John Tamihere and Christine Fletcher team up to challenge Auckland Mayor Phil Goff
Saturday, 26 January 2019
Two-term Labour MP, former talkback host, and social agency leader John Tamihere has launched his bid for the Auckland mayoralty.
Tamihere has teamed up with former National MP and Auckland City Mayor, and current councillor, Christine Fletcher, in an unusual move to campaign with a ready-made deputy-mayor.
The pair launched their campaign, and its slogan 'Shake it up and sort it out', in Henderson in West Auckland on Saturday morning.
The red and blue colours on the launch website reflected a campaign trying reach a wide political spectrum in October's local body election.
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The campaign has five key policy planks - most of them familiar local body election catch-cries.
Tamihere pledged to 'open the books and clean the house', and said it's not clear how ratepayers money is being spent.
He promised to reduce the power of 'faceless' centre city bureaucrats, and return more decision-making to communities.
Tamihere has called for more democratic control over public assets and wants to appoint councillors to the boards of all council-controlled-organisations such as Auckland Transport. That would require a law change.
His pledges included a 'crackdown on waste and incompetence' with the establishment of an Integrity Unit that could investigate public complaints.
Tamihere has called for a 'proper partnership' with central government, especially in housing and transport, and questioned the need for a regional fuel tax.
'Auckland needs a leader who understands what Aucklanders want and need, and who has the spine and the real world experience to get it for them,' said his running-mate Fletcher.
Fletcher took other swipes at current Mayor Phil Goff during the campaign launch.
'The ribbons Goff has been cutting are all the work of other people,' she told assembled media.
'I voted for Goff (in 2016) - but today council is divided, there's paralysis on key strategic issues and the bureaucrats are running the ship. There's a failure of leadership,' said Fletcher.
Tamihere offered little detail to the slogans and broad policy areas.
When asked whether he would try to scrap the 11.5 cent regional fuel tax, which he criticised in his policy outline, Tamihere said he would 're-negotiate' it.
When asked what that meant, Tamihere said: 'I'd like it to be zip, the same as any other region…' before Fletcher stepped in to argue the need for alternative funding for transport.
He criticised the decision to raise public transport fares, without 'socialising it.'
Asked how the pair's own, different constituencies might view the merging of their political 'brands,' Fletcher said: 'Aucklanders are intelligent, they're frustrated, the council has become dysfunctional - I'm not at all worried about the merging of the minds.
'I've been collaborating with JT for a long time now, we are pretty united on all of the significant polices, and I think most Aucklanders are united on just getting things done.'
Tamihere had to depart to catch a plane, without answering the question.
Tamihere and Goff were Labour caucus colleagues for two terms from 1999 in the Helen Clark-led government.
Goff held senior portfolios such as Defence, Foreign Affairs and Associate Finance, while from 2002 Tamihere had junior roles such as Small Business, Youth Affairs, and Associate Māori affairs.
Fletcher ran second in the Albert-Eden-Roskill Ward in 2016, behind centre-left Cathy Casey, after Fletcher's C and R ticket suffered a split in the vote with the National Party-backed Auckland Future candidate.
That split won't occur this year with Auckland Future contesting the North Shore, and C and R the wards south of the Waitemata Harbour.
Tamihere's career as an MP effectively ended in 2005 when a conversation recorded by Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine was published and quoted Tamihere as referring to women as 'frontbums'.
He referred to colleagues as 'smarmy' and 'queers', took swipes at Clark herself and called the PM's advisor Heather Simpson 'butch' and 'dangerous'.
He lost his seat to the new Māori Party's co-leader Pita Sharples.
Tamihere unsuccessfully ran for the Waitākere City mayoralty in 2007, and found a new calling as a talkback radio host alongside Willie Jackson on Radio Live.
Tamihere's career as a talkback host ended controversially when he was dumped from the show he co-hosted with Jackson.
The pair had interviewed a young woman who said she had attended parties where a group calling themselves the Roast Busters were present - young men who boasted online of having sex with drunk women and girls.
The RadioLive hosts said that if 'some' of the girls had consented, 'that doesn't make [the Roast Busters] rapists, does it?'
They suggested that women who consented to sex may now 'line up' to say they were raped as well.
The pair later apologised but major advertisers quit RadioLive after a storm of public outrage.
Tamihere and Fletcher were asked about the mayoral hopeful's past mistakes.
'Name one person who hasn't learned from their mistakes or their regrets,' said Tamihere.
'If you haven't learned from your mistakes there's something wrong with you.
'I regret a lot of things, but you are not my priest and this is not a confessional - I've made mistakes and I won up to them.'
'John has got some forthright views but I see him as having matured and moved on,' said Fletcher.
'And he will certainly have me keeping an eye on him.'
Goff is expected to announce his intentions for a possible second term next month.
In 2016 Goff won the mayoralty with a comfortable win over business executive Victoria Crone.
Two-time centre-right contender John Palino is making a third challenge, and is the only other confirmed mayoral contender.