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phil mauger, white man in a blue suit, on blue background with a local elections 2022 sign and a smile
Phil Mauger thinks that Christchurch communities aren’t feeling heard. (Image: Shanti Mathias/Tina Tiller)

Local Elections 2022September 22, 2022

Phil Mauger’s boots-and-all bid to be Christchurch’s next mayor

phil mauger, white man in a blue suit, on blue background with a local elections 2022 sign and a smile
Phil Mauger thinks that Christchurch communities aren’t feeling heard. (Image: Shanti Mathias/Tina Tiller)

The mayoral candidate sits down with Shanti Mathias to discuss climate, transport, housing – and why other cities should be more like Ōtautahi.

Phil Mauger is willing to defy the government. The Christchurch city councillor – and now mayoral candidate – voted last week against complying with a government intensification standard for building multi-storey buildings. The former construction company owner is known for stunts and a willingness to get his hands dirty; last year, he was fined by the council after using a bulldozer to dig a trench that was intended to reduce flooding.

When I meet him at a cafe in the Ōtautahi suburb of Merivale – no bulldozers in sight, but made obvious with a large car plastered with “Phil for Mayor” slogans – Mauger is affable, clutching a printout of notes he doesn’t refer to once. The campaign has been a long one; Mauger declared that he was running for mayor over a year ago, and tells me that he’s been to 22 mayoral forums in the last month, “seeing more of my competitor, David [Meates], than my own wife.” 

I have to ask, first, about Mauger’s thoughts on intensification, a debate heating up around the country but particularly prominent in Christchurch. Mauger is unrepentant about his vote. “We are getting intensification,” he says, adding that he supports denser living in the central city and along bus routes. But it’s intensification in the suburbs that troubles Mauger (and the 17 resident associations which have rejected the proposals). “[Intensification] is an Auckland and Wellington problem that has been pushed down on us, and I just didn’t agree with it,” he says. 

There is a problem with housing, though, Mauger concedes; he is on the board of the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust, and thinks that the city needs to support those who live in social housing more. But often, he says, people who are living in social housing need “wraparound support” like caretakers for properties and security guards. “You can’t just drop someone in a home when they’ve never had one and don’t understand money – they might move into a house then be worse off in five years,” he says. He agrees that Christchurch’s homeless population are some of the city’s most vulnerable people, but says that someone needs to “move homeless people along at 6.00 in the morning so they don’t cause a drama during the day.”

An election billboard with phil major (white man in suit) on it. background is a fence
Mauger is determined that Christchurch can solve its own problems (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

Where people live goes hand-in-hand with transport; Mauger, an avowed “car fan,” says that making bus services fast and reliable should be a priority over creating light rail transport for Christchurch. Bus lanes, for instance, often aren’t necessary on underused routes; “there’s nothing worse than sitting in your car and seeing the bus going past [in the bus lane] with only a few people on it,” he tells me.

The bus system in Canterbury is piecemeal, with Environment Canterbury responsible for services and Christchurch City Council responsible for infrastructure like bus stops, and Mauger wants to integrate these aspects of bus travel. He thinks lower prices from next year will get more people onto buses. Later that day, he’s asked at the Stuff debate when he last took a bus, and confesses that it’s been “a wee while”. 

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“We want to make it easier for people to get into town,” Mauger says, sipping his long black (two sugars). “And when they get there, we don’t want to penalise them with high parking and stuff like that.” He assures me that he’s supportive of cycleways, but thinks that they can be cheaper; he’s previously said that money for cycleways could be diverted to Christchurch’s new stadium by cutting costs. 

He has a hydrogen car, which he loves, and suggests that the fuel can transform emissions for Christchurch; two of the biggest actions he suggests to me to tackle climate change are electrifying or hydrogenifying the council’s vehicle fleet and planting trees. “Is it better to spend $10 million on cycleways or plant 20 million trees?” he muses. Transport and tree cover are different issues, I suggest – could he not have both?

