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Geoff Taylor: ‘I get up in the morning thinking about the river project, honestly.’ Image: Archi Banal
Geoff Taylor: ‘I get up in the morning thinking about the river project, honestly.’ Image: Archi Banal

Local Elections 2022September 19, 2022

The man in the purple shirt says he can turn Hamilton around

Geoff Taylor: ‘I get up in the morning thinking about the river project, honestly.’ Image: Archi Banal
Geoff Taylor: ‘I get up in the morning thinking about the river project, honestly.’ Image: Archi Banal

A former Waikato Times journalist and a failed Mills & Boon novelist, Geoff Taylor wants to move from deputy to mayor of Hamilton. Aimie Cronin quizzes him over coffee.

Geoff Taylor’s mug seems to be looking out from every street corner in Hamilton. The deputy mayor arguably had no ambition to run for the mayoralty in the upcoming local elections until a year ago, but he’s all in now. Like all candidates having to synopsise their campaign slogan with that single billboard pose because most Hamiltonians won’t bother to learn a single thing about them, he’s gone for a casual hand on the hip, a smile like he’s mid-conversation over a sausage at a barbecue, a snappy purple shirt that says I’m living my campaign slogan and Making Things Happen

On the corner of Clyde Street and Galloway in Hamilton East, Taylor’s face has been cut out by vandals, presumably being used for something lewd further up the road, but his purple shirt’s still there, popping. “The purple shirt!” he says. “It’s my favourite shirt!” He got it from Hallensteins. He likes to arrive at speaking engagements wearing the purple shirt in front of an image of himself on a large screen wearing his purple shirt and apparently, it’s become a bit of a joke where people yell out: “Ahhh! The purple shirt!” He seems happy. 

I worked with Geoff Taylor at the Waikato Times. He started his career there in 1999 as a 34-year-old political reporter and says it turned him into a “nasty little man”. He went on to cover various other rounds that restored his humanity and was deputy editor when I met him as a newly trained journalist in 2011. There was nothing nasty about him then. When he left the Times in 2014, I asked him if he was going to try and become mayor one day, he was just that guy: charismatic, approachable, a bit slippery. You could imagine him exploding into laughter at a dirty joke behind closed doors. He laughed off my prediction as they always do and said he was thinking about becoming a teacher. 

“I knew it!” I tell him as we sit down for coffee eight years later. He says when he and his wife Julie, a nurse, did the budget for teachers college and the subsequent beginning teacher wage, they found they couldn’t afford it. So he started a business with his good friend Richard Walker called Long River Press writing memoirs and books about businesses and joined council in 2016. I remembered that he was also writing romance novels at night when he got home from his day job at the Times, trying to get published by Mills & Boon.

“I sent one off and it didn’t get published,” he says. “It’s really hard to get published, especially for a man. I put too much sex in it, like, man sex, it was probably the end of me.”

I tell him that I have tried reading Mills & Boon to get me to sleep at night and usually end up tossing them across the room. 

“I love them,” he whispers. 

“All of the women are virgins!” I say. “I read them yelling, ‘Why can’t any of them have had sex?’”

“I don’t recall that,” he says. “It escaped me somehow.”

He says he made his wife read his drafts. “She was very kind, you know, she didn’t say they were shit. I got her to help me with the sex scenes. I said, ‘What would a woman want, because I have no idea.’”

“I hope it wasn’t the first time you were asking that,” I say. He explodes into laughter, clapping his hands as if to say, you got me. 

“It’s not just romance,” he says, “I want to write heaps of other books, once this turns to custard.”

Another photo shoot, the same purple shirt. (Photo: Andrew McRae / RNZ)

Why is Geoff Taylor running for mayor? He likes his writing business and it seems to be doing well enough, topped up with his salary as a Hamilton City councillor. He has a spiel about Hamilton once having been “an ambitious, confident and growing city … we got to where we are by backing ourselves and getting shit done, by being independent and fearless.” He pauses for effect. “We’re not now. Which is why I’m standing, really. The last three years have felt like a government department that has to ask for permission from the office.” He lists the issues, many of them national: high-rises in the suburbs (he’s for them in the CBD, but no further afield), safety (he thinks we rely too much on police and need to increase our number of City Safe staff and get to know each other better with planned weekly barbeques on every street), Three Waters. 

His take on current mayor Paula Southgate’s handling of Three Waters is the linchpin of the Geoff Taylor mayoral sell: he’s pitching himself as the man who would have fought like hell against Three Waters and Southgate as the mayor who failed to take the hard line against the government each time she had the chance. After our coffee, he writes in an email: “For her to now suggest she never supported the Three Waters model is comical. The mayor sat on the fence for a year when our council could have been taking a strong position in leading the national debate. Her refusal to consult residents as I called for in August 2021 effectively locked the city’s residents out of the debate and backfired, because when the government produced the final legislation, residents were given only two weeks to have a say.” 

