Once a Labour stronghold, Mount Roskill set for ‘competitive’ race in 2026

Sunday, 6 April 2025

Michael Wood isn’t ready to say if he intends to stand again, but believes the race for his old seat will be ‘competitive’ in 2026. Stewart Sowman-Lund reports.

It was one of Labour’s most shocking results on a night of shocking results. At the 2023 election, Mount Roskill, the Labour stronghold once held by Phil Goff, turned blue for the first time.

Few saw the result coming. Along with Mount Roskill, the neighbouring red fortress of New Lynn also went to National and in Mount Albert, the former home of prime ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern, Labour held on by the thinnest of margins due to a strong showing by the Green candidate.

The vote in Mount Roskill saw the end of Michael Wood’s political career, or at least put it on hiatus. The long-serving Labour faithful had been embroiled in a political scandal before the election related to his personal shareholdings which had already seen him stripped of his ministerial posts.

It’s hard to know whether that was what tipped the seat toward National’s Carlos Cheung - a first-time candidate - or if it was a symptom of the broader “mood for change” that saw Labour unceremoniously turfed out of government three years after securing a majority.

While Wood is still mulling whether to put his name forward to contest Mount Roskill again next year, he told the Sunday Star-Times the Labour Party has been active in the community since the last election - and the party is determined to regain the electorate.

“We've been doing a lot of work on the ground, getting out and reconnecting, holding community meetings, campaigning on issues, speaking up for the community where the Government is letting down people,” said Wood.

“So we're doing that work. We're utterly committed to winning the seat back and being able to represent this community again, but we'll work through our process around exactly who it is a little bit later.”

Many saw Mount Roskill as a safe Labour seat, though Wood disputed this characterisation. He said it has always been more of a “battleground” than people realised.

“If you look at … the last seven MMP elections, Labour's won the party vote three times, National’s won the party vote three times, and it was a dead heat about once. So the nature of the seat - which is that it's a very, very diverse mixed community - has always meant that it's been a bit of a battleground,” he said.

“Obviously, for a long period of time, we managed to build up … decent electorate majorities that weren't able to withstand that big tidal wave against Labour that we experienced in 2023. I think it's likely to be a very, very competitive seat [in 2026].”

Under proposed changes to electorate boundaries, Mount Roskill would pick up parts of New Lynn and Blockhouse Bay, while losing other areas to the neighbouring Mount Albert electorate. Wood says that “on the face of it” this will “give something of an advantage to the National Party, but probably not a large additional advantage”.

Political commentator and former Labour chief of staff Neale Jones believed the proposed changes could benefit both parties.

“They've taken out the Wesley area, which is a state housing area, sort of the Labour heart of the electorate. They've brought in Blockhouse Bay, which is probably light blue, and there's a bit of Avondale, which probably about evens out,” he says.

“People I've talked to locally think … probably 1000 to 1500 more … voters favouring National, but in the scale of a general election, that's relatively minor.”

Carlos Cheung, the incumbent National MP in the seat, doesn’t think it would change much.

“I can see that as a very fair boundary change. I think both sides, on a political level, will lose a little bit of support from each side. So I think the boundary change for me is quite neutral overall.”

Cheung is a backbench MP and, ranked 48th on the National Party list in 2023, was seen as a surprise winner on election night. He told the Star-Times the seat had always been “marginal” and not easy to win.

There hasn’t been any polling done in the area since the last election, he said, but conversations on the ground were positive - even if they weren’t always convinced by the Government’s performance.

“General feedback is … some of the policy, National-wise, people may dislike or not agree, but they appreciate the groundwork I'm doing in my electorate.”

One community worker in Mount Roskill, who did not want to be named due to her role with an apolitical organisation, said she felt Cheung had made an effort since taking office.

“People appreciate seeing their MP around. Carlos is doing a good job … he’s definitely trying to connect with different local groups,” she said.

While Wood took some responsibility for losing the seat in 2023, he acknowledged that the overall party vote also took a massive hit.

“When you're the candidate … you do have to take responsibility. You take responsibility for the good stuff. And when things don't go well, you have to take responsibility for that as well.”

It was for other people to decide whether he had rebuilt any lost trust in the electorate, said Wood, though Mount Roskill has been “home” for a long time.

“This place has been in my blood for a long time. I represented the community and local government for a period before central government as well,” he said.

“I guess I just have a belief that people in this community are often quite humble people, not people who like to make a song and dance about things very often, and it's important that their issues and concerns and aspirations get a hearing as much as anyone else's.”

Jones doesn’t believe it’s fair to blame Wood individually for the result in Mount Roskill, noting that “the party got punished more heavily than Michael Wood did in the election”.

He added: “I think there's obviously some local support for Michael. That's a decision for him [whether to stand again]. But I think … the most determinative factor will actually be Labour's party vote recovering.”

Neither Wood nor Cheung was willing to comment on each other’s performance directly, though Wood gave a veiled hint that he didn’t believe the current MP was up to the job.

“I guess the big question is: does this community have a representative who has the heft and the ability to actually speak up and push back when bad things are happening here?” He wouldn’t answer his own question.

Cheung said as a rookie MP, he was making an effort to be out and about in the community.

“I think a lot of people … know me, but I think that as a first-time MP [some] people don't know who am I or what kind of person [I am],” Cheung said.

“This is why I'm very visible … attending almost every local event or community event just to introduce myself.”