to want a second term. But he’s broken the Labour stranglehold and that’s changed the political landscape of the city.
In 2025, expect a new, high-profile centre-right candidate to make the most of it. The name being talked about already is Simon Bridges.
Mind you, Leo Molloy wants to run again and some of Brown’s campaign team have told him they want to work with him.
The impact of voter turnout
Did low voter turnout cost Efeso Collins the election? The answer is no.
The city average was 35.3 per cent, with the highest area (Great Barrier) at 56.6 per cent and the lowest (Ōtara) at 22 per cent. The economist Brian Easton has looked at what would have happened if all areas had a response as good as Great Barrier’s. He assumes the gap between the two candidates would have stayed proportionately the same in each voting area.
This is a way of measuring Labour’s voter deficit. How many votes does it lose simply because its base is less motivated to vote than National’s?
Easton did his calculations for the Herald using voting data from Auckland Council for the areas covered by the local boards and their subdivisions.
He says that because the Collins campaign “failed to get its people out”, it “lost 4 percentage points of the vote”.
If that hadn’t happened, Brown would still have won, but with 40.8 per cent of the vote, not 44.9. Collins would have got 35.1 per cent instead of the 30.9 he ended up with.
That same 4 per cent deficit in a general election, says Easton, “would cost Labour five seats in Parliament”.
