You think convicted drink driver Adam Holland sounds like an arsehole? It gets worse. Janie Cameron explains.

Self-described “anarchist” and Auckland mayoral candidate Adam Holland has been convicted of driving at five times the blood alcohol limit after he rear-ended a stationary car with a mother and two young children inside, TVNZ reported yesterday.

“Everybody has a DIC charge these days … the limit is absolutely pathetic. Only a lightweight can’t handle 400 [mcg of alcohol per litre of breath],” wrote 25-year-old Holland on his Facebook page. The legal limit is 250mcg per litre.

He added: “I blew 1054 and felt fine – the crash wasn’t even my fault and if I could relive the events, I’d have acted in exactly the same way.”

Holland, who collected 1,772 votes in the recent mayoral election, was most notable in the campaign for showing up inebriated to a debate at the Auckland University students’ bar wearing Islamic dress and a painted face, yelling, “Allahu Akbar!”

The Spinoff contacted Holland in June, curious about this campaign from a self-styled Trump-a-like and – so he claims – the grandson of former prime minister Sidney Holland.

Was this a dark and brilliant satirical stunt, a breathtaking critique of contemporary politics? Or was he just an obnoxious bigot? We wanted to find out.

Our conclusion: he didn’t warrant the oxygen of publicity. It takes a special quality of character not to be qualified even as a joke candidate.

Now that the election is over, however, and in light of Holland’s interesting stance on his drink-driving conviction, Janie Cameron has dusted off the transcript. Did we do democracy a disservice by denying him the spotlight?

Adam Holland sounded like he was the one rear-ended when he picked up the phone on a Wednesday afternoon.

“I do apologise, I’m just pretty hungover right now,” he croaked, sounding anything but apologetic.

“I’m facing two charges in Auckland District Court for excess breath alcohol, but in fairness I felt fine, you know, I felt completely fine. Oh well, shit happens. I smashed into the back of this woman’s car and drove off.”

After a few minutes of incoherent ramble about court proceedings, the 25-year-old, who says he is the grandson of former prime minister Sidney Holland, told me he was “dead serious” about running for mayor.

He described his “campaign for cession” with a startling likeness to the beginning of Trump’s crusade. His only semblance of policy was to build a wall around Auckland to keep out non-residents and immigrants.

“There has to be quite a few state-funded jobs to get that wall built. [We] would like to see gates everywhere, tunnels, toll fees. We want it pretty secure, we want snipers along the border. That should get rid of some unemployment.”

Holland said his policies “absolutely” reflected those of Donald Trump.

“I like the idea of Trump getting in. I like his policies. He predicts all these attacks, like the one in Orlando … I think the media is pretty unfair on him.”

He wanted to slacken New Zealand’s gun laws too. In his promotional YouTube video (where he also quotes Hitler), Holland can be seen brandishing some kind of pistol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqtMiQSplGM

“I’m all for legalising [guns] under certain circumstances.”

He described himself as “absolutely” anti-Muslim and anti-Jew. (He used the word “absolutely” a lot).

“Possibly more anti-Jew than anti-Muslim I think.”

Holland’s immigration policy came in the form of the wall he wanted to build, which he said would solve Auckland’s housing crisis.

“If they’re from Syria, they just can’t live in Auckland … We don’t know who they are – they could just be anti-democracy, anti-west, you know?

Holland said his first move as mayor of Auckland would have been getting Penny Bright to pay her rates, “or she’s out”. He also planned to banish newly appointed mayor Phil Goff, and prime minister John Key from the city.

Holland said the motivation for his campaign was best described as “Auckland first”.

“We’re being ripped off by Wellington, we’ve been ripped off by Christchurch, we’ve just been ripped off all across the board for decades.

“Our tax money goes all the way down throughout the country. There’s disproportionate rates, our budget is always just ridiculously low. The whole city is going to hell.”

The diplomatic candidate said if the rest of the country didn’t fall in line, he would impose “absurd trade sanctions on them and just rip them off”.

“Auckland would become so rich that we could build a military just in case the rest of New Zealand wants to start pushing their weight around.”

Holland, who says he lives off a hefty inheritance from family overseas, said he’s been retired for “quite some time now”.

“I don’t know if I’m going to go back to work. I retired when I was 18 and I’ve just been fucking around ever since.”

Auckland councillors Penny Webster (Rodney) and Calum Penrose (Manurewa-Papakura) both crashed to shock defeats on Saturday. Their campaign manager Hamish Coleman-Ross says it wasn’t his fault – that his opponents stooped to a place his candidates refused to venture.

Losing sucks. But when you do, I believe it pays not to disappear into the night, nor to sit and lick your wounds claiming that you were hard done by. The results are what they are and in an election you must respect the decision of the people. I do so without ill feeling or regret. That said, post analysis is important and so I’d like to share my thoughts about the shock results on campaigns for which I was responsible.