Southgate, in her first mayoral term and standing for re-election, says she has always had concerns about Three Waters and has repeatedly pushed back against the government, unsuccessfully. Her approach is collaborative, that’s what she’s about. Taylor says she should have taken a stronger stand. “Flex your muscles! Show a bit of frontier spirit!”, he says at one point. He says Southgate should have rallied other cities to join forces (she says she tried), “now it’s going to be really hard and the only thing that is going to turn it around is a National-led government repealing it if they’ve got the courage”. Taylor says he will vote National in the next elections.

Opposition to Three Waters is a major plank of Taylor’s policy agenda (Photo: Supplied)

Taylor wants to tell me about the other component to his Making Things Happen campaign and that’s turning the city to face the river. He sees it as council’s role to enable developers to get on and make things happen down there: apartments, commercial space, a regional theatre, a sports hub and a pedestrian bridge. “If I get elected, we won’t recognise the waterfront in five years.” I can tell he likes these dramatic one-liners, maybe it’s the writer in him, maybe it’s the politician. I smile suspiciously at one point. “I truly believe in everything I’m doing on council. I get up in the morning thinking about the river project, honestly.”

I want to know what made him a nasty little man when he covered politics at the Waikato Times. It seems to be a combination of dealing with too many career politicians and sitting through too many meetings. “And the nature of it is that it’s a power game, isn’t it, so…”

I observe he’s right in the middle of it. 

“Yeah, and I’m doing it because I’ve got some cool ideas and I’m excited.” 

He says he is calmer now than he used to be. “How should I put this? I don’t drink much any more and it has made me calmer. I’m healthier, I made a lifestyle change there.” 

It’s a bit of a stretch, but he likes to credit the regular “common sense barbecues” he stages around the city for helping keep him grounded. He has pledged he will try to continue them if elected, saying either he or fellow councillors will be in attendance each month. He wonders if getting to know each other face to face might lessen crime, among other things. “Imagine if we had a barbecue on every street, every month, and maybe a community garden, maybe a library box, maybe a compost heap, a place for people to meet where we’re all offline for a bit.”

I ask if people have been showing up.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

I ask how many sausages he takes (he doesn’t eat them because he’s a pescatarian and never remembers to get veggie ones in time).

“Two bags of 40. Sometimes you might get 20 people, but sometimes you might get 70 or 80.”

I ask if people come and complain about the council.

“Most of them don’t,” he says. “People like to talk about high-rises in the suburbs, trees, speed, weeds. I’ve been really delighted by people’s responses.”

He says when he takes his Jack Russell, Charlie-boy, for walks in Grandview Heights where he lives, he is stopping the whole time to chat with neighbours. Some people go out of their way to avoid that kind of thing but he’s adamant he loves the chitchat.  

That’s the other thing I remember about Geoff Taylor. He loves his dog. When I ask how people can access him on the campaign trail, he immediately situates himself at Swarbrick Landing on Tuesday and Thursday mornings where he religiously drops his dog off at the doggy daycare pickup point at 8am and picks him up at day’s end. “I have to admit and it’s a little bit embarrassing, but I don’t like leaving him at home. So he goes to doggy daycare twice a week and I try and organise meetings on those two days.” 

His campaign seems to have come a long way since the Waikato Times story in March telling how he had failed to turn his camera off while vacuuming shirtless during a council meeting on Zoom. I thought it smacked of a cringey publicity stunt. Not many people know anything about local councillors – was this his way to try to get his name out there as he announced his candidacy for the mayoralty? He convinced me it wasn’t, “Oh shit no. God no,” he said, but as I sit down to write, I wonder. 

‘If you regularly enjoy The Spinoff, and want it to continue, become a member today.’
Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large

What to make of this man who sleeps in a bed with his wife, two cats and dog each night, who loves Ken Follett novels – “the scope! The incredible scope of his storytelling!” – who gave up meat after watching a TV show where a goat was about to be killed and eaten for dinner (“the look on the goat’s face … I stopped at that very moment and I said to Julie, ‘you know, I’m not going to eat meat any more, I just can’t’”), who has four step-kids and they all call him Dad, who listens to Newstalk ZB with Mike Hosking in his car and was told by Michael Laws during an interview: “You’re a good man.”

I read through the transcript of our coffee meeting later and realise he has sidestepped my question about rates. Will he increase them as mayor? I text him with a few questions and say, “You didn’t give me a straight answer about what you’d do with rates?!” He replies answering all the questions, bar that one. I text him the following afternoon: “No comment on rates still?!” Radio silence. I think Geoff Taylor will do just fine in politics.


