The weekend’s election result was a great one for Labour and the left, only slightly tempered by the realisation on Sunday morning that it would likely be the best election result I’d ever experience. Labour swept Christchurch in a way it never had before, picking up the party vote, as well as the true blue seat of Ilam, and further outside the city, Rangitata. A massive congratulations to all the MPs, campaign teams, and volunteers who worked to get this result. It might have always looked like Jacinda was heading to victory, but the scale of the win wouldn’t have been possible without the hundreds of people on the phones, putting up signs, and getting out the vote on election day.
While congrats are in order for all the MPs, I just want to touch back on the two races I looked at during the campaign. Tracey McLellan had a stonking win in the newly-created Banks Peninsula, with more than double the votes of her nominal challenger, the inept Catherine Chu. While she might want to slip quietly back into her council and health board roles, their should be serious questions about Chu’s competence for those jobs. Her performance in the campaign was dire, with her comments that I reported on at the local Somerfield candidates meeting being picked up by the Press. It seems clear that she doesn’t have a handle on the complexities that are plaguing the health board; I think it’s more than fair to question whether she’s also cut out for a job at council. I’d say she’ll have a very hard race if she goes for re-election, but until then, we will all continue to pay her somewhere in the vicinity of $250k to do two jobs that she’s told us she’d rather not do.
One of the other “independent candidates” who less than a year later turned out to be from the National Party is Megan Hands. Hands won a seat on ECan at the last election, in the West Ward (I of course ran for ECan and lost, and while I wasn’t running directly against Hands, you can put this all down to sour grapes if that’s what you want.) What is interesting about Hands is that when she became the National candidate, her biography said she was “born in the Waikato and grew up on dairy farms throughout the North Island”, and that she lives near Darfield (which is actually in the Selwyn electorate, meaning she’s run for two seats that she doesn’t actually live in in the last year). She also “has had long standing involvement in New Zealand Young Farmers, and is a two time regional finalist in the FMG Young Farmer of the Year Contest. Megan brings a strong voice for rural towns and communities.” National Party operatives on twitter congratualted her for her actual rural-ness:
(Sadly we couldn’t congratulate her via twitter, as she deleted her probably problematic account before being selected. Single tear emoji.)
This was quite different from the biography that she used when she ran for ECan (her profile used to be on the ECan website, but the information about last year’s election currently goes to a dead link.)
She’s shown her hand in the race for parliament, and it was a different Hands to the one who ran for ECan. ECan West Opuna is an urban ward (taking in the Harewood, Waimari, Hornby, and Halswell city council wards), and are the people of this ward being well-served by someone who lives in Darfield? She won her ECan election, and I’m not arguing that. But to do so, she told the people of Hornby that she was an environmentalist who cared about water, before telling the people of Rangitata that she was a dairy farmer who cared about them. Interviewed after her selection in the Ashburton Guardian, she said this:
Rural New Zealand is my home, and regional towns and communities are where my heart is, and that stands me in good stead to represent the Rangitata electorate.
This might sound like something that is purely academic, but the elections last year were the first (almost) fully fair elections that we’ve had in this region for a decade. I say almost, as the election returned 14 councillors - 8 for urban seats, and 6 for rural seats (2 each in north, mid, and south Canterbury). However, this means that the rural vote has more seats than the number of people in the region suggests they should. Don’t take my word for it - listen to former Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer.
All of the urban seats returned people who were elected on a pro-fresh water platform - except for Hands. This means that the council is 7 pro-water, urban representatives; 6 rural reps; and Hands, who represents an urban ward, but says that “regional towns and communities are where my heart is”. Canterbury people were hoping that a democratic ECan would start turning around the dismal water quality, that has deteriorated rapidly over the last two decades. It would be a travesty if progress was blocked by a rural Nat sitting in an urban seat.