Having a mayor? Why we need our local leaders to take a stand

It’s done and dusted.

The recounts have been finalised. The inaugurations have been held, complete with fancy robes and oaths and sandwiches after. New mayors and councillors have found their places at big tables across the motu. There’s much to celebrate, and yet I wish I could unsee much of 2025 - the first local government campaign I’ve been deeply involved in. Holy moly.

Don’t get me wrong: there are brilliant people on councils. It’s just that there are some shockers too - from the outgoing Kaipara mayor styling himself the ‘Trump of the north’ and banning karakia, to the outgoing Invercargill mayor using the N word, casting homophobic slurs, and mocking the appearance of a woman hosting an event he attended.1 And the batshit behaviour isn’t just from elected representatives. It’s directed at them too. This stuff’s happening all around the motu.

But if batshit is a contest, the Wellington region is definitely striving for the tiara. I could offer you plenty of dispiriting examples, but here are just a few.

We’ll start in Upper Hutt, my hometown. It’s a long and ongoing story, and I wrote about a chapter of it earlier, but the last few years have seen a targeting of local people who’ve run against Wayne Guppy, the city’s outgoing mayor and patron of various local organisations. I was so troubled by it I emailed Guppy twice, urging him to take a stand against the behaviour. I never heard back.2

Down the road, continuing the friendly rivalry between our cities, Lower Hutt is not to be outdone.3 Over years, outgoing mayor Campbell Barry has been subjected to sustained and disturbing attention by political opponents - one of whom, a well-known local figure named Mark Crofskey, involved himself in a very personal situation faced by the Barry family, causing them distress. Crofskey ran for National in the 2020 general election, and is also on the board of KidsCan, an organisation that supports vulnerable families.

Barry’s situation went all the way to court. Just last month, the media reported that Chris Milne, previously a Hutt City councillor who’d left following a code of conduct investigation, had a court order made against him under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. The order required the naming of Milne, who’d been behind an anonymously-run Facebook page targeting the Barry family with false information and threatening language, and publishing information provided to Milne about the family’s personal situation. Joining Milne in court was a ‘second defendant’ - someone probably relieved to be unnamed for his sake of his professional reputation. He’d gotten more privacy than the Barry family.

We can agree this is nuts, but down the road a little further, Wellington city was murmuring, ‘Hold my craft beer’.

In Wellington, there’s been a well-publicised, vicious campaign against Tory Whanau, Wellington’s outgoing mayor. Things arguably hit a nadir when it was revealed that Ray Chung, a sitting councillor running for both mayor and council, had emailed his council colleagues about Whanau’s ‘pendulous soft breasts’. This didn’t go well for Chung. He even got rubbished on The Platform for doing what was thought to be impossible: failing to meet Sean Plunket’s ethical standards.

But has any of this held Chung back? Not really. He was re-elected onto council, if not to mayor, and incoming Wellington mayor Andrew Little has announced him as the chair of council subcommittee.4

Emily Writes has called on her readers to email Little with their disgust at the appointment - and the lady’s got a point.5 If there’s one thing our experience in the Wellington region shows, it’s this: more often than not, there’s no career penalty for harassment or misogyny or racism. In fact, there’s no penalty at all. Behaviour that would get you or I ostracised or sacked is simply tolerated - to the extent that calling a spade a spade, like I’m doing right now, is more of a social faux pas than the behaviour itself.

At the same time, frustrated Wellingtonians expect their incoming mayor to get the city’s house in order. Whatever the cause of the council’s disorder, people are fed up, and they want their new mayor to just get on with it and make his council work. Andrew Little has to figure out how to play the hand he’s been dealt, and at the end of the day, every pack of cards has its jokers. I get it, but it’s galling - especially seeing Chung, who helped destabilise the previous council, rewarded for his efforts in the name of restoring stability.

How did we get to this place?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is just about individuals or particular regions: we have problems with local government as a democratic institution. In theory, voting should be all the checks and balances we need, rewarding the sensible people and kicking out the plonkers. In reality, that doesn’t happen. There are lots of reasons why, but some of the less-traversed ones are:

• Mayors have limited ability to influence councillors who don’t want to work collaboratively or uphold ethical standards.
• Because political parties aren’t all that involved in local government (something that has both pros and cons), there’s no other discipline over councillors who want to roam all over the place like free range hens.
• It’s hard for the public to see when councillors aren’t doing their jobs properly, because there’s no equivalent to question time in Parliament - and less media scrutiny, thanks to the hollowing out of local journalism.
• Critically, members of the public - including the batshit ones - have almost unfettered access to councillors and candidates for council. This is paired with much weaker protections against harassment, misogyny and racism than MPs receive (even though MPs themselves are insufficiently protected). It allows harassers to sow chaos - sometimes as part of concerted political campaigns.

I don’t want to labour this last point, because I don’t want to put people off standing for council, but nor can we ignore it. Someone’s going to get hurt - even more than the considerable hurt already being done. Last year, a former Nelson mayor came home to find an angry man with a nail gun inside her house.6 The incident was defused without further harm, but the next incident of its type may not be.

What can be done?

Currently, the Government is working on codes of conduct for mayors and councillors.7 These will provide formal, more visible avenues for complaints against those who act unethically or simply don’t do their jobs. Codes of conduct come with a certain risk, in that they could be weaponised by batshit people to further harass local government figures, but on the whole, they’re a step in the right direction - recognising that voting simply doesn’t provide enough checks and balances over councils.

But action by central government isn’t enough. We need local leaders to take a stand. More specifically, we need to hear from, ahem, middle-of-the-road men. I’m not singling out Andrew Little, or anyone else - Little’s a skilled and experienced leader who clearly ran an effective campaign. But I am saying he belongs to a fortunate demographic.

The thing is, middle-of-the-road men benefit from the batshit. They don’t need to take part in it or even condone it. Staying quiet about it is enough.

That’s because there’s something perverse happening in our politics, especially at local level. Mayors, councillors and candidates who are seen as ‘diverse’ - often women, Māori and rainbow folks - get far more harassment than others. The harassment takes a psychological toll, but we tell the ones paying the price to suck it up: if they can’t handle it, it’s a sign that people ‘like that’ aren’t cut out for politics.

And the harassment affects people’s ability to do their jobs. Rumours circulate. Collaboration halts, and pettiness takes its place. Nasty alliances form. Emails about colleagues’ breasts are sent, for God’s sake - but ‘professionalism’ demands the victim say nothing, or she’ll be judged more harshly than the email’s sender. ‘Diversity’ becomes a kind of shorthand for chaos, no matter who the chaos was sown by. And after enough chaos, or even just the appearance of it, it feels like a relief to put a middle-of-the-road man back in charge. We breathe out again.

What else could be done differently?

Well, people with a track record of behaving badly need to pay a career penalty. That means being made to sit outside council chambers, boardrooms, and other halls of power until they pull their heads it. And it means redefining our concept of ‘professionalism’ so it stops tiptoeing around behaviour that’s seldom tolerated from anyone except men in power. So long as people with track records get roles just to keep the peace, it will encourage them to wield the threat of chaos. ‘Diverse’ folks will pay the price.

And leaders like Andrew Little need to be unequivocal. Start today. Use the power that comes with your demographic. Set explicit ethical and professional standards, and ask your councillors to sign up to them. Then hold them to account. Expect them to explicitly report to you on how they’re meeting your standards, and make those reports public. Award addition roles, like chair positions on committees, conditional on those standards.

Stand up for all the diverse people who voted for you. You may have been dealt a mixed hand, but you’re still holding all the cards.

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