“But we only have so much money – we need to get carbon neutral as soon as possible,” he says. Given this, and Mauger’s determination to keep rates increases beneath inflation at 3.5 to 4%, where does he stand on the development of the expensive Tarras airport in Central Otago, being built by Christchurch Airport, in which the council’s holdings company is a majority shareholder?

stage with 4 people - 2 chrichstchurch 2022 mayoral candidates and two white women who are asking questions. lots of mostly grey heads visible in the audience
Mauger and Meates at the Stuff mayoral forum in Christchurch’s Turanga library (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

“The airport say they can be carbon neutral [in their operations] because it’s not their planes, which is a fine line in my view,” he says. Mauger isn’t sure if global travel will ever return to pre-pandemic levels, but while he sees the merit of competing with Queenstown Airport, he thinks that Tarras visitors will mainly benefit the Otago region, not Christchurch, though he doesn’t give me a definitive answer on whether he thinks the new airport should go ahead. 

I ask Mauger if there are any policies from other cities that he’d like to see in Christchurch. He says that perhaps Christchurch could be a “mini Melbourne” with laneways and walkability. But if he’s mayor, he’ll “promote the living daylights out of Christchurch,” showing the rest of the country how unique the city is.

So he thinks that other cities should be more like Christchurch, not that Christchurch should be more than other cities? Exactly, he tells me, and launches into a spiel about how in a few years, when the stadium is completed, Christchurch should host the Commonwealth Games. (There’s perhaps a royalist streak to Mauger, who also suggests that a city to sea cycle trail, once completed, could be called “The Queen Elizabeth II Way… because she was always into the outdoors and families and stuff like that.”)

With every policy, Mauger is insistent that communities need to be consulted, involved in the design process, able to determine which decisions go to the council table and not just be asked which options are preferred after it. But local elections often have remarkably low turnout, I say; many people are ambivalent or ignorant about the work of councils in their community. Strident objectors – the residents association members clutching their “Stop Daylight Robbery” signs at the intensification vote – and vociferous supporters – the people who will sing ‘Imagine’ to extol the merits of a new stadium – submit their views, but the people who don’t mind or don’t have reason to believe the council can help them, don’t bother. 

“There’s an apathy, people will just put their heads down and do what they need to do,” agrees Mauger, saying the consultation processes need to be improved. As mayor, he says he’d like to host public meetings every fortnight, sit down with members of the public and community boards to hear what people’s problems are. Perhaps this election will be different, though: “maybe I’m biased because I’m in it up to my neck, but this year [council] has five people changing – I think interest is high because people will see a change.”

phil maguer in black room talking to people sitting on chairs who are looking at him
Mauger speaks to members of the disabled community on the campaign trail (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

The insistence on listening to community voices is the key, Mauger thinks, to success and popularity as mayor. At a debate hosted by Stuff and Te Pūtahi on Friday, the candidate was asked what unpopular – but important – thing he’d be willing to do as leader. 

“We need to get trust back,” he said, dodging the question. But would he be prepared to do anything unpopular? “No,” he replied. Mauger tells me that his goal in his first year as mayor would be to get satisfaction with council from a record low of 42% and back into the 60s. 

This attitude seems to be working. In a TVNZ poll conducted two weeks ago, 58% of Christchurch voters said that they’d vote for Mauger. In a first past the post system, that would be more than enough to see him accept the mayoral chains in October. 

After our interview, I accompany Mauger to a campaign event at Skillwise, an organisation that works with people with disabilities to support them to be involved and included in their communities. Over the course of an hour, Mauger is confident answering questions about the Bromley smell, Christchurch buses, his opinion of Winston Peters and what Christchurch City Council can do about Covid. While some of the questions are a little leftfield, Mauger is unperturbed. 

He says that he wants Christchurch to be a better place to live for people with disabilities, shows everyone his hearing aids and talks about how breaking 21 bones in his body after being run over by a truck a few years ago made him realise how hard it can be to navigate the city in a wheelchair. He’s told me that he wants to be a good listener, and now he demonstrates it; the policies are not always specific, but he is willing to be as available to this small audience as he is to debate David Meates in front of hundreds of people at the Stuff mayoral forum.

After Mauger leaves, I speak to Nathan Beaven, the Skillwise member who has organised the event. “I wanted to hear what the mayor wanted to do in the city,” he says. Does he know who he’s going to vote for? Beaven beams. “Phil!”


