New Zealand By-elections (next event: Botany [before 8th December 2018])

[Mazda]

Plagiarising the Canadian thread.

Parliamentary by-elections in New Zealand are pretty rare: partly because we have general elections every three years; partly because we've historically had a Parliament of c.120 members, usually much fewer; and partly because for the last 20 years, we've operated under MMP, which means that we only have 71 electorate seats. The last by-election was the Northland battle of 2015, in which NZ First leader and Question Time entertainer Winston Peters came from nowhere to win the seat off National.

The current by-election is in Mount Roskill, an electorate on the Auckland isthmus which very geographically compact. It also has one of the highest foreign-born populations of any electorate: only 49% are NZ-born, and the Asian population is 39%. It's a predominantly working class/lower-middle area, stretching from well-heeled Onehunga in the East to slightly rougher areas in the West and South, with crime rates in the area going through the roof (and legging it down the street).

As you would expect from this write-up, it is a traditionally Labour electorate, with the preceding seat going Labour in 1957 and remaining so up to now, apart from the exciting years of 1990-93, in which a National MP was elected and subsequently jumped between various parties four times in three years. He was not re-elected. The MP since then (and from 1981-1990) was Phil Goff, a successful politician who was rarely out of Cabinet or ShadCab who also managed to be a strong electorate MP and an all-round good egg. He stepped down from Parliament in October when he was elected Mayor of Auckland - as Auckland contains about a quarter of the country's population, this is a considerable step up from living out his days in seemingly-perpetual Opposition.

But in recent years, Mount Roskill has drifted to the right, as immigrant populations become more established. While Phil Goff won the electorate vote in 2014 with 55% of the vote, Labour only won 35% of the Party vote in the seat - meanwhile, National won 42%. It would be fair to say that Mount Roskill isn't so much a Labour seat as a Phil seat.

I'll give a brief run-down of the issues and events of the campaign, but this comes with a health warning - I'm a Labour member and have been pretty closely involved with the campaign on that side.

So Labour are standing Michael Wood, who's been in local government in the area for two terms and is well-practiced at campaigning: in fact, he's stood in every general election since 2008 and the Botany by-election of 2011, and hasn't yet been successful (although he's come close a couple of times). National, meanwhile, are standing Parmjeet Parmar, who is more demographically acceptable for the electorate and is already a List MP - on the plus side for her, this means that she can point to her track record and put "Working For Mount Roskill" on all her election hoardings. Unfortunately for her, that track record is not particularly stellar. She hasn't really made a name for herself and has pissed a lot of people off by trying to preside over Citizenship ceremonies in the electorate - not only is this blatant electioneering, but it is also Not Allowed, because you can only preside if you're an electorate MP or an elected local government personage.

The main issues are crime, housing and transport, with transport being the one both sides are pushing. Labour have proposed fast-tracking a light rail system between the electorate and the CBD, with the potential to extend it to the airport (which is all but inaccessible by public transport at the moment). Parmar's response to this was to propose that we "build more bus stops". The existing bus network will be at capacity in 2020, by the way.

Another major event in the campaign was a debate a few weeks ago, in which Parmar's husband heckled Michael Wood while he was speaking - this included several horrible comments about Michael's wife, and after the debate there was a bit of a fracas between the two. Mr Parmar claimed in the press that he had been manhandled by Michael, but nobody listened to him, and shortly afterwards, the level of pro-Nat online abuse directed at Michael 'mysteriously' reduced. I am saying nothing.

Advance voting started on 21 Nov, and E-day is 3 Dec. We are expecting to win, but we would say that wouldn't we.

[Mazda]

Tell me about this fellow who changed parties four times?

That was the, er.. incomparable... Gilbert Myles, and it wasn't entirely his fault.

You see, the Labour Government of 1984-1990 was very keen on neoliberalism and privatisation and destroying the welfare state, while National had traditionally been relatively happy to leave all that stuff alone. So Gilbert stood in Roskill in 1990 on a platform of returning NZ to the good old days of being "the only planned economy in the OECD", which was fairly typical in the National Party at that point, and was a major plank of their election campaign.

Unfortunately, when they got into power in 1990, they went even further than Labour had (their economic policy was popularly known as 'Ruthanasia' after their Minister of Finance, Ruth Richardson) and this annoyed a few One Nationers in their ranks, such as Winston Peters and a few others. This was also an era when the pressure to change the electoral system was mounting, which led to a number of opportunistic people starting new Third Parties to take advantage of the multi-party future.

