"It's home for me - it is likely I will stand there," Manji told the Herald.
"It's a bit of a homecoming," he said, joking he'd been to the University of Canterbury, which is in the electorate, twice.
"There's nothing like the feeling of coming down Memorial Ave," said.
Manji reckons the seat will be "much more open", considering Brownlee had decided to step back, and the seat was far more diverse than it had been in the past.
“It’s a more diverse community - it’s a lovely place to live with a great university,” he said.
A parliamentary report from 2021 using 2018 census data showed that 31 per cent of the electorate was born overseas, compared with 22.1 per cent in 2005.
"With Gerry stepping back it is much more open," he said.
Manji is modernising the party, trying to make it sound less like a think tank and more like a political party.
Manji has been ahead of the curve on some of the economic issues facing the country. In a series of columns on financial news website Interest.co.nz, he raised concerns about the Reserve Bank's digital money printing response to Covid-19, months before it became a mainstream political issue.
Every party in Parliament, with the exception of Labour, now wants an inquiry into the economic response to Covid-19, including the bank's decision to digitally print nearly $53 billion.
At the time, Manji criticised the fact the Reserve Bank was focused on stabilising financial markets by conducting bond purchases in the secondary market. He was worried this would see investment flooding into assets like housing and shares - which is what happened. He wanted to see the Bank buy bonds directly from the Government, cutting out the middleman.
"What panned out was we saw major asset price inflation," Manji told the Herald.
"That was borne about because of the focus essentially in encouraging people to take on debt, and at a time in which the economy was closed the only thing people could buy was housing. Lowering interest rates boosted the price of housing, but it didn't help the economy because the issue was liquidity, not the cost of money," he said.
He thinks the bank's "misdiagnosis" of the problem was that Covid would be an ordinary "business cycle recession". In fact, what transpired was parts of the economy being switched off and people staying home, but thanks to things like the wage subsidy, most sectors of the economy, including most households, were not actually losing large sums of money.
"The Government quite rightly kept the cash flow going," he said.
Manji reckoned by September and October the Bank should have realised the economic effects of Covid were nothing like it had expected and the Bank should have responded accordingly.
"It's not a critique of the initial policy, they just thought 'we are not going to change our position' - That's where the Minister of Finance should have got involved and said 'what's going on here?" he said.
Looking back, Manji reckons policymakers should think clearly about what kind of economic problem the country was facing. He drew a comparison between the Christchurch earthquake response, which required shutting off large parts of the CBD and supporting businesses with a targeted wage subsidy, and the Global Financial Crisis, which was a credit crisis.
Essentially, the bank was preparing for another GFC, when it was actually facing a worldwide Christchurch.
"The obsession with QE [quantitative easing, or digital money printing] as a tool … was an obsession over every crisis being a credit crisis and we have to respond in this way. There was a real lack of external input in this conversation," he said.
Manji said this mismatch caused asset prices, particularly house prices, to rise.
He said we should ask if things could have been done slightly differently.
He's looking at his party's policy platform at the moment, looking for issues on which TOP could have a voice.
Manji wanted TOP to sound less like a think tank and more like a political party. "We're reviewing the policy platform," Manji said.
"We think tax reform is critical. If we don't rebalance incomes from asset prices, particularly in housing we're going to have the same issues we have at the moment, particularly around inequality," he said.
"Looking at broader issues in public services particularly health, transport, the energy market," Manji said.
Energy, in particular, was a concern, given the way energy prices feed into inflation.
"Are we producing energy at the least cost possible in the most efficient way possible in the most environmentally sustainable manner?" he said.
New parties have had a difficult time breaking into Parliament, so Manji will face an uphill battle if he wants to enter Parliament in 2023. But if Manji won a seat, he would bring two other MPs with him on current polling.
