Brooke van Velden ran a strong campaign to win Tāmaki off National in 2020. Liam Hehir weighs up what will be different in this election’s match-up.
In September 2023, I wrote that Brooke van Velden winning Tāmaki was possible but unlikely. She would need, I said, “a lot of things to go right”. This means either one of two things happened. The first possibility is that a lot of things did go right for her. The other possibility is that I was, well, wrong.
Not wrong in the sense that the odds were imaginary. Tāmaki had been National territory for generations – Simon O’Connor had won the seat repeatedly. He even won an 8,000-vote majority in 2020, when National was being electorally waterboarded up and down the country. Nor was I wrong that Act’s case depended on something more complicated than “Tāmaki is right-wing, therefore Act can win it”. That was always too simple. Act surged in 2020 but that didn’t make it the natural home of the traditional eastern suburbs voter.
What I got wrong was more important – the breakdown of tribal loyalties. What van Velden won in 2023 was permission from enough National voters to break ranks. I assumed, too complacently, that the old National electorate-vote discipline would hold.
Tāmaki voters tore that theory up.
But so did other electorate voters. The 2023 election saw something like a dam breaking in the general electorates. Act held Epsom and won Tāmaki. The Greens held Auckland Central and added Wellington Central and Rongotai. Five general-roll seats went to parties other than National or Labour that year. It was the strongest such showing for small parties in non-Māori electorates since the 1930s.
The odd protest vote aside, electorate voting has generally remained a safe harbour for New Zealand political tribalism. For many years, New Zealanders had grown accustomed to shopping around with their party vote. When it came to the electorate vote, however, conservatism prevailed.
I don’t mean to denigrate van Velden’s personal efforts. She couldn’t have won without an effective and personable local campaign. But her chances weren’t hurt by a more national moment in which voters became much freer with their electorate vote.
Van Velden is stepping down this year, but National should be careful about assuming the seat will simply snap back. That being said, there is good reason as to why Mahesh Muralidhar may fancy his chances.
The starting point has to be that National won the party vote in Tāmaki with 52.41%. While van Velden won the electorate seat quite convincingly, Act won only a modest party vote there. So, thousands of people who wanted a National-led government decided they did not need a National MP.
And to explain this, we need to look at a number of very specific factors that are not necessarily in play this year. One was that the socially conservative Simon O’Connor was deeply out of favour with liberal National voters. He was also not popular with parts of National’s leadership. Van Velden, by contrast, is a social liberal. As a staffer to David Seymour, she played a big role in bringing the assisted suicide law to a vote. O’Connor was a prominent opponent of that law which, as we all know, was endorsed by the voters in a crushing referendum result in 2020.
She also campaigned hard. Very hard. She was there early, there often and she came across well. It’s always hard to tell how much of a difference candidate effort and quality makes but being personable, disciplined and present hardly hurts.
Then came the permission structure. Paula Bennett, also a campaigning progressive within the party and still well known, staged one of those cups of tea events to signal to voters what they should do. And the signal was that they could vote for van Velden without feeling they had betrayed their people.
That was the bit I failed to see clearly enough. I saw the usual arithmetic. I did not see the other things that overwhelmed that arithmetic. And that brings us to back to the election this year.
Act has selected James Christmas, an Auckland barrister with experience at senior levels of government. I have had no dealings with either candidate. Accordingly, I do not pretend to offer a personal character reference for either of them. But we can still look at what each represents inside the centre-right ecosystem.
Muralidhar looks like the sort of candidate National likes telling itself it wants. He is entrepreneurial, energetic and modern. He is a migrant success story in a city where demographic change continues apace. Christmas is a different kind of problem for National. He is not some Act crank dragged from the Facebook comments section and put in a blazer.
Christmas has National connections. He has worked around National governments. He is culturally intelligible to National people and there are plenty of National people who will not be too upset if he wins.
In 2023, the division was partly about O’Connor. Liberal Nats decided they’d had enough of him, or at least enough of being represented by him. The party still mattered but the candidate’s philosophy became unacceptable to enough of them.
In 2026, the contest is different. It is not about conservatism but whether National still commands instinctive loyalty among centre-right voters who think Act is the sharper instrument. National remains the main vehicle of government. But Act can now say to Tāmaki voters: keep the government, improve the government and give your electorate vote to somebody who will push it harder.
What we are going to see is if van Velden’s 2023 win did more than change the occupant of the seat – we are going to see if it changed the habits of those voters. And if the men and women of Tāmaki have decided to become as habitually transactional as Epsom voters have, that may not bode well for Muralidhar.
National can win it back. Of course it can. The party vote alone proves the electorate is still fundamentally National-leaning. Muralidhar has months to define himself as a local, serious and connected candidate. If Act stumbles, if Christmas fails to turn insider credibility into public support or if voters decide van Velden was a one-off, things will snap back.
But I would not bet the family on it. I made that mistake once already and the farm is still looking at me reproachfully.