Myles and another MP, Hamish Macintyre, went Independent in 1991. The following year, they established the Liberal Party together in the hope of attracting a few more prominent Nats - they were both first-term backbenchers. This didn't work, because when Winston Peters left the party, he formed his own NZ First outfit, leaving Myles high and dry.

Now, this Liberal Party was not exactly capturing the public imagination, so in 1993, Myles and Macintyre affiliated the Party to the Alliance - a group of vaguely anti-neoliberal parties with a range of political views, from ex-Labour malcontents to Greens to Maori rights activists to Social Credit wackjobs. Myles was not happy at all in this alliance, which was far too left-wing for him, and shortly afterwards he defected again to NZ First, following Winston.

This was just in time for the 1993 election, at which he was never particularly favoured to keep the seat, and all hope was quashed at a debate which took place at a yachting club, where Myles opened with a joke about the advanced ages of the club members. This went down very badly indeed and Myles never regained confidence throughout the campaign, losing by quite a margin to Phil Goff.

Anyway, he was on the NZ First List in 1996 and entered Parliament in 1999 after a resignation from someone above him on the List. Almost immediately, a tape was leaked which revealed that he'd promised to defect from NZ First to the struggling National Party to bolster their minority Government, but people were wise to him now and Peters basically physically threatened him into staying in the Party - at least until the election several months later.

He was investigated for fraud in 2011 and convicted of obstruction of justice, which caused much mirth in the political scene.

So: National->Independent->Liberal->Alliance->NZ First and then an attempted ratting from NZ First back to National.

[Mazda]

In addition to the fracas between the Labour candidate and the husband of the National candidate, news broke this evening that a group of men were hooning around in the National campaign car and accosted a by-stander, shouting "We're Parmjeet's boys!". This resulted in the by-stander having a horseshoe thrown at him, which was subsequently 'lost' by the police.

Suspicion falls on Ms Parmar's nephew, allegedly.

[Mazda]

NZ First sitting this round out?

Yes, they're saving money for 2017 - and Auckland isn't their strongest region, of course. John Key put about that Winston was only standing aside to help Labour, but that's the first we heard of it.

The Greens are also standing aside, endorsing Labour, and we've had a few Greens doorknocking for us. The minor party candidates this time round are very minor indeed, and the only one with a chance of getting more than a thousand votes is Roshan Nauhria. He's a local businessman who's promising to spend his entire personal fortune on providing free school meals in Mt Roskill, and he's also promising to halve crime within 5 years and a few other things. Not well-costed at all, but he's got some hoarding out, and he's prominent in the Indian community - almost every vote he wins will be a vote denied to National.

[Mazda]

Assuming NZ First are the kingmakers next election, are they more likely to prop up Key as PM or will they form some sort of surreal Lab-Green-Winston government? (I assume adding Maori-Mana to that coalition would be, err, too much). Also, is this Gareth Morgan bloke going to be a sub-threshold spoiler, a flame-out or could he enter parliament?

EDIT:

Also, welcome to the forum!

Thank you!

It does indeed look as if NZ First will be kingmakers, although I wouldn't rule out a continued Nat-minnows coalition since the election is likely to be held in the Winter (for reasons I'd prefer not to go into). Winston will go with whoever concedes most to his platform and, more importantly, his ego.

Maori are pretty much reduced to Nat stooges now, and I don't think even their emergent deal with Mana will change that. But they are definitely taking all the electorates seriously, and I wouldn't rule out a gain if a candidate has more mana than their Labour opponent. The Maori Party do not canvass at all, though, which probably limits their effectiveness. If Hone Harawira gets back in, there's a possibility that he'd vote confidence and supply with a Labour Government, but there's a lot of Ifs there.

Gareth Morgan will probably make it to the election and no further. He's already utterly disappeared from the news, which is a bad sign for him - the Internet Party and the Conservatives had a couple of stories a week back in 2014, not many of them positive. The question is how much of a spoiler he will constitute, and who he will spoil. My suspicions are 'not much' and 'everyone' for those questions, but  it might be too early in the game.

[Mazda]

Not the most unbiased article, but it does have a poll hidden inside.

