Wellington mayoral candidates and contenders for the Pukehīnau/Lambton ward faced off in an unexpectedly spooky debate on Thursday.

When I arrived at the packed St Joseph’s parish hall and managed to claim one of the last remaining chairs, right up the back, I sat down on a pile of six Nicola Young campaign flyers. The Pukehīnau/Lambton ward elects three councillors using a ranked choice system. More than any other ward, it typifies the split between the Old Town and the New City, which you can see in the two incumbent councillors. There is an older, moneyed crowd who make up the powerful residents’ associations in the “character suburbs” of Mt Victoria, Thorndon and Oriental Bay, represented by Nicola Young. Then, there are significant numbers of renters, young professionals and students, represented by the Green Party’s Geordie Rogers (and Tamatha Paul before him). The third council spot is held by Iona Pannett, who has confusingly straddled the divide by being Green-aligned but opposing upzoning for high-density housing. She isn’t running again.

Young and Rogers are a cut above the rest of the field in experience and political skill, and I would put my money on them both being re-elected. The real contest here is to see who will fill the seat vacated by Pannett. Here are my thoughts from the night:

The crowd was very friendly to Nicola Young, and she worked the room well. She has a prim and proper speaking voice and a dry, Wilde-esque wit. She got a big laugh with her closing line: “If you don’t vote for me, you won’t see me again because I’ll be home working out how to pay my rates.” While it’s a cliche for candidates to worry about affordability for renters or homeowners on fixed incomes, Young broke the mould by openly focusing on the concerns of the wealthy: “They’re ones we don’t want to lose because they’ll go out to dinner. They have another house; they’ll take their business elsewhere.” 
Geordie Rogers doesn’t have the firebrand style of Tamatha Paul. He doesn’t give bombastic speeches at the council table, preferring to take a more considered, collegial attitude – he’s more Shaw than Swarbrick. Because of that, it’s easy to forget what a genuine talent he has for political communication. He rose to national attention in 2022 when, as president of Renters United, he held his own in a live TV debate against Chris Bishop. Even in a room that wasn’t particularly favourable to him, he defended and promoted policies that others may have shied away from – decarbonising the council’s swimming pools, the new organic waste facility and switching land value rates – often winning applause from an initially sceptical crowd.
Stuart Wong, a member of Independent Together, and Dan Milward, who recently left Independent Together after Ray Chung’s sex-gossip scandal and is now just a regular independent, were rhetorically indistinguishable from one another. They both have solid business experience, they both think rates are too high and want the council to cut nice-to-haves, but they didn’t seem to have any particularly original policies or insights for what they want to do. But I suppose when your only stance is “cut everything”, you can get away with that. 
Labour’s Afnan Al-Rubayee is running for a second time after narrowly finishing fourth in 2022, just 110 votes behind Pannett. This should be her race to lose – a party endorsement, a good team of volunteers, and some established name recognition. But she offered little to distinguish herself at the debate beyond being a generic Labour candidate. She spoke in a series of public sector buzzwords: “I have worked alongside the community to set up initiatives from a grassroots point of view”, “The gift of democracy is essential”, “communities shaping decisions”, “the council should be constructive and transparent”. She said she thought the new organic waste-processing initiative was too expensive, but after some mild jeers from progressives in the crowd said she supported it “one hundred percent – no, one million percent”.
I was impressed by Tim Ward, who is best known for running hospitality venues including Matterhorn, Good Luck, San Fran and Abandoned Brewery. He is unpolished as a politician, and openly acknowledged some areas of inexperience, but in a race where every candidate can kind of sound identical, he managed to make some fresh points. He thinks the council is focusing its events strategy too much on attracting big international shows – he wants to pivot that to local creative events like CupaDupa and Great Sounds Great, to help grow the sector from the ground up. When other candidates talked about keeping the streets safe, he emphasised that meant “keeping all our constituents safe”, including the homeless community, with better social support. And he spoke at length about dismantling the council’s procurement process – not exactly a policy with mass appeal, but it shows he’s done his research.

The Pukehīnau/Lambton ward candidates answer a yes/no question.