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Paula Southgate: ‘Start it, make it successful, walk away. That’s what you should do as a politician.’ (Photo: Facebook / Design: Archi Banal)
Paula Southgate: ‘Start it, make it successful, walk away. That’s what you should do as a politician.’ (Photo: Facebook / Design: Archi Banal)

Local Elections 2022September 22, 2022

‘Don’t mistake being nice for being weak’: Paula Southgate and the ‘nice mayor’ label

Paula Southgate: ‘Start it, make it successful, walk away. That’s what you should do as a politician.’ (Photo: Facebook / Design: Archi Banal)
Paula Southgate: ‘Start it, make it successful, walk away. That’s what you should do as a politician.’ (Photo: Facebook / Design: Archi Banal)

As she seeks re-election to the Hamilton mayoralty, Paula Southgate tells Aimie Cronin it’s wrong to conflate niceness with inability to get things done.

I saw mayor of Hamilton Paula Southgate in the flesh for the first time about a month ago. It was obvious she was on the job even though she was in a bar – she had an urgency about her as she worked her way around groups. She stood out despite her title, wearing this tailored grey and black check suit. Because she’s so tall (nearly six foot three), the suit seemed endless and a bit magical, like she was Willy Wonka or something. No one really dresses like that in Hamilton. I felt happy that the city’s mayor was no longer the owner of a finance company and used car yard, but a woman who was moving around like a big-time operator looking sharp, cool, important. 

When I met her for coffee last week at a spot by the river, who knows what she was wearing, but her energy was the same. I arrived first and sat there trying to imagine how the encounter would begin; if she would shake my hand, what with Covid etcetera, or hug, or nothing. It was the latter. She came striding down the path talking on her cellphone and I hovered next to her until she was off the call. She seemed like she wanted to get on with business, like all good, busy mayors.

She had suggested we meet at the Vietnamese restaurant Banh Mi Caphe in town, but it was closed. She wondered aloud if the owners might let us in, her being the mayor and all. She wanted to give them a shoutout, she said, because they had been good to her. She poked her head in and someone who worked there frowned: “Closed.” Off we went with nowhere to go, but with the appearance of two people who were heading somewhere of the utmost importance. 

We ended up at Mr Pickles, the bar where I had first seen her. She ordered a single shot cappuccino even though it was 3pm and usually, she will take only chamomile tea after 2. 

Paula Southgate is nearly 59, she’s got a deepish voice, a bit of an English accent (she moved to New Zealand from England aged 15), and an endless-seeming stamina hovers over our conversation that made her appear as though she could talk about something or nothing for an infinite amount of time. If she were to enter one of those competitions where the person who touches the car the longest wins it, she would win the car without a doubt. The council’s draft annual plan meeting earlier this year took six days: “Boring!” says her rival deputy mayor Geoff Taylor, but Southgate is proud of her collaborative leadership style and says she likes to give everyone at the table a voice, even if it takes an age. 

Paula Southgate has been in local politics for a very long time. Specifically, 21 years. She has belonged to more groups and fronted more projects than any sane person would care to hear about in detail and she talks about them as though they are all very interesting. “Typical politician,” she said at one point, “chat, chat, chat.”

She wanted to communicate that despite being a career politician, she is also a person who embodies the spirit of the Geoff Taylor campaign slogan “making things happen”. She talked about a successful project she led at the regional council years ago that brought tūī back to the city. She credited so many people she tied herself up in knots, but the point is she fronted a project, worked with others well, and got something done. At one point she leant forward and dramatically banged the table, “that’s the good thing about projects,” she said, bang! “Start it, make it successful, walk away. That’s what you should do as a politician.”

A few moments later, she looked out to the river and said, “I guess people forget you are the reason that the tūī are back,” and it feels like a real moment. Then she immediately corrected herself, “I’m not taking all the credit!” she said, and listed again all the other people and groups who had anything at all to do with tūī at that time.  

