hayden

Local ElectionsSeptember 20, 2019

All the scorecards being put out by our emerging election watchdogs

Guest writer
hayden

Voting papers are being sent out today, and lots of people say they won’t fill them out because they don’t know anything about the candidates. Respected website ‘The Spinoff’ is trying to fix that through its Policy Local tool. But it’s not the only one. Catherine Jeffcoat talks to the rest of the watchdogs.

The Spinoff local election coverage is made possible thanks to The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a member and supporting The Spinoff’s journalism click here.

In my day job at the Sustainable Business Council, we recently invited a panel of young people from not-for-profit and activist groups to tell our Annual Council Meeting how businesses could better engage with the community. Members listened carefully and asked thoughtful questions about what businesses needed to know, and how to build relationships. 

Then out of the blue, Bevan, who runs a drycleaning firm in Taranaki, is a hard-core Chiefs fan, and never misses an Annual Council Meeting, said: “So we know young people really care about climate change and the planet, but how do we get them to vote?”. 

Bevan is right to be concerned. Voting turnout in New Zealand’s local elections has long been dire and in decline, particularly among the young. Research carried out by Auckland Council after the 2016 local government election found the voting rate was highest among those who have voted before: males, older Pākehā people, ratepayers and people who have lived in Auckland for a number of years. Youth turnout lagged far behind that of people aged 65+.

When Auckland Council asked non-voters why they didn’t vote, the top reasons were “not knowing enough about the candidates (25%) or the policies (22%), not knowing who to vote for (16%), and the amount of effort required to select a candidate (10%)”. Recent research carried out by youth advocacy group Seed Waikato backed those findings, showing a high number of young people feel disconnected from local government. 

Throughout Aotearoa, moves are underway to correct that democracy deficit: to bridge the information gap and help elect councils that will take action on the issues their communities care about. More and more organisations are undertaking citizen scrutiny initiatives to increase the amount of information available on candidates. Their goal is to make sure voters know what’s at stake in these elections and motivate them to vote, by getting beyond the vague slogans in voting booklets and telling people what their aspiring elected representatives really stand for.

Jenny Coatham at Generation Zero Dunedin doesn’t hesitate when asked whether young people care more about climate change than local government elections. 

“Councils, on the whole, are not good at engaging and consulting with young people. They tend to want to do it on their terms, which mean writing a submission to the consultation document, and that’s not particularly exciting for your average 18, 20-year-old.” 

Coatham says a lot of young people – and people generally – don’t realise how much councils shape their towns and cities, and how damaging it can be if poor-quality candidates are put in charge. Generation Zero is looking to bring that home this election. It has developed scorecards for Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, building on the scorecards they produced for the 2016 local body elections. Volunteers like Coatham have been charged with looking at candidates’ plans for making substantial progress on climate change as well as assessing their engagement with the community and leadership abilities. Results will be published when voting papers are sent out, and some regions are running follow up events, including panels, with information available on Gen Zero’s Facebook page. They’re just one of a rising number of groups trying to illuminate the issues and explain the candidates in this year’s local elections.

Explaining the DHB elections

DHB elections are often the most low-information contests in local democracy, with many voters knowing few or even none of the candidates. The Public Health Association is trying to change that. It ran scorecards for District Health Board candidates in Wellington in 2016, and this year it will be producing them in Christchurch and Dunedin as well. PHA chief executive Prudence Stone sees this as a chance to raise awareness of what DHBs actually do as well as increase voting rates. 

“I’m not sure if many people even know how huge the role is. DHBs have to oversee one of New Zealand’s largest workforces and are the biggest owners of state capital, with assets like hospitals, Primary Healthcare Organisations and emergency services, and all the contracts that fall under that. 

“If a DHB is made up of our peers in the community, well, what kind of a peer are you, are you just a cowboy who wants something on your CV or are you actually qualified?” 

The organisation is posting the scorecards on its website and on Facebook.

Focusing on transport policy

Bryan Crump, a familiar voice on Radio New Zealand, was moved to start his own podcast a year ago. The Traffic Jam covers Wellington’s transport issues in the wake of the city’s much-derided, deeply unpopular bus service overhaul. Crump is now taking his advocacy one step further, organising election panels with groups like the AA and Cycle Wellington.

