It was a strange and eventful night, but in the end all the candidates at National’s 2025 Hamilton mayoral debate united on one difficult, perhaps even impossible, course of action.
About half an hour into the National Party’s Hamilton mayoral debate, a man gets up and starts shouting. He’s been grumbling since the start, muttering “bullshit” under his breath as candidates give their responses. Now the ambient grumpiness is erupting into full-blown ratepayer rage. His ire is mainly directed at Sarah Thomson, one of the mayoral frontrunners, and a current councillor for Hamilton West. “You spent $1 million on a playground and $1 million on another playground” he yells, jabbing his finger. “Is that not a waste of bloody money?”
People try to escort him out of the Hamilton Settlement Centre and into the cooling air of Claudelands Park, but he won’t budge. “I want to say my bit,” he says. “I’m entitled to it. I’m sorry I’m not a bloody Māori.” There are groans from the crowd. Eventually the night’s MC, National MP Ryan Hamilton, threatens to remove him from the premises “physically, myself”. The man put up his fists to fight. It’s Thomson who finally defuses the situation, offering to go out into the foyer and talk to the man. They sit in a hallway until police arrive to take him away.
Sarah Thomson and a helper talk with the aggrieved ratepayer outside the debate.
It’s definitely one of the top three weirdest moments of the evening. Hamilton’s mayoral contest is riddled with big policies and even bigger personalities. Thomson and former National MP Tim Macindoe are expected to duke it out to take over from the city’s two-term mayor Paula Southgate, who’s retiring at the election. But the city has ranked voting, or STV, so aspiring candidates don’t have to worry about taking votes off their ideological allies. There’s little downside to putting your hat in the ring, and a bunch of the more fringe figures appear to be using the mayoral contest as publicity for their council races. “My name’s John McDonald, running seriously for the east side (Hamilton East) and less seriously for mayor,” begins one.
McDonald infuses his standard issue anti-bureaucracy platform with some light lashings of conspiracy. He speaks darkly about governments going from managing infrastructure to “managing us as people”. His solution is to design a “smart city” free from surveillance technologies and, most of all, speed humps. He’s still upset about vaccine mandates, and says the council did a shoddy job of its health and safety risk assessment for “mandatory injections”.
When asked for his greatest insight from the campaign trail, another candidate, Roger Stratford, talks about how well-organised his competitors are. “They’ve done their research. Especially John here. He’s done a lot of research on the internet,” he says, with genuine admiration.
Stratford is also a bit offbeat. His policies are scattershot, sometimes bordering on incoherent. But when it comes to his political ambitions, he’s crystal clear. “I’m announcing my intention in 2026 to stand in the Hamilton East electorate seat,” he says at the conclusion of his three-minute introductory speech. “I intend to unseat the incumbent National Party member.”
“Thanks for that,” says Hamilton, the incumbent MP for Hamilton East, as he returns to stage.
It’s a bounty of personalities. Rudi Du Plooy is a political vet, having served as a councillor for eight years back in Johannesburg, and gregariously sells his arch-conservative message in a pinstripe suit. But he records the night’s biggest political fail. Asked for his catchphrase, he delivers a long response. “Nothing will happen until Du Plooy is deployed.” It’s all The Spinoff can do not to join the protester in police custody. “Deploy Du Plooy” was right there.
Rudi Du Plooy regales the crowd with tales of his time as leader of the Christian Front in South Africa.
Though Guy Temoni-Syme is Du Plooy’s sartorial equal, with gold-capped shoes offsetting his otherwise casual attire, he speaks haltingly, and asks Hamilton to go easy on him in the Q&A. Still, he delivers the night’s boldest political zinger, telling the blue-tinged crowd to stop whinging about buses. “I hear complaints about bus lanes. Don’t complain about them,” he says. “What you need to be is more patient. Young kids are crossing that road. If it saves a life, I’m happy.”
For all the diversity on display, everyone agrees on one thing: the rates are too damn high. Hamilton’s went up 16.5% in 2024/25 and are set to rise another 15.5% this year. The reasons are familiar. Past councils, buoyed on by crowds like the one in attendance, kept rates artificially low and failed to invest in vital infrastructure. Now the bill has come due, and it’s crippling. Development is currently banned in much of the city because the pipes aren’t up to scratch.
No one wants to hear excuses like that though. Macindoe’s entire message is oriented around cutting back the burgeoning rates bill by reducing waste. It’s echoed by his fellow right-leaning candidates and centrists like former K’aute Pasifika Trust chief executive Rachel Karalus. Even Thomson, his left-wing challenger, concedes current increases are “unsustainable” and promises to bring them down.
Tim Macindoe finds a sympathetic audience for his stump speech on getting rates back under control.
But what are their proposals? Macindoe and McDonald bring up speed bumps, which are mostly funded by NZTA, and represent an infinitesimally small part of the council’s capital budget. Thomson talks about bringing services, including rubbish collection, in-house. The most popular idea is reviewing the council’s procurement practices.
Even that seems unlikely to make a meaningful dent. Hamilton’s rates increases are almost all going toward core infrastructure. When a minority of councillors, including Macindoe, tried to reduce them last year, instructing the chief executive to make savings that would rise over two years to around $10 million per annum, they were told it would mean shutting a library, reducing road safety education, and turning off the city’s fountains, among a host of other service reductions. Macindoe is vowing not to make cuts to libraries now, and he’ll have to find some outrageously inflated council contracts if he wants to knock rates rises back by even a few percentage points.
Maybe contractors really are taking the council for a ride, and those savings will turn up. But it also seems possible that Hamilton faces a choice between harsh rates rises, and letting poo bubble up in the streets every time it rains. That’s a hard pill to swallow. People are struggling with the cost of living crisis, and these aspiring mayors feel obliged to at least give them hope of relief. They get claps for their cutback commitments, no matter how light on detail some of them may be, then file out to pass round brochures promising to make changes that could well prove impossible.
There’s no way round it, even for the candidates who want the council to keep making investments in things like public transport provision and emissions reduction. Afterward it emerges that Thomson has agreed to meet the night’s protester at a local library on Monday morning. This is a rates election, and if you want to win, you’ve got to talk to the people who are frustrated, even if you think their ire is misdirected.