Phil Goff will almost certainly be elected Mayor of Auckland next month. That’s a good thing. Although an independent, we’ve known him as a Labourite for decades and fits comfortably in preconceived notions of electability.
His main opponent, Vic Crone, looked a contender. From Aotearoa’s business community’s favourite success story Xero, she could have played to her strengths as a political newcomer. With support and funding from traditional Auckland National Party people, a real battle was looming.
But she just hasn’t been good enough, lacking the confidence, charm, coolness and intelligence that people might call the ‘X-factor’. You need that to beat an establishment politician.
So it’s in the bag for Goff. And the whole thing could have been as boring as that. Until Chloe Swarbrick came along.
Swarbrick’s campaign has been the most exciting thing to happen in local body politics for as long as I’ve been paying attention. She’s young, she’s slick, she’s deeply connected to Auckland culture. And she is not a politician.
Politicians might go on BFM to appeal to student voters – but Swarbrick is the interviewer. Politicians might wear a shirt from a local fashion company to appeal to young people – but Swarbrick started the label. Politicians might be invited to the opening of an art exhibition – but Swarbrick organised the event.
This authenticity would be enough to catch our attention. But of course, policy is pretty important as well. Swarbrick’s policy is forward-thinking and progressive.
She’s the only candidate polling over 5% that says she wants house prices to drop in Auckland. No careful politicking about slowly reducing the rate at which they are rising. She’s not Goff, with a lifestyle block on the edge of Auckland, and she’s not Crone, whose experience with the housing crisis is that a friend of hers has to stay in her beach house (she said that, I shit you not).
Swarbrick is actually living the Auckland housing crisis. She wants to buy a modest studio apartment in Auckland City, and at the moment that’s not possible. It’s a lot easier to trust someone to fix housing affordability when they aren’t going to lose out financially from any fall in house prices.
She’s a real supporter of the Living Wage Movement. While many mayoral candidates have committed in principle to the Living Wage at Auckland Council, she has gone a step further by committing to making the Living Wage a condition of the cleaning contract when it comes up for tender next year. Goff has pledged to support a Living Wage for Council staff but says contractors are for Phase 2, maybe.
Generation Zero have given her an A- grade for her environmental credentials, the highest scorer (tied with Goff – good for him, good for Auckland). Green issues are obviously hugely important for local elections. As councils are the key players in transport, urban development, parks, rubbish, recycling, and so on, a candidate’s position on these issues should be one of the biggest factors in deciding your vote.
So Swarbrick gets a big tick on the issues of the day. But what has turned me from a comfortable Goff supporter to a passionate Swarbrick cheerleader is her mission: to increase engagement in local politics. For her, this doesn’t just mean getting existing voters to like her. It means making politics relevant to those who feel left out of the system – not just the young, but all the disenfranchised and disenchanted, as she puts it.
It’s the kind of rhetoric I like and we need. She talks about changing the system – how refreshing is that! For this reason, her perceived lack of experience doesn’t need to be a hindrance. She’s not campaigning to be the mayor-ist Mayor of Auckland. She wants to oversee comprehensive change to the whole Machine.
The experience of Goff and Crone in central government and big business respectively would see them elected with entrenched understandings about how things currently work, and decades of assumptions about both what is possible and what is desirable. A mayor without any of this baggage would be invigorating. And it’s not as if Swarbrick would be elected and suddenly the fate of Auckland would rest entirely on her shoulders. The Mayor of Auckland has a huge budget for a big team. Maybe she could appoint Goff as an advisor.
That said, you can’t help but be impressed by just how extremely knowledgeable she already is about even the most mundane details about the bureaucracy of the Super City. She certainly out-performs all candidates other than Goff on this front, as she has demonstrated at any debate she’s invited to. The words of Goff himself are relevant here:
“I think the other candidate that I most admire is a young woman called Chloe Swarbrick. She’s 22 years old. She’s very articulate. She’s a very pleasant person. I think we probably share a lot of the same ideas,” he says.
“I hope that she hangs about and she continues to put her talent into politics. If I hadn’t have voted for myself I think Chloe would have been the one.”
When the bloke who will be mayor thinks Swarbrick is worth voting for, those who reject her for reasons like age and experience look a bit silly.
While Swarbrick is absolutely right to be talking up her chances of actually winning (confidence is key in being taken seriously), it’s safe to say that outcome is extremely unlikely. But a strong showing for Swarbrick sends some important messages.