In June I severed my links with the media world to take on the role of campaign manager for three sitting councillors seeking re-election: Calum Penrose, Penny Webster and Sir John Walker. Sir John, who has Parkinson’s Disease, needed to show voters that despite his illness he was still fit for the job. I produced a “hearts and minds” video and radio campaign so people could see and hear the man and know he was still fighting fit for the role. He was successfully re-elected on Saturday.

The other two were a little different, mainly because when it came to being councillors they were exceptionally good at their jobs. The strategy was simple: campaign on the results delivered. The list of achievements for these two was immense. Calum was responsible for taking 158 bylaws from all the amalgamated councils and simplifying them down to 20. The stand out was the “dangerous dogs” bylaw, supported by an amnesty wherein owners could have their dogs de-sexed, chipped, registered and even provided with a muzzle for a mere $25. The response was so successful that central government used it as a blueprint for its own nationwide “dangerous dog” law.

In July this year, the bylaws review programme Calum led was named supreme winner at the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand (IPANZ) awards. Other achievements included successfully advocating for laws to be changed so that police can now be present on trains and securing funding to have the Takanini interchange widened.

Penny also had big achievements on the transport front. She was able to secure the Matakana Link road to greatly assist the traffic flow around Warkworth and pushed for more money to seal roads – then delivered in the form of $10 million over three years, up from an original $1 million per year. She even found time to sort out badly designed roundabouts and get more funding for rural fire service, amongst many other issues big and small.

All of us on the Penrose/Webster team agreed that it was a matter of positively promoting their achievements as evidence that they were doing the job they were elected to do. We used all the platforms available to us – print, radio, digital – to promote their work, thinking that if they’d achieved that much then they would easily retain their positions.

We were very, very wrong.

Our opponents focused their campaign on rates rises and the location of the spending. For Greg Sayers in Rodney the catchcry was “bring your rates home”, alluding to the argument that rates were being siphoned off and spent on central city projects such as at the Central Rail Link. In Papakura/Manurewa Daniel Newman campaigned with an “oppose 9.9% rate increases” slogan.

In both instances the evidence was without question in our favour. In Rodney under Penny Webster, all the rates raised had been spent in the area – and then even more again for water and transport projects. As for the 9.9% rate increase, it could be interpreted as true for Auckland as a whole, but not in the case of Manurewa/Papakura. And so we set about promoting the falsity of the allegations. We didn’t get nasty, we never made it personal; we just got on with telling the truth. But it wasn’t what people wanted to hear.

I knew that we were up against more than just our opponents at a public debate hosted at the Omaha Golf Club. As the event began I sensed an air of hostility that hadn’t been present at previous meetings – I was told later that many attendees had come from outside the community. The MC for the evening opened with a story about the uselessness of Council, setting the tone for an evening of Council bashing.

By default, Penny Webster ended up as the fall gal for the perceived failings of an entire organisation. When she tried to tell the truth about staff spending and the announcement of the Matakana link road people yelled back “Liar!” and “Lies! Lies!” at the top of their lungs. It struck me right then that nothing we said – or disproved – was going to have any currency. Creating a narrative about secret budgets, closed door deals and a deceptive Council was a much better story and people were more than willing to buy into it. Penny lost the debate and her opponent was awarded with a Trump-referencing hat that read “Make Rodney Great Again”.

The truth about Council spending, staff numbers and debt is actually quite positive. There’s a reason the organisation has an AA+ credit rating and you would think that would be enough to convince people, but it’s not. Most people’s understanding of Auckland Council comes from the Herald, which regularly paints a picture of an organisation that’s out of control and gone wild with overspending. It’s not a bad yarn, insomuch as there must be a hero to come slay this grisly beast. Save us all, Goff-man!

The lessons to be learned here are twofold. Firstly, Auckland Council do not communicate their achievements in an effective manner and their relationship with community media is poor to non-existent. Secondly, the strong anti-Council sentiment has been fuelled by the inability of leadership to rally the troops and get strong public buy-in on the city’s many projects. This may change with a new mayor who has campaigned on changing the culture of Council, but the election also illustrated bigger challenges that all politicians now face.

Worldwide, we’ve entered an era of “post-truth politics”, and it seems that local government is not immune. The campaigns of Penny Webster and Calum Penrose were neither lazy or underfunded but they told a story that people didn’t want to hear. We certainly countered the accusations that were levelled at us but then that’s exactly what anyone would have expected. Had there been more independent analysis of the candidates by the media, the lies, half-truths and misinformation would have been exposed. But that didn’t happen.

As we look to the general election next year it is crucial that independent analysis of policies and performance is separated from conspiracy and rhetoric. The power of post-truth politics has reared its head in this local election and as a result two of the city’s hardest working and most results-driven councillors are now on the sidelines. Should we have attacked our opponents more directly? Maybe we should have made wild promises and pledged to dangle the CEO from the top of the Auckland Council tower until he coughed up those secret budgets. But no, we stuck to the facts.

It might be naive to think that the truth will win out, but it’s something I deeply believe. In coming to terms with the result, all the candidates I represented say they wouldn’t have changed a thing about the way they campaigned. They depart council politics with their reputations fully intact.