“There’s actually a lot of fence-sitting from councillors saying they support a more walkable and liveable city as well as a four-lane highway to the airport,” he says. “Well, you can’t afford both. These meetings will give people a really clear idea of who to vote for your priorities.”

Crump says Wellington’s buses will be front-and-centre in the debates. “There was a lot of anger expressed against regional councillors after what happened with the buses – but who are you going to put in instead? Yes, the Regional Council showed a lack of care over that issue. But you can’t expect councillors to pay attention to an issue if voters are not collectively paying attention.” The Traffic Jam has already held one meeting on September 18 and will run another one on September 25. Visit its blog, as well as Facebook and Twitter.

Wellington cyclists form A ‘people-protected’ bike lane through the city. Photo: Bryan Crump

Putting the spotlight on climate change

Inspired by Generation Zero, the Common Climate Network has developed a toolkit that any region can use to find out where their candidates stand on climate action, which has been picked up by groups around the country. The results will be published by Generation Zero at localelections.nz.  

Low Carbon Kāpiti used the Common Climate Network template in a questionnaire sent out to candidates on the Kāpiti Coast District Council. Representatives from the organisation have been attending candidate meetings and asking questions in person. Its spokesman Jake Roos says the council has signed up to being carbon neutral by 2025, but has work to do to achieve its goal.

“Ideally, road maintenance, which is a huge contract, would be part of the carbon footprint, but there’s not enough data. And there have been poor decisions lately in terms of buying new gas boilers and diesel vehicles. We need councillors that ensure council spending aligns with going carbon neutral, and doesn’t rely too heavily on offsets”.

Roos hopes the scorecards will help voters identify the candidates who have well-formulated plans for how to make the district carbon neutral. They will also be published via localelections.nz and promoted through Facebook.

The Low Carbon Kāpiti team. Photo: Low Carbon Kāpiti

Alicia Hall is the founder and spokesperson for Millions of Mothers which has sent the Common Climate Network questionnaire to a number of councils, from Kaipara to Kaikōura. The results will go live on the local elections website as well as on the group’s website and on social media in the hope it will reveal which candidates are making the future health of younger generations a priority.

“We think it is important for everyone to vote, especially youth, given the impact of inaction around the climate crisis will have on their future. We are encouraging people to vote according to their values and keeping their children’s future environment in mind.”

Alicia Hall. Photo: Millions of Mothers

Testing candidates’ knowledge

Organise Aotearoa has surveyed all candidates standing for Hamilton City Council and Waikato Regional Council and ranked them on a number of social and environmental issues. Hamish McDonald, Kirikiriroa branch member, says he was surprised at how many candidates had a poor understanding of some key issues. Only 24% of respondents could answer a question about which way they would vote on a bylaw later this year. “Most candidates were pretty naive about public transport and about how homeless people are treated in Kirikiriroa,” he says. “Even with our survey results, it will still be very difficult to know what you are voting for.”

That lack of knowledge – and sometimes cooperation – from candidates is a problem affecting many of these citizen scrutiny efforts, even if a non-answer can sometimes be revealing. Women in Urbanism is also creating a local government scorecard to profile the candidates in Auckland, Wellington and possibly Christchurch on urban design as it affects women, with questions covering transport, safety, climate change, and creating liveable cities. Gabriela Jimenez-Rojas, a WIU committee member, acknowledges some candidates might not have thought about urban design through the lens of how well cities work for women. But she hopes respondents will show their “passion for democracy, sustainability and quality of life”. “We are hoping candidates are well-informed or are at least open-minded to the challenges faced in urban living for all people, but especially women,”

Generation Zero’s Coatham says her ambition is that increasing the flow of information on what candidates believe will show voters what’s at stake in these elections. She points to an example of a bad council decision from World War II when the US Army Engineering Corps were stationed in Dunedin. Its officers saw sea-level rise and flooding was going to be a problem for the city and told council it would install some levees for free as practice before its troops headed out to the Pacific. Council declined the offer. 

