Can Max Harris break Labour's 69-year Tāmaki drought? He doesn’t seem sure
Saturday, 18 July 2026
Having previously spoken with the ACT and National candidates, Stewart Sowman-Lund sits down with Labour's Max Harris to discuss his bid to make history in Tāmaki - a seat Labour hasn’t won for nearly seven decades.
Ask a hopeful politician if they’re going to win and the answer, no matter the odds, is usually a resounding yes.
But Labour’s Max Harris is less blindly optimistic in his response. As the candidate in the seat of Tāmaki, he knows there is an almighty challenge ahead of him.
Not since 1957 has a Labour candidate secured the east Auckland seat. National’s Rob Muldoon held it for three decades until 1990, after which it was held by three further National MPs.
Then, in 2023, ACT’s Brooke van Velden swept in and won it. She may not be on the ballot this time around, but the party is determined to hold onto it. Its candidate, James Christmas, has been highly visible in the electorate since launching his campaign a few weeks ago.
National, whose candidate Mahesh Muralidhar recently held a glitzy campaign launch in front of party faithful, thinks of himself as the rightful next MP - he told the Sunday Star-Times in March that Tāmaki was “National Party heartland”.
Read more:
The battle for Tāmaki: how a ‘safe’ seat became a live contest
PM warns against strategic voting at ‘posh’ launch of Tāmaki election bid
‘I rang Luxon’: James Christmas on his jump from National to ACT
Harris, speaking to The Post from a cafe in Glen Innes, says it’s too early to know how the votes will fall - but argues that it’s actually a three-horse race. However, he won’t say he’s going to win.
“I think what we're aiming to achieve is a historic result for Labour, and a result that people aren't expecting,” he said.
“I think the race is wide open, and I think it's exciting, and I think a lot will turn on how the next few weeks and months pan out. I think we’re building momentum.”
Harris is one of a handful of fresh faces on the Labour Party list, and one of the higher-profile new candidates. Beyond his work as a prominent lawyer - which has included successfully representing cases in the Supreme Court - his name has routinely cropped up across various media outlets as a commentator.
Last November, he argued in an opinion piece for The Post that the election of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election offered lessons for politicians around the world (Labour has since adopted a graphic design approach that has echoes of the Mamdani campaign).
Earlier in his career, Harris was a clerk for Chief Justice Sian Elias at the Supreme Court and a consultant in Helen Clark's office at the United Nations. His undergraduate degree was at Auckland University, but he earned his doctorate in constitutional law at Oxford.
Placed 29 on Labour’s list for the forthcoming election (which Harris claimed to be “pleasantly surprised” with), there’s likely a route to Parliament that does not involve securing the Tāmaki seat. But it’s no guarantee, and while he is planning to keep his day job until the election, Harris says he is working incredibly hard to campaign for Labour.
Asked whether he should already be treating the campaign like a fulltime job, Harris said he didn’t want to let any of his clients down.
“I will keep ramping up visibility, and I hope people are seeing me about, but there's always more to do, and I also think that my legal work is important as a sign of the kind of advocacy I do for people,” he said.
“Some of that legal work is for people in this electorate that I'm doing up until the election, and I don't like letting people down. If I'm engaged for an important court date, I want to represent people, and I want to win for people.
“I'm serious about my legal work. It's not something I just do on the side.”
In contrast to his National and ACT competitors, who have campaign bases in the wealthy St Heliers area, Harris’s hub is smack bang in the middle of Glen Innes. On one side of his office is a fish and chip shop, on the other there’s a vape store. A neighbouring Salvation Army Family Store was receiving a truck load of donations when The Post arrived, and the store was busy.
Tāmaki, though often viewed as being mainly a collection of up-market coastal suburbs, is actually incredibly diverse. Along with Glen Innes, it includes areas like Glendowie, St Johns, Stonefields and, due to a boundary change this election, Point England. Some of these locations have favoured Labour in the past.
Harris, who admits to living just outside the electorate boundary, said he had long-standing connections with Glen Innes and it was intentional to base himself in the area.
“I have had a lot to do this area, and I’m especially fond of Glen Innes and the pride that's in this community.”
He says he is campaigning across the electorate, including in the potentially more National-friendly areas.
“We have done door knocking outside of this area, and I've been doing lots of events in other places, and one of the aims of the campaign is to really boost visibility across the electorate,” he said.
Admitting it was “maybe a bit cheesy”, Harris said that as a frequent user of the Tāmaki link bus route, he liked to think of himself as a “Tāmaki link that holds together all parts of the electorate”.
He added: “There's a worry about people living in different worlds within the electorate. I'm committed to all parts of the electorate.”
Harris has previously positioned himself as a values-driven campaigner and activist. In 2017, he criticised then-prime minister Sir Bill English for being “too timid” and politics as a whole for lacking in ambition.
Does Labour under Chris Hipkins, a party that has faced criticism for tinkering around the centre of politics, offer a bold vision for the future? Harris argues that it does.
“I think there's a lot of aspiration among the membership, and I think there's a lot of aspiration within the caucus and the leadership. I think the policies that have been announced so far reflect a commitment to universalism. It's a bold, important commitment.”
On universalism, Harris said he strongly advocated for it.
“I think if you means test and target these services, it's so much easier to whittle them away over time and I see that in legal aid every day. I'm a lawyer, I see that in welfare, and I think it's actually really important that we have that universal buy-in to ensure we defend those services over time.”
Policies so far announced by Labour include a public transport cap, free maternity scans, free cervical cancer screening and three free GP visits.
“Those are all universal policies, and I think reclaiming that ideal is actually quite a bold step in saying that we want everyone to be lifted up and everyone to benefit,” Harris said.
“When the middle class benefit, we're more likely to defend these services, and people are more likely to defend these services as a community. I think that is why we still have universal education, and mostly universal healthcare, and universal super. So, I actually think there's a boldness in those policies that people are responding to.”
The capital gains tax policy, covering residential and commercial property but excluding the family home and farms, was seen by some as a more cautious policy than previous attempts by Labour at changes to the country’s tax system.
Harris supported those settings and argued that announcing it early in the campaign may help normalise it and make it into something not seen as “controversial”.
“I think that is a strong move, and a deliberate move. So, yeah, I think we can throw up our hands and say ‘we need to diversify our economy, we need to upgrade our economy’ and continue to talk about it for years, but if we don't start somewhere in trying to build a different kind of economy, we'll just continue the way we've been.”