Shane Te Pou – Max Harris in Tāmaki Wonderland

The puha — or perhaps the kale pot — is simmering in Tāmaki, and I reckon people should be paying attention.

Old folks lik me will remember Tāmaki as Rob Muldoon’s fortress. Rock solid. Practically bomb-proof for National for decades. Brooke van Velden’s win for ACT in 2023 cracked that a bit. Now she’s stepping aside, and the seat’s wide open for the first time in a generation.

And in walks Max Harris.

I’ve been around enough campaigns to spot the difference between a candidate going through the motions and one who’s actually grafting. Harris is grafting. Door knocking, enrolment drives, an office in Glen Innes, young volunteers turning up week after week without being asked twice. motivating young folks like my kids to get out of bed early on a Saturday and do a bit of mahi .

That’s not a man waiting for the campaign to come to him.

National have put up Mahesh Muralidhar, who’s had a go at Auckland Central before and knows his way around a campaign. ACT have gone with James Christmas, who’s clearly spotted his moment and is working it. I’ve seen some of James’s work over the years, and I honestly don’t know how he’ll land on the issues around Te Tiriti With his own party — but I’ll give him this, he’s always struck me as sharp, articulate and thoughtful. This is not a soft contest, and Harris knows it.

He’s campaigning like he means it, though.

Everyone who’s been to one of his meetings tells me the same thing. It’s not just that he goes down well with the Labour crowd — he comes across as genuinely switched on even in rooms that were never going to vote for him. That’s rare. And it counts for something in a seat like this.

The campaign’s put him deliberately in front of unfriendly rooms — he was right not to follow my advice when I said simply stick to labour heartland Instead he’s sharing a stage with the National and ACT candidates, fielding questions from people who’d sooner eat glass than vote Labour.

There’ve been other events too, built around his own thinking on the economy and what Tāmaki actually needs. That tells me the strategy isn’t to protect him. It’s to throw him in the deep end and see if he swims.

He’s not pretending to be something he’s not, either. Lawyer. Writer. Rhodes Scholar. Spent years thinking about economics and inequality and the state. Fair enough. But right now he’s doing something rather different — knocking on doors, one by one, in streets that used to belong to Muldoon’s National.

That’s where all the thinking meets the real world. On the doorstep the big arguments shrink down fast. Parking on Taniwha Street. Petrol prices. Whether the bus turns up. A parent worried about their kids. A firefighter talking about the job. Ederly people asset rich but csch poor who want to live out the last few years in the whare the kids were brought up in I don’t blame them

Someone telling you flat out they’re stressed about the cost of living. Harris has been writing up those conversations as he goes, and that, more than anything, tells you what kind of campaign this actually is.

There’s a real trap here for someone with his background — smart, articulate, university educated up to his eyeballs — and that trap is sounding like a clever person talking politics at other clever people. Tāmaki’s never rewarded that. It wants you to listen first and earn the right to talk. From what I can see, Harris gets that.

There’s a tension worth being upfront about too. Harris is a progressive, and not a quiet one — his record on Te Tiriti, human rights and social policy sits well left of centre. He’s fighting for a seat that runs from some of Auckland’s wealthiest streets to communities under real pressure, in what used to be a stronghold of Muldoon-style conservatism. Whether that background helps him or hurts him with voters who lean conservative, or who’ve simply switched off politics altogether, is anyone’s guess. For what my words are worth most voters don’t care much where you sit on the spectrum — they care whether you’re actually listening. Harris seems to get that too.

Even the wider commentary’s starting to notice, with Tāmaki being flagged as one of the seats worth watching this election.

Then there’s the team around him. Having-run 6 campaigns one my own against Bill Bill Birch , yes Im a
Koro I know nobody wins a campaign on their own. You need people willing to give up a Saturday morning to knock on a stranger’s door and ask them, straight up, for their vote. People who’ll put up the signs and work the phones and raise the money and talk their mates round. Harris has found those people. That’s not something you can fake or buy.
I wouldn’t write off the Tāmaki electorate vote as a sideshow. Harris sits at 29 on Labour’s list, so what happens in this seat and what happens to Labour overall are tangled up more than people realise.

Fortresses fall.

Long shots sometimes build the kind of organisation that flips the numbers on election night. Every so often you get a candidate who simply outworks everybody else in the field.

That’s my read on Max Harris in Tāmaki. I’m not calling the upset. Not yet.
But I’d be watching this one closely.

Now I want to offer my own disclosure awhile back ago I asked Max to help my relations out down in the Eastern Bay of Plenty with a land issue. He was already onto it.

He put in hundreds of hours pro bono and had some success.

And that’s another reason I’m writing about him. He’s a worker and I like that about people.