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“Now hundreds, if not thousands, of families are going to lose their home or potentially lose their home, who have built their community around a place where the infrastructure just isn’t there to help them. And the cost of adapting now is millions if not billions. And the longer we delay, the more costly it gets,” Coatham says. “The decisions that our representatives are making, not just at national levels but at local levels, are going to affect not just the next election cycle or the election cycle after that, but they’re going to have a lot of costs associated with them for generations to come.”

Catherine Jeffcoat is a member of the Common Climate Network, which connects New Zealanders with positive climate action. www.commonclimate.nz Facebook Twitter 

The fee for this piece was donated directly to the Ihumātao/SOUL campaign

The Spinoff local election coverage is made possible thanks to The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a member and supporting The Spinoff’s journalism click here.
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AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF JIM BOULT
AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF JIM BOULT

Local ElectionsSeptember 20, 2019

Queenstown’s benevolent dictator prepares for battle

Contributing writer
AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF JIM BOULT
AN ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF JIM BOULT

Freedom camping, public transport and affordable housing are challenges Queenstown’s Mayor Jim Boult says he’s uniquely poised to solve – if only people would do what they’re told.

The Spinoff local election coverage is entirely funded by The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a member and supporting The Spinoff’s journalism click here.

Queenstown is a microcosm of an idealised New Zealand. The epicentre of tourism, cradle of our national mythos, more recently a bolthole for the international elite, the small town on the edge of Lake Wakatipu is a jewel in the crown of New Zealand Incorporated. 

But the social and economic ills which plague the country are felt most strongly here too. The housing crisis has pushed property prices to the highest in the country. Freedom campers have driven locals to the point of despair. Itinerant workers are sleeping eight to a room in dilapidated shitholes while they clean the mansions of the super rich. Mayor Jim Boult, running for his second term, believes he can fix all that – if only some people would come to the table and do what they’re told.

“I’ve had a lifetime in business and you get somewhere in business if you are tenacious and you push things through that you think need to be done,” he says. “I was elected by a landslide in 2016 because I think there was a view in the district that we needed stuff to be done, and we’ve done stuff. Sometimes that’s required me to be a bit bloody-minded.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the brewing battle over a proposed expansion to Queenstown Airport, which would potentially double its capacity by 2045 by extending noise boundaries. The approach to the current runway is one of the most picturesque in the world. Planes fly in the shadow of the alps toward the base of the lake. Boult is totally opposed to expansion, favouring an extension in Wanaka – much to the chagrin of some in the township. Not everybody agrees with a halt on growth, but Boult, who led Christchurch Airport as chief executive through a terminal expansion and both earthquakes, says not everybody is informed.

“I don’t think there’s any other mayor in New Zealand who has got anything like the knowledge of running airports and the economics of airlines than I have. And yes, that probably does give me an advantage.”

Queenstown Airport (Photo: RNZ)

Boult has an ambitious, 10-year, billion-dollar plan for the region, which is expected to have a larger permanent population than Dunedin by 2028. There are around 40,000 permanent residents in the district, with an average of 70,000 people a night. During peak periods there are up to 130,000. Already there are fears of a potential power black-out unless services are upgraded.

“You can’t have infrastructure for 40,000 people and poke 130,000 people into it – it just doesn’t work,” says Boult. “We’ve got to have an infrastructure that is greater than the permanent population.” 

“It’s the most ambitious 10 year plan any council in our district has tabled, but there is a shortfall of $300-$400m, so where do we find that?”

Boult argues a visitor levy is the fairest and most effective way to plug the gap. A 5% levy applied to all accommodation providers including AirBnB would raise an estimated $22.5m, and Boult says international case studies show negligible impact on visitor numbers.

Hotelier Nik Kiddle, Boult’s most significant challenger for mayor, has written the accommodation levy off as “too blunt”, “heavy handed” and “overly simplistic”. Kiddle, who is running on a platform of “honesty and transparency”, argues that the levy would let central government off the hook for local infrastructure it should be funding.

Boult’s role on the board of Wayfare, a 65-year-old tourism operator formerly known as Real Journeys, is a conflict of interest, he says.

“Jim Boult is the chairman of one of the largest tourism operators in New Zealand, and his proposals deliberately exempt almost the entirety of that portfolio from additional tax liabilities. What I’m saying is that even if we get [just] the four big tourism operators – which includes his companies – to step up to the plate, it’s far fairer: [the] beneficiary pays.”