Also, welcome to the Forum! It's always nice to have someone else interested in NZ's elections.

The Spinoff is one of the best things in the NZ media world (soon to be nearly as monopolised as the Chinese media). I think Simon's been a bit naughty here, though: we were planning to keep that poll extremely internal in order to prevent voter complacency.

Andrew Little was in the electorate yesterday, along with about 10 MPs and the standard 100+ Saturday volunteers. The only big hitters Parmjeet has had campaigning for her are John Key and Hekia Parata, which shows a lack of confidence in their camp. But we'll see what happens on the day - advance voting looks to be on a broadly similar level to the general election.

[Mazda]

Update: A story has broken in the media about the next person on the National Party list, who will enter Parliament if Parmjeet Parmar (currently a List MP) wins the by-election. This person is a rather extreme sort of Christian, who claims that "Donald Trump has been appointed by God".

Prime Minister John Key defended her, and claimed that this story was only breaking because Labour are panicking about losing the by-election - going on to attempt to lower expectations for his own Party performance.

We ran into the Nat campaign this evening, and there were about twice as many of us as there are of them, so I'm not unduly worried about losing the seat.

Less than 48 hours until polls close.

[Mazda]

Just got back from the party. Much ebullience.

Mount Roskill by-election, 2016

Michael Wood (Labour) - 11170 (66.3%) +10.5%
Parmjeet Parmar (National) - 4652 (27.6%) -4.0%
Roshan Nauhria (People's Party) - 709 (4.2%)
Andrew Leitch (Democrats for Social Credit - 125 (0.7%)
Brandon Stronge (Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party) - 79 (0.5%)
Richard Goode (Not A Party) - 40 (0.2%)
Tua Schuster (Independent) - 32 (0.2%)

[Mazda]

Excellent news! What is the People's Party? That's a good result for a group I've never heard of. Is it a one hit wonder for this by-election or are they going to stick around?

Party for immigrants, mainly Indians, focusing on crime. The founder-leader, who stood in this by-election, promised to spend his entire MP salary on free school meals for Mt Roskill kids. The sums didn't work, of course.

I have a feeling he'll last, at least until the next election, but after that, it'll disappear due to lack of support and lack of cash. Nauhria has previously been a member of Labour and National, leaving both after being passed over for selection.

[Mazda]

Great that Michael Wood is a committed Anglican.

Funny you should say that - I phonebanked an elderly lady during the campaign who asked me whether Michael had 'Christian values'. My explanation that he was a churchgoing Anglican seemed to disappoint her, because "all the most evil people in the world go to Church - I'm asking whether he has Christian values."

At that point, I put her on speakerphone. The office was filled with hilarity for the next five minutes.

[Mazda]

Bill English, who was sworn in as PM today, has ruled out an early election:

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This means that Shearer's departure will trigger a by-election, probably to be held early in 2017.

[Mazda]

National isn't running a candidate.

Jacinda Ardern is the Labour candidate. This should be a shoo-in for her. Her opponents are Penny Bright (Indep; ran for mayor in 2016 and got 1.77%), Joe Carolan (Socialist Aotearoa), Julie Anne Genter (Green; currently a List MP too), and Vin Tomar (People's Party; this party got about 4% in the Mount Roslill by-election last year).

Someone who knows NZ better than me can correct me, but I'm pretty sure that if Ardern is elected, Maryan Street will take Ardern's place from the list. Street was in Parliament from 2005-2014.

Edit: I should've mentioned that the by-election will be on February 25, 2017.

Yes, it'll be Maryan - she's next on the List and she wants to get back in.

We in Labour don't expect any serious contest, obviously, although Julie Anne is making a fair go of it. We're still putting a bit of effort in so as to keep the machine well-oiled, though.

The electorate covers some very expensive areas in terms of house prices, so housing is a major theme.

[Mazda]

Since the change in leadership in the National Party, a few of the old guard have sought more gainful means of employment - Bill English himself took early retirement, and former 'Minister of Everything' Steven Joyce followed close on his heels, having never been in Opposition before. Both of these were List MPs, but today, former Health Minister Jonathan Coleman resigned to take up a CEO position with a private health provider.

Coleman was loathed by much of the left for his conduct in the Health portfolio, which included neglecting mental health, contracting meals out to nefarious and incompetent private companies and describing the idea of providing free gender reassignment surgery as "nutty".

