The anonymous leaflets are designed to hurt Tamatha Paul’s chances of re-election, but so far they’re backfiring, she says. 

With local elections just weeks away, a Wellington councillor has found herself targeted in flyers featuring her photograph and an assemblage of attributed quotes in a variety of typefaces. Tamatha Paul, who is seeking re-election in the Pukehīnau Lambton Ward, said she believes she knows who is responsible for the leaflets, which include no mention of authorship but announce they will be distributed across the ward during the campaign. 

Paul said a man, believed to be the individual accused of defacing candidate hoardings in 2019, handed one of the flyers to her after a debate on Tuesday night. He promised that it would be delivered to every home in her ward, before walking away, she said. 

The flyer extracts remarks by and about Paul – a Green Party candidate who was elected as an independent to council in 2019 at just 22 years old – from media reports between March and September 2021, on subjects including housing, gangs and the work culture at Wellington City Council, together with a screenshot of a since deleted tweet about “absolute knobs” making public submissions. 

The footer reads: “To be placed in letterboxes in Lambton Ward early to late September 2022”.

Election rules require candidates to identify themselves or their agents on advertising materials, but there is nothing to suggest the leaflets are linked to anyone standing for election.

“When I first read it, I thought that these are things that I’ve said, what’s the problem?” Paul told The Spinoff. But the use of an anonymous flyer to challenge her position on housing intensification in this way amounted to “typical, pathetic intimidation tactics”, she said. “It just motivates me even more to speak up. It has the total opposite effect … They’re going to have to try a lot harder than this to put me off speaking out.” 

That extended to the sentiments among constituents she’d spoken to in recent days. “The feedback I’ve had so far is that people will be going out of their way to support me now due to this flyer,” she said. “It’s probably refreshing for people to see a politician that doesn’t sit on the fence on these important issues, who makes it clear where they stand on these issues.”

The targeting of her use of language revealed a snobbish attitude to the fact she talked like a “real person”, she said. “I’m not going to apologise for the way that I speak. People understand the way I talk and they resonate with it. I’m not sure why people are surprised – that’s what you get when you elect a young person who speaks their mind and doesn’t beat around the bush on really important issues.” 

Councils had become “dominated by people who have this inflated sense of privilege”, said Paul. “That’s been disrupted all over the country and they don’t like it.”