Paula Southgate speaks during the Fifa Women’s World Cup ‘One Year To Go’ event at FMG Stadium Waikato. (Photo: Mike Walen/Getty Images for FIFA)

She seemed nice. “One of the biggest frustrations on this campaign is that people keep saying I’m nice,” she said, “and that nice people don’t get things done. That’s not true.” She seemed like she had practiced what she was going to say on certain matters like being nice, and when she spoke these words they came off in a sweet, rehearsed way, as though she was in a high school speech competition. Toward the end of our interview, she returned to the nice thing: “Don’t mistake nice for being weak, it’s not,” she said. “I can make hard decisions, I’ve shown that time and again. I personally prefer to collaborate and to partner, and I don’t mind being nice because I would rather be known for being nice than for being horrible, and it is a democracy not an autocracy. I do get things done, I’m very positive, I’m very collaborative; that’s what people will get if they vote for me.” 

It’s a testament, I think, to her niceness, that she seems to be very uncomfortable with the situation she finds herself in as she goes up against Geoff Taylor, current deputy mayor. There has been a falling out over the handling of Three Waters. Both are opposed to the reforms, but Taylor believes she should have stood up more aggressively to central government, that she’s sat on the fence when she should have given parliament the middle finger from the onset. 

“I didn’t like it 18 months ago,” she said, “but we thought we could influence it and that government would listen, and we tried. The model is not right for Hamilton, we all absolutely agree it is not right for Hamilton and we reject the bill. That’s the way it goes. You can’t be a blanket naysayer and say no, no, no to everything. What I would say is that I have always believed that across New Zealand, some reform in the way that water is managed is required, and both National and Labour have said that.”

Taylor says she has been seduced by Wellington and her inability to make traction against Three Waters is a sign of weak leadership; she says her approach has been “constructive and informed”. 

Same goes with central government’s resource management reform, that will allow three-storey apartments to be built through the city and its suburbs. Southgate said council had spent a lot of time planning how it would grow the city, “and then they came and trumped that with the medium density requirements for tier one councils and we were horrified, because all of a sudden instead of intensity going where we’re sitting in the CBD … it could go anywhere, like scattered seeds, right? And like everyone else, I was like, no.

“We opposed it, the government rushed it through, we didn’t have a lot of time to talk with our public about it, and the only tool we have available to us now is the district plan. Geoff could say we are being too weak. Perhaps he wants to say a blanket no to this, too, but what would a blanket no do? It’s a law. We have to give effect to the law.” She said council can’t stop it, but can soften it by looking at things like green space and traffic management. 

Paula Southgate has no shiny new projects she will be pushing in her campaign for a second term as mayor. “I’m going to continue the good work that we as a council, not just me, the collective council, said was important for the community.” She listed off a few of those things: finishing the revitalisation of suburbs Fairfield and Enderley, finish revitalisation of the Hamilton Zoo, revitalise the central city, implement safety improvements to intersections. Does she think Geoff Taylor could get these things done? “No matter who the mayor is, things get done, right, it’s just how things get done.” 

“My challenge, if I was going to be cheeky,” she said, “is to ask what has Geoff made happen on his own? Because I can talk a lot about what we, collectively, as a team have made happen.”

“What has he made happen,” she asked, looking at me like she expects an answer.

“Umm. Two hours free parking in the CBD?” 

“OK, that’s one thing … He was politically strong on two hours free parking,” she conceded, before rallying. “But of course everything needs the consensus decision of council and there wouldn’t be two hours free parking in the CBD if the majority of council hadn’t lined up with him. So how does that work?”

Please don’t make me answer again, I thought, avoiding eye contact. 

“No mayor can do anything without consensus. Not at all.”

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

This election will be the first time Hamiltonians who bother to vote will use the single transferable vote system (STV). Neither mayoral candidate knows how things will shake out as a result of it. Southgate said she has been going around saying (she lowers her voice and sticks one finger out), “make me your first choice! Make me your number one!” to try and imprint the process in people’s minds. In 2016, she lost by an aching six votes to Andrew King, owner of Kings Finance and Kings Cars. She insists she didn’t stay up any nights swearing about it. That seems unlikely. 

I read through the transcript of our coffee meeting later and realised I failed to ask her about rates. Will she increase them as mayor? I texted her asking. I was met with silence when I asked the same thing of Geoff Taylor. She diligently replied with a whole lot of words that don’t answer either way, suggesting she probably will. I think she’s nice all right, but it will take a lot to get the politician out of Paula Southgate.


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