But the public, it seems, agrees with Boult. A referendum earlier this year showed 81% in favour of a levy with a 44% turnout. Any levy is technically a tax, and so central government has to agree, but Boult is confident they’ll come to the table. He’s had experience wrangling bureaucrats, he says.

“The buses here are run by the Otago Regional Council, but we had probably the dumbest public transport system in New Zealand before I instituted the $2 bus programme,” he says. “I mean, $16 return trips to get into town?

“I said to the ORC that if it was cheap enough and frequent enough then people would use it. If you make it good enough people will ride it. This council had to agree to underwrite it because ORC said they were nervous, and we took it on, and it’s gone like a rocket. In November 2017, the month before the programme began, 30,000 people a month rode on the buses. It’s now around 130,000. And as well as providing a way to get around the district, it’s much better for the environment. 

“I had to kick and scratch and fight a bit to get there, but maybe that was the benign dictator kicking in.” 

Kiddle sarcastically rephrases that characterisation to”‘benevolent dictator”. “[Boult’s] a businessman by training and he expects people to do what they’re told. But there’s a saying that when change is done to people, they resent it; when it’s done with people, they celebrate it. The mayor shouldn’t run council like a business, it’s about bringing people with you.”

Queenstown. Photo: Getty Images

There is an argument for assertive business acumen in Queenstown. The region is singularly dependent on tourism and the effects are felt most strongly here. The fortunes of tourism in Queenstown have a significant impact on the health of tourism in the country as a whole, Boult argues – if the Queenstown experience suffers a decline in quality, that will ripple out into the industry at large. Tourism’s image has soured in recent times, with questions around sustainability, growth, and ecological ethics plaguing the industry. It’s both a business and branding issue, Boult says. 

“My personal view on growth going forward is that we’ve plateaued, and with the environmental and social issues going on around the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re in for a pretty flat period. And so we need to move to a high-value model. If we turned tourism off tomorrow, town dies. So you know, that can’t happen. But we need to concentrate on value rather than numbers.”

At the end of the quarter ended June this year, bed nights in the town had increased 1.1% annualised, whereas spend increased 3.7% annualised, Boult says. “What that says is that numbers are pretty much staying where they are but the value was growing and that’s the direction I want to go in.”

But Boult’s business experience hasn’t been without its controversies. Around 300 itinerant workers will be evicted from the Lakeview camping ground in time for the election. They say they’ve been betrayed by a town that relies on them and many report facing homelessness. There has been criticism the move reeks of corporate callousness, with the site to be developed into a billion dollar mixed-use development, but Boult says the decision was made long before his time as mayor. 

JIM BOULT IN HIS AMAZING OFFICE. PHOTO: DON ROWE

Boult was also a director of the doomed Stonewood Homes construction firm and resigned just three weeks before it and a number of connected companies collapsed in 2016 owing around $27m. Stonewood Homes was eventually bought by the Chow brothers, who own strip clubs, brothels and real estate in Auckland, for a bargain bin price.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Boult was subject to an orchestrated smear campaign when fellow contender Lyal Cocks approached journalists and public relations consultants with an offer of a job investigating Boult’s business dealings. The implication was that coverage of the Stonewood collapse would disqualify Boult in the eyes of the public should he refuse to stand down. A police investigation confirmed the existence of the campaign, but said it fell short of blackmail. 

This year, Queenstown Lakes District Council candidate Niki Gladding laid a formal complaint alleging Boult had failed to manage conflicts of interest relating to his role at Wayfare. “It felt like deja vu,” Boult says. “I think I’m a really nice guy, but apparently some people don’t.” 

So why run again? Why leave huge sums on the table in the private sector if every campaign exposes Boult to allegations of corruption? Queenstown is growing, but it’s still a small place, and the drawcard is certainly not his office, which sits in a small room just above the Queenstown library, desk unadorned but for an apple and a model plane.  

“My wife asks me that every day. I just decided I needed to pay back by putting something back into the community. There are times I think ‘Goodness me, I’d rather do something in business’, but most of the time of the time it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.”

The Spinoff local election coverage is entirely funded by The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a member and supporting The Spinoff’s journalism click here.