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two cartoon hands holding envelopes and a "local elections' sign on a blue grid background
Voters will be using Single Transferable Voting and Māori wards for the first time (Image: Tina Tiller)

Local Elections 2022September 17, 2022

How to cast your local elections vote

two cartoon hands holding envelopes and a "local elections' sign on a blue grid background
Voters will be using Single Transferable Voting and Māori wards for the first time (Image: Tina Tiller)

You’ve been following the local elections avidly. You’ve been comparing candidates on Policy.nz. You’re ready and psyched to vote. Finally, you’ve received the papers. So what comes next?  

Who should I vote for?

That’s up to you! But you can explore candidates’ policies here and familiarise yourself with candidate red flags here.

So, the paper. Am I ticking boxes? Am I ranking candidates? Am I drawing pictures that represent my desire for democratic representation? 

Don’t draw pictures! Inside your voting envelope, there will be a booklet of candidate blurbs, with brief descriptions of who they are and their policies. There will also be detailed instructions (your friendly local media start-ups can’t always cover every question) and forms to fill. 

Once you know who you’re voting for, you need to fill out the forms. If you’re voting in a first past the post (FPP) election, you will be ticking boxes next to your preferred candidates’ names; the winner will be the candidate(s) who receive the most votes. If you’re voting in a single transferable vote (STV) election, you need to rank all your candidates from most preferred to least preferred. We have a full description of how STV voting works here, but essentially it means that your preferences get taken into account even if your favourite candidate doesn’t get in. 

You will be voting in multiple elections – for a mayor and councillors, and perhaps a local or community board, licensing trust, or regional councillors too. Make sure you fill out your votes for all these elections; there may be multiple pieces of paper. Mark the paper cleanly – don’t use that pen from the back of the drawer that always leaks – and feel happy that you’ve acted decisively for local democracy. 

Votes can be mailed or placed in a ballot box. Photo: iStock

I’ve filled out the forms – what do I do next?

You need to send the forms back so they can be counted. Your voting papers should include a self-addressed envelope – tuck your papers into this and mail it in any postbox. If you’re mailing your vote, be sure to send it by October 4 so it will arrive by the October 8 deadline. 

If your papers have sat by the door for two weeks and accidentally not been posted before the deadline (it happens to the best of us) then you can drop the envelope off at a ballot box before midday on election day, October 8. These boxes will be available at some libraries, council service centres, and – in Auckland – at every Countdown. You should be able to find information on your council website about how to find ballot boxes where you live, or who to contact if you have other questions. 

When will I know which candidates have won?

Most votes will be counted and released by the afternoon of Saturday 8 October, giving a pretty clear indication of winners and losers. It’ll take another few days for special votes to be counted.

Special votes

I don’t have voting papers because I forgot to enrol/just moved house/ turned 18 last week/rain destroyed the contents of my letterbox but I’m desperate to vote! What do I do?

Special votes are available to people whose names do not appear on the main electoral roll but who are still eligible to vote. They can also be used if you’ve forgotten to enrol, your voting papers get wet or damaged, if you’re on the unpublished electoral roll, are travelling during the voting period, or haven’t received voting papers for another reason. 

A rainy city street at night
Rainstorms or forgetfulness don’t need to get in the way of voting. Image: Getty Images

How do I get my special voting papers? 

There will most likely be a voting hub of some kind where you live – perhaps a council service centre or a set up at a library. You should also be able to get in touch with the electoral officer for your area to request special voting papers. During the voting period, which is September 16 to noon on October 8, you will be able to pick up voting papers from these locations, or you can ask to have your voting papers mailed to you. You can fill out your form and cast your vote at the same location, or you can take it home and tick your boxes or rank your candidates there then send your vote in the post or drop it off at a voting location.

You can pick up and cast your special voting papers without being enrolled to vote; however, you must enrol by October 7 for your vote to be counted. If you haven’t enrolled before, you can do that here

‘If you regularly enjoy The Spinoff, and want it to continue, become a member today.’
Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large

Where do I find places to drop off my special vote? 

Have a search on your council’s website – there should be some information there. However, a quick rundown for the major population centres:

  • Auckland: 65 different Countdown supermarkets and other locations you can find here
  • Hamilton: Ballot boxes are marked with checkboxes on the map here
  • Wellington: Te Pokapū Hapori Community Centre on Manners Street, and five different libraries during the week of October 3. More information here.
  • Christchurch: Christchurch Civic Offices on Hereford Street or libraries listed here
  • Dunedin: At the Civic Centre in the Octagon during the voting period, other locations and times listed here

Do my special votes count? 

Yes, a special vote counts exactly the same as any other vote. However – just like in general elections – special votes are counted later. “Progress” election results, counting votes cast up to October 7, will be available on election day, October 8; “preliminary” election results, counting all votes cast on 8 October, will be available on 9 October; and “final” elections results, counting all the special votes, will be published on October 13. 

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