The blessed suspension of political chatter ended the other day. For three weeks, the country appeared to run itself, no policy was enacted and even the factory that churns out Act Party press releases went quiet. I am willing to lay odds that a poll of New Zealanders would find we were quite keen on this state of affairs. Polling itself had also been retired, of course, and we liked that, too.
There were exceptions. In a running social media performance that was some combination of gleeful wind-up and genuine personal obsession, Newshub’s Patrick Gower railed about the three weeks it took to verify special votes after the election, declaring, “We need to cut through red-tape crap like this with a bloody chainsaw.” Only on the eve of the final result being announced did Gower allow himself to relax and declare victory. “I systematically dismantled the arguments of most who came at me,” he typed triumphantly on X. “Personal opinion.”
In my electorate, Auckland’s Mt Albert, there was some news. Labour’s Helen White held on, but her majority over National’s Melissa Lee came down to a mere 20 votes. Lee, understandably, signalled her intention to seek a recount. White, who had probably been aided by lingering sentiment about her predecessor, Jacinda Ardern, had already managed to flush away that goodwill by insisting to a TV news reporter she had done “really well”. She clearly had not.
White outperformed Labour’s party vote, but so did Labour candidates who lost their seats, some of whom faced dramatic rightward swings in the party vote. Mt Albert was different. After the special votes were counted, the Green Party closed the party-vote gap with Labour to only 306, and between them they were 5000 votes clear of the centre-right. National actually managed fewer party votes than it did when Lee stood in 2017.
The Greens even won the party vote in Wellington Central and Rongotai – where their candidates are also now the electorate MPs – but not in Auckland Central. Chlöe Swarbrick was returned as the electorate MP, but National won the party vote. Yet together, the Greens and Labour received more votes in Auckland Central than Act and National combined – and in Rongotai, they scooped nearly two-thirds of the party vote.
None of this has any bearing on the election result or the formation of a government, but it might weigh on the business of government. National’s flagship housing and transport policies (and those of its likely partners in government) have implications for these urban electorates where, it appears, most people want something other than those policies.
Those implications arrived in more concrete form in the same week as the special votes. Auckland councillors adopted a draft Future Development Strategy that strongly emphasises new housing development in existing suburbs rather than paddocks on the city’s far edges. It’s a left-liberal article of faith that this is the right way – so much so that Howick councillor Maurice Williamson urged his colleagues to delay adoption until a government was formed and Auckland Council gets “reasonable agreement about where we go forward” with the new ministers.
Only two other councillors voted with Williamson, and they did not include Mayor Wayne Brown, who retorted that “Auckland has to determine what Auckland is going to be like”. Brown, an icon of the grumpy white male renaissance, sometimes seems to have more faith in the well-organised liberal nerds on his council than in his fellow travellers.
After three years in which the feelings of farmers about government policy have characterised the political debate, it may be that where the new government will encounter its grief is the central cities. Heaven knows where they’ll send the e-bike convoys.