One is that you don’t need a big budget, 20th century hoardings, political party tickets or a pre-existing public profile to be a top candidate. Having only spent just over $5,000, making full use of social media, and using policy and messaging that wins interest from blog sites, commentators and opinion shapers, Swarbrick’s approach is a shining example of what grassroots and tech savvy folk imagine political campaigning in a digital age could and should look like.
That the Herald barely mentioned her but profiled candidates polling lower than her in their recent local body feature is a testament to this. The old media rejected her until they realised they were behind the 8-ball on the most interesting thing happening in this election. Of course, their coverage has mainly consisted of ‘She’s 22, how novel’. The real conversations are happening outside of mainstream media control.
Another message is that our generation (and people with similar values), who have been put in the too-hard basket by mainstream politics, are in fact voters. We just needed someone to speak to us directly and make it clear they are there to represent us. We haven’t really seen this in Aotearoa politics since the early days of the Greens.
When Swarbrick is asked what success looks like her this election, she stays on message – she’s in this to be Mayor of Auckland. Just like Bernie Sanders refusing to concede until the final votes were being cast at the Democratic National Convention, Swarbrick keeping her eye on the prize despite the realism (or perhaps defeatism) of political conversation is what keeps her momentum building.
And just like with Sanders, success doesn’t have to only mean winning the election. She is motivating a new constituency to pay attention. She has challenged all sorts of assumptions about the way we can and should do politics. Her bid has already been worthwhile when I see friends who wouldn’t usually engage even in the general election liking and sharing her posts on Facebook.
No one will ever again say that a self-described socialist can’t be a real contender for President of the United States. With a decent chunk of the vote going Swarbrick’s way, perhaps soon no one will be able to say that a young independent with next to no campaign funds can have a real impact on politics.
Vote Chloe Swarbrick: the best candidate, the front-runner’s choice, the breath of fresh air. If it means Goff is elected with a margin in the 10s rather than the 20s, so be it.
Sam Gribben
I’m a Wellington-based activist and unionist. My political awakening happened as a 16-year-old involved in the campaign against youth rates, where I learnt that it only takes a bit of strategic organising and a good loud campaign to change the country and maybe the world. I reckon the biggest obstacle standing between Aotearoa and a progressive utopia is the left’s difficulty with being nice to our allies. My favourite word is community. Favourite quote: You’re either helping to put on the Muppet Show, or you’re one of the old guys in the balcony insulting it.
Quoted from above:
“Generation Zero have given her an A- grade for her environmental credentials, the highest scorer (tied with Goff – good for him, good for Auckland). Green issues are obviously hugely important for local elections. As councils are the key players in transport, urban development, parks, rubbish, recycling, and so on, a candidate’s position on these issues should be one of the biggest factors in deciding your vote.
So Swarbrick gets a big tick on the issues of the day. But what has turned me from a comfortable Goff supporter to a passionate Swarbrick cheerleader is her mission: to increase engagement in local politics. For her, this doesn’t just mean getting existing voters to like her. It means making politics relevant to those who feel left out of the system – not just the young, but all the disenfranchised and disenchanted, as she puts it.”
Yes, of course, Chloe is presenting a good campaign, but to be honest, apart from her rates proposal on capital land value, and strong support for public transport and so forth, she is like the others somewhat short on details.
And Generation Zero have lost their credibility in so blindly and fully supporting the version of the Proposed Unitary Plan that the government appointed “independent” hearing panel recommended to Council, and which Councillors and the Mayor largely voted for.
The now decided on Unitary Plan will prove to be a great instrument for developers and builders to exploit the loopholes in it. It will end in new complexes to be built that will again turn out to be poor choices, as so many rules were thrown out, and as design guidelines can be treated with generous discretion by Council’s consenting officers.
The failure by the decision-makers to sufficiently scrutinise the details of the recommendations and to rely on “experts” who largely support vested business interests before those of the ordinary Auckland citizen, that will demand its price in future. We will add new problems to the still not fully resolved “leaky homes crisis”.
And Chloe seems to embrace Generation Zero’s ideas without too much scrutiny also. I am sure she will have a good run and reasonably satisfactory results, but she is still just starting a political career, as I see it.
We will be stuck with Goff and Councillors who will offer pretty much more of the same, where the interests of ordinary Aucklanders come second or will not even be considered. We will have large projects require massive investment, and that will only come with borrowing money, which we will pay for for generations to come.