In any case, this prompts a by-election in the Northcote electorate just months after the general election. The electorate is on the genteel North Shore, but went Labour twice under Helen Clark and has a historic working class history around Hillcrest, Beachaven and the Chelsea sugar factory. However, since those days, that community has been replaced to a large extent with people who commute into the CBD, and the profile of the seat is very much a case of two-parent families of educated professionals who have no use for public transport and moan about traffic on the Harbour Bridge. There is also a high population of Asian people (in an NZ context, this means East Asian), who are also very much in the National camp at the moment.

So it's very much National's to lose - Coleman didn't have a huge personal vote, but the National party vote has been consistently around 50% for the last four elections. For Labour to win would require a strong local candidate, a bad National candidate, and NZ First and the Greens to stand aside.

However, as Northcote Labour are notoriously Odd, the first of these is easier said than done.

[Mazda]

A potentially competitive by-election? Whoa! Count me in!

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http://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/24-02-2017/the-nailbiter-in-mt-albert-or-why-the-by-election-on-saturday-is-more-important-than-you-think/

This is hilarious in hindsight.

Yeah, back in the day when Jacinda was just a lowly list MP trying to get an electorate of her own. It's been a whirlwind of a year for her. Winning a by-election, becoming leader of Labour, increasing Labour's vote share by a huge amount, (eventually) forming a government, and she's going to have a kid in a few months.

A lowly List MP? She was the inevitable next leader of the party and a highly-ranked member of the Shadow Cabinet. And in the same term, Bill English (Finance then PM) and Andrew Little (LotO then Random Dude) were List MPs, so the electorate seat was really just a nice-to-have.

Although, yes, the rapidity of the leadership change and poll bounce was nerve-jangling.

[Mazda]

Thanks for reminding me of this thread! I've been in the electorate every weekend (last Sunday I thought I might escape, but ended up being magnetically pulled to a public meeting for the Democrats for Social Credit, at which I was one of twelve attendees).

The hoarding war is fairly even between National and Labour (neither of them look good - National's because of Bidois' stupid face, ours because of the weird size and the random orange-white-teal colour scheme), with Greens present on a fair number of private sites as well as Council sites. ACT cover most of the Council sites, as do the Democrats - but the latter only have tiny, awful ones, so they needn't have bothered. Naturally, judging anything from hoarding coverage is a fool's errand anyway. Particularly as there are a ton of civic-minded people who have agreed to have both National and Labour signs on their fences. I've even seen one National-Green fence.

Despite the half-hearted attempts from both sides to turn it into a referendum on Jacinda, and from the Greens to make it about poverty or something, it does seem that the main issue is the traffic down Onewa Road. I do not give a toss about this, tbh. Whenever I've been down that road, it hasn't seemed too bad, and whatever problems that exist at the moment mainly come from the fact that they're digging up most of the surrounding streets for various reasons. The traffic issue will basically resolve itself when the orange cones migrate to some other suburb. However, this hasn't stopped ACT's Stephen Berry from losing both of his voters by proposing a new motorway harbour crossing through Northcote's beloved green parks and, er, cemetery.

Because it's a by-election, there's been a lot of focus on the personalities of the candidates. Dan Bidois (National) has the better narrative, having flunked out of high school, taken a butcher's apprenticeship and ended up at Harvard, but he generally just seems to be a boyishly enthusiastic cookie-cutter Nat - and I've heard quite a lot of complaints on the doorstep about his recent move to the electorate. He is also heavily involved in the Wesleyan Church, a sect which split off from the Methodists because the latter thought gays were tolerable. Shanan Halbert (Labour), meanwhile, is seen to be weak, which is largely, but not entirely, a homophobia thing, but it has been drilled into me over the years that I probably shouldn't volubly accuse people of flagrant bigotry while door knocking. The #stronglocalvoice thing is working in the 'local' element, though.

