Wellington Activist Sam Gribben says ‘Vote Chloe Swarbrick’

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.