One major challenge will also be to force Aucklanders who do in their vast majority still love their cars, to move away from individual car use to switch to more public transport use. If we replace petrol fueled cars with electric ones, we will also need new power generation, as the present resources are finite and limited. Where will the extra water for nearly another million Aucklanders come, I wonder, who actually did the thorough analysis of data and conduct independent studies, I ask?
Here is what really influences where Auckland goes, it will not so much be the Mayor and Councillors, they will be pressured to follow these ones:
http://www.committeeforauckland.co.nz/membership/members
http://www.committeeforauckland.co.nz/membership/membership-categories-benefits
How will one idealistic candidate and potential representative like Chloe, or even Phil Goff, stand up against these influences and take them to task, I ask?
Business rules, business, and local government is increasingly being dictated to by big and also medium size businesses, with their lobbying powers.
I hate to tell you this but, rightly or wrongly, a middle class white girl living in Epsom, who at 22 can’t afford an apartment ‘yet’, is not about to draw in the ‘disenfranchised and disenchanted’.
I think you may be seriously underestimating the class divide.
That’s not to say that she could never do that, but she may need to survive a few hard knocks before some 20 year old kid in Henderson or Manukau thinks there is anyone representing their interests.
Thanks for the feedback. I grew up in West Auckland myself, and the people I refer to as old friends on Facebook who are interested in and engaged by are as you describe, the 20 year old kid in Henderson included. 22 should not be too young to be thinking about saving for apartments. But her point is that it’s entirely unrealistic in this market. For what it’s worth, in the affordable housing discussion Chloe always also brings up rents, as far as I have seen.
I like to think about Chloe’s pitch as being beyond traditional class divides myself, but yes, the proletariat uprising will need a diversity of voices 🙂
Thanks for reading and engaging!
Thank-you Siobhan.. so true..
She may have been misquoted recently, but in the Herald Swarbrick’s comments on “ethnic” issues come across as decidedly anti-Maori.
Hey Castro.
Reading my statement back, I completely understand how it could be misinterpreted. What I was trying to say was that Maori affairs are far too often dictated by Pakeha – I want Maori to make decisions for Maori. I take Ti Tiriri incredibly seriously, and staunchly support Maori seats.
I’m incredibly sorry for how my response could have been misinterpreted, and take full responsibility for it.
Ps Sam My favourite word is community too.. on Waiheke we know what it really means. We also know we have to engage ‘honestly’ to win as we did for Matiatia, against very sly and wealthy people looking out for their futures not ours collectively. We know how to connect across ages, socioeconomic status, genders and ethnicities…Also helps to know when you have wolves in sheeps’ clothing or wolfcubssinlambswool in your midst..They have an aura and aroma about them often.. A just ‘too nice’ or good to be true one!
Glad you mentioned the Muppets Sam? Because some people’s strings have definitely been pulled by the who is being SpunOff? ‘slick’ Miz Swarbrick. and the Youth Wing of the Property Council and Property developers’ darling Gen Zero..
Seriously? So you are fine with her being down with Privatisation by stealth aka PPPS and CCOs? (Yep she said that, I shit you not, but then deleted it on Cathy Casey’s wall presumably realising what a faux pas admission it was to make).
Yep the same kind of PPPs as Serco? Novopay?
So You are fine even as an AT CONtract case is due back in the Auckland High Court shortly to continue answering bribery and Corruption charges. ( Be one of many mark my words).
And you sound ecstatic with her having the endorsement of the floor crossing #AVoteForPHilGoffAVoteForTheTppa?
Really?
We actually are in trouble here when people cannot see what is being confected and conjured right in front of their faces? But then again that is how we got 8 years of John Key and non stop #PoliticalLiquefaction isn’t it?
If you can fake sincerity ( Authenticity Credibility and Integrity) You have got it made? a banner at many TPPa events says..YEP..
And Labour-lite Blue did for Hone and helped Key and we all know what that happened Northland in 2014 too aye?
Phil Goff does not deserve to be mayor and neither does anyone who supports more privatization and TPPA. Matters not so much his experience but rather his integrity and ethics and lack of being a corporate puppet.
Phil Goff is in the pocket of the United Nations and should be questioned about that and many other issues as well. His possible; potential future authority needs further scrutiny and questioning after his likely mayoral win.
Look deeper at the alliances between Goff and Helen Clark and John Key and the United Nations and the WTO and support ( ? ) of NATO and corporate greed.
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