In terms of actual data, the National internal poll had us 8% behind and our internal had us 2% behind. Which is all complete rubbish, but suffice to say that it's reasonably close. The advance vote data is interesting, though - so far, it's been consistently about double the advance vote turnout of the GE, and most of the highest increases are in places where we tend to do quite well. There's a few possible explanations:
- turnout is higher because of idk Simon Wilson doing a campaign diary in the Herald - wtf no, it's a by-election.
- Labour voters are turning out in droves because we've got a genuine chance at winning - Coleman's long dominance would have put a dampener on lefty turnout, to be sure, but you would have expected that these people would have turned out to give a party vote to Jacinda, if anything.
- Labour voters are turning out in droves because we're doorknocking them to death - the campaign is actually less active than Mount Roskill, I'd say, and I can believe the rumours that National are throwing the kitchen sink at this one.
- National voters in Labour areas are turning out due to desparation, having gleaned a very negative picture from general feeling in their own suburbs - there may be some truth in this.
- Turnout isn't actually higher, it's just that usually-on-the-day voters were getting it out the way before Queen's Birthday - probably explains the bulk of it.

So it would be nice to win (apart from the fact that Shanan would be an MP), but my feeling is that we'll just run it fairly close and improve our vote. I would have said that the Green vote would decline heavily, but Rebekah Jaung is a pleasant and articulate young woman who will get quite a lot of the (large) Asian vote. The main two candidates are Maori and Shanan is openly gay.

[Mazda]

Dan Bidois (National) - 10,147
Shanan Halbert (Labour) - 8,785
Rebekah Jaung (Green) - 579
Stephen Berry (ACT) - 157
Kym Koloni (Ind/One Nation) - 95
Jeff Lye (Cannabis) - 76
Tricia Cheel (Democrats for Social Credit) - 30
Liam Walsh (Not A Party) - 5

I saw a Kym Koloni leaflet in a letterbox on election day, randomly.

[Mazda]

We seem to be having these on the regular now.

I don't want to get too in-depth, but essentially, the National Party has spent this week setting fire to itself. The central figure is Opposition Chief Whip (well, until the start of the week) Jami-Lee Ross, who has been accused by Simon Bridges of leaking, and by the rest of the country as a bully and a sexual harasser. In return, he has accused Bridges of corrupt practices around donations and of making up sexual harassment accusations. Oh, and also it's diffused into this whole argument about the influence that the Chinese Communist Party has over the National Party. And this is without going into the drama about Bridges privately referring to one of his MPs as "f***** useless". The MP in question (who, to be fair, is quite useless), publicly backed Bridges and basically admitted that he had a point, but hilariously, her mum then came out and told Bridges to "go suck eggs".

So it's been a fun week for NZ Politics, but the main upshot is that Jami-Lee Ross has resigned his seat and is re-contesting as an Independent. There seemed to be some local support for him, but then the harassment accusations came out and that died down considerably. The National candidate will definitely win (my money's on Katrina Bungard, a local board member in the area, being selected - she was one of Ross' victims), but there might be some entertainment on offer. The only other candidate yet announced (at this very early stage) is Eliot Ikilei of the tiny New Conservative party and Labour are discussing whether to stand a candidate or just gaze at the chaos in horrified bemusement.

[Mazda]

Well, not quite that regularly, it seems: Jami-Lee Ross now says that he can't stand in a by-election while National are flinging dirt at him, in an interview in which he flung yet more dirt at the National Party.

He's therefore not handing in his resignation from Parliament and wants to continue throwing dirt with the benefit of a parliamentary salary and a platform from which to fling. It's unclear whether he'll genuinely get to stay until the election, though, as there's a good chance that National will get him kicked out under the anti-defection law they voted against a couple of weeks ago. He could also be convicted of a crime holding a 2-year sentence.

[Mazda]

This whole thing is hilarious. Have you seen any good comprehensive articles on this? I missed the first few days of the Ross Revolt.

That would be really hilarious if Bridges used the Waka-Jumping bill against Ross. I don’t really like the idea of using it against electorate MPs though.

This is a comprehensive list of everything that's happened, while https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-10-2018/the-uniquely-damaging-betrayals-of-jami-lee-ross/ is less comprehensive but is at least basically up-to-date. Newsroom have /url] [url=been]https://www.newsroom.co.nz/@politics/2018/10/16/279660/zhang-yikun-and-the-alleged-100k-donation https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2018/10/19/284377/death-by-1000-cuts-working-for-jami-lee-ross.

The latest news is that Jami-Lee was sectioned yesterday with help from the police, and this sets in train a process by which he can be ejected from Parliament without invoking Waka-jumping. It isn't clear whether the Nats organised his sectioning or not, but to be fair, he's probably been under a fair amount of stress this week.