Tory Whanau has been elected mayor of Wellington. Video / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Georgina Campbell
Georgina Campbell is a Wellington-based reporter who has a particular interest in local government, transport, and seismic issues. She joined the Herald in 2019 after working as a broadcast journalist.
Wellington's mayoralty was ripe for the taking after a tumultuous three years around the council table, but Labour Rongotai MP Paul Eagle lost his chance to be at the top in a humiliating loss.
The whispers about who would be the capital's next mayor started more than two yearsago and the name on everyone's lips was Eagle.
Name recognition is everything in local government and he had plenty of it, having first been elected as a Wellington City councillor in 2010 before becoming deputy mayor in 2016.
Eagle then went on to win the Rongotai electorate in 2017 after Annette King retired from politics.
But he found Parliament to be a very different place compared to his freedom as a councillor. Being a backbench MP for a party in government came as a shock to the system.
Five years later he remains on the backbenches. He has not been given any ministerial or associate responsibilities. He doesn't chair a select committee.
I had an appointment with my beauty therapist yesterday before the wild local body election results started to flood through.
The therapist told me she'd heard Eagle hadn't achieved much in Parliament, so she was voting for Tory Whanau.
It was a sign of things to come. Out with the old and in with the new.
Whanau is the former chief of staff for the Green Party and is a well-known face to Wellington's beltway.
But she was relatively unknown to the wider public when she announced she was running for the mayoralty in November last year.
Newly elected Wellington mayor Tory Whanau with friends and supporters after the result was announced. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Announcing so early on was strategic. Whanau had kicked off Wellington's mayoral race, meaning she would get guaranteed press coverage and her name would be mentioned in almost every story about the mayoralty and potential candidates going forward.
Whanau courted sitting councillors with lunches and coffees, making the effort to get to know them and understand their concerns.
As Whanau sought to introduce herself to some of the movers and shakers in Wellington, she found many had dismissed her and didn't consider her to be a serious candidate.
She persuaded them otherwise. Whanau sunk $40,000 of her own money into her campaign, which she said was a sign of her commitment to winning the job.
Whanau ran as an independent and was endorsed by the Greens.
The 2020 success of Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick winning the Auckland Central electorate would have been on the minds of Whanau's volunteers- could they could pull off something similar in Wellington?
Team Whanau ran a grassroots campaign. It was positive, energetic and fresh.
Her street level posters dotted around Wellington's CBD were highly effective. Her face was on Courtenay Pl, Manners St, and on the way to the train station.
Notably, she took a prime spot on a building just before the Mt Victoria tunnel.
Whanau sometimes struggled to clearly articulate the details of her vision for the city during mayoral debates. This is despite having some good ideas like delivering a new major urban revitalisation project between Wellington's waterfront and the hospital using special legislation.
Labour Rongotai MP Paul Eagle's political career is on the rocks. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Eagle kept firmly to his "back to basics" campaign and said that while fixing infrastructure might sound a little boring, doing so was about restoring the mana of the capital city. He wanted to review council spending and have neighbourhood plans.
But overall, Whanau felt more authentic.
She was up-front about the fact she could not promise a cap on rates increases, she was a calming presence when Eagle started bickering with Andy Foster, she admitted she would like to have a crack at the Green Party list if the mayoralty didn't work out (she would need a job after all).
Eagle on the other hand was evasive as to what he would do if he lost the mayoralty and he was so on-message that at times he felt unoriginal.
It's fair to say Eagle's political career is on the rocks.
Whanau, on the other hand, is now in the driver's seat with a strong majority of 16,000 votes.
This is a convincing mandate for change, unlike Foster who won by just 62 votes last time around.
There will be teething issues as she settles into the mayoralty with little experience in local government.
Her first priority will be bringing the new council together and she has the advantage of no one wanting to spiral down to the in-fighting which played out in the most recent council.
She could very well look to the right when it comes to picking her deputy to help build the necessary consensus to get decisions across the line.
Whanau could consider choosing a returning councillor to balance out her own lack of experience, which would mean either Diane Calvert or Nicola Young.
These two councillors have frequently been dissenting voices around the council table, although Young has shown ability to work with the left and formed an unlikely but genuine friendship with former Labour councillor Fleur Fitzsimons.
And so it begins, a new era at Wellington City Council with the city's first wahine Māori mayor.
Both Whanau and her council deserve some time to get the lay of the land and most importantly, to get things right.
