Auckland's mayoral race: The battle of the blue-red combos

Monday, 18 March 2019

OPINION: With a million voters to woo, candidates wanting to be Auckland's next mayor need to have wide appeal.

The decision by challenger and one-time Labour cabinet minister John Tamihere, to have a running-mate, in former National cabinet minister Christine Fletcher, is an obvious though novel strategy to make a pitch across the traditional political spectrum.

How that campaign might take on the red-blue combo that is incumbent Phil Goff, is starting to take shape.

Expect to hear plenty about the 'Auckland' candidate versus the 'Wellington' candidate.

**READ MORE: 

* Auckland's mayoralty race: Let the games begin

* Auckland mayoral contest goes live as Phil Goff confirms candidacy

* John Tamihere and Christine Fletcher team up to challenge Auckland Mayor Phil Goff

* Labour endorses Phil Goff for 2019 Auckland mayoralty**

Behind the Tamihere/Fletcher duo are two long time campaigners from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Matt McCarten's had an organising role in the Labour Party, the late-nineties-formed Alliance, Unite Union, and most recently with Andrew Little during his time as Labour's leader.

He was involved in the 1992 campaign which averted the privatisation of local body-owned Ports of Auckland, but the Alliance's regionwide tilt in Auckland's 1995 local body election, with its 'Greater Auckland Plan' to build infrastructure, failed.

Joining the campaign from the blue corner is Michelle Boag, a one-time National Party President who has been active in trying to find and support successive centre-right candidates for the Auckland mayoralty - most recently Victoria Crone who lost soundly to Goff in 2016.

Tamihere is likely to be pitched as the straight-talking, old-style Labour battler, taking on the establishment AKA the Government, and bureaucrats in Wellington but especially Auckland, where there'll plenty of talk about an overpaid and overstaffed council.

The attack lines are clear: Goff as a'puppet' of the government, and of his trying to mask his Labour past with campaign hues of blue, to again attract National-leaning voters from the south-east and centre. 

Expect an old-style street-corner campaign, with Tamihere working his street-level skills, while at the same promoting his business cred as a one-time Minister of Small Business, and long standing chief executive of West Auckland social services provider Waipareira Trust.

Fletcher is a three-term Auckland councillor, one-term Auckland City Council mayor and a leading figure in the National Party-aligned Communities and Residents group in the central suburbs. Her job will be to allay any fears those in the leafy suburbs might have about backing Tamihere.

It will be a campaign that needs to fracture support for Goff in the south and west which traditionally back Labour, a party which Goff once led.

Two weeks after his campaign launch, Goff's 2019 promises are yet to be unveiled, though expect a 'more of the same' approach, building off a term of solid progress, though not all of which he can claim credit for.

He is taking a different tack to appeal-widening, counting on voters knowing his life-long association with Labour, but with a campaign colour-scheme heavily tinged with blue.

Goff's 2016 policies haven't all turned out according to the brochure, but whether Tamihere's campaign can make electoral headway with the discrepancies remains to be seen.

Against Goff's solid incumbency and $200,000 campaign war-chest unspent from 2016, and Tamihere's outspokenness and campaign-hardened team, the other declared challengers John Palino, Craig Lord, Joshua Love and John Lehmann will have their work cut out to carve out a constituency.