David Lee, a former city councillor and current regional councillor, is seeking a political comeback, though it wasn’t entirely clear why. He seems to be positioning himself on the centre right, though not as radical as Wong or Milward. “Apparently, I’m a dinosaur according to my two daughters. I said you’re confusing age for wisdom and experience,” he said. (Does that mean he is old but isn’t wise or experienced?) When asked how he would engage with the community, he said, “I’m an introvert and an energy vampire. I’m very open to having coffee and sucking the energy from people. “
Zan Rai Gyaw, who ran in 2022 on a single issue of taxi-pooling (nope, I don’t know what that means either) is running again, this time on the single issue of limiting voting rights to homeowners and renters who have lived in the city for at least six years. “There are too many students, public servants and national issue voters; it’s not working,” he said. He wants the council to “remove the irrelevant matters from the agenda” and “do the relevant things”. When asked about organic waste processing, he said he had “looked at landfills and it’s actually quite complicated. It’s not just burying waste under the ground”. He didn’t expand further.
One-time My Kitchen Rules contestant Teal Mau, a former refugee who moved to Wellington in 1975 and now runs a hair salon, laid out his policies by repeatedly echoing, “I have a dream that one day…” In his final line, he seemed to promise better weather: “I have a dream that one day we won’t say ‘you can’t beat Wellington on a good day’, we’ll say ‘you can’t beat Wellington on any given day’.”
Tony De Lorenzo sat next to Geordie Rogers, and most of his answers were, more or less, “what he said”. “It’s always hard to go after Geordie,” he said. “He keeps stealing all my words, this guy.”

After the local candidates, the mayoral contenders trotted up to repeat the endeavour. Alex Baker was unavailable, Josh Hartford of the Silly Hat Party had to leave early, and Scott Caldwell was missing because he “lives in Auckland”.

Joan Shi told the audience “I have a warm personality” in a perfectly monotone, almost robotic voice. She said she built her own campaign website and “in this way, I also reduced carbon emissions. In this way, the council should also save money.” 
Rob Goulden suggested Wellington should build a medical school, “but I see Waikato has jumped ahead of us”. He wants New Zealand to have a standing civilian army.
Kelvin Hastie really, really likes Simeon Brown’s idea to build an $8 billion long tunnel underneath the CBD.
Don McDonald tested out a couple of new campaign slogans – “Donald: better than some of the others” and “McDone waiting for the second coming”. As in the Johnsonville debate, he focused on his interest in reforming time to a system of six days a week and five weeks a month. “My special policy is calendar is stupid,” he said. “No Thursday forever.”
Pennywize the Rewilding Clown said he would “be carefully listening to every single voice that supports my plans”. He admitted he had “a few skeletons in the closet. We all do. Mine just happen to be real.” When discussing the government’s Local Water Done Well initiative, he said his plan for water reform was to “reneg on the whole thing and save billions by not investing anything. The catch is that you won’t have any running water. But it’ll be fine, we can work it out.”

Pennywize the Rewilding Clown addresses the crown.

Karl Tiefenbacher is worried about his mum’s rates bill and even more concerned about his own. He spoke at length about the structure of his ice cream business, Kaffee Eis, and the commercial rates he has to pay at his factory in Grenada North. “I’d be 30k per year better off if I was in Auckland,” he said. He wants to “change everything about the council”, but didn’t say too much about what he would change other than the typical pledge to cut nonspecific “nice-to-haves”.
Diane Calvert, in my opinion, has clearly established herself as the most credible contender on the centre right. Tiefenbacher will probably be a good councillor, but he isn’t ready to be mayor (the Whanau saga has shown the downsides of jumping to the top job too soon). Ray Chung is a bumbling fool, but will continue to get support from the loudest, angriest voters, because he is the loudest, angriest candidate. Calvert has spent three terms on council and clearly has a stronger grasp of how things work than either of them. She has kept her campaign relatively simple (“I haven’t got a whole raft of policies because I think what we need is a plan for the next few years”) but she does have some specific new ideas: creating a city engineering team, scaling back the Courtenay Place upgrade without scrapping it completely, and she has proposed a solution to the council’s social housing that is more realistic than Chung’s idea of hoping the government takes if off the council’s hands for free. General dissatisfaction with council engagement is a big theme of the campaign, which plays into Calvert’s hands well; it’s a drum she has beaten non-stop ever since she arrived on council.
Andrew Little pitched his appeal to the Old Town voters in the room, complaining about the cost of rates and poor consultation – “They might see someone from the council for feedback but nothing seems to change,” he said. (Personally, I’m a bit torn on the legitimacy of this complaint, because it often comes across as a certain class of people – ie older, wealthier homeowners – who are used to getting their way suddenly realising that the world doesn’t revolve around them.) But he stuck to his guns on housing policy – when the mayoral candidates were asked a yes or no question on whether they would vote to further reduce “character areas”, which restrict high-density housing, Little and Pennywize were the only candidates who said yes.