How The Great Mt Albert Debate went down

Welcome, honoured politics nerd, and congratulations: it’s 5.40pm on a Wednesday and you have found yourself on a live blog covering an electorate debate in Mt Albert. Now you’re here, you’re probably screaming internally “what should I expect in the following hours!?” Don’t worry, I’m here to help.

First, expect the unexpected. We’re going to kick things off at 6pm with a big surprise. It’ll be a first for The Spinoff and maybe the world. If you want to fact check me on this in the comments you can become a Spinoff member here.

The debate itself will begin very shortly after. We’ve got all the established party candidates for Mt Albert on board, which to recap are Alex Price (Act), Helen White (Labour),  Melissa Lee (National), Qiulae Wong (Opportunity Party), Ricardo Menéndez March (Green Party) and Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri (NZ First). One of the nation’s most esteemed podcasters, Toby Manhire, will be our host and moderator for the evening.

Transport and housing loom as big issues for the Mt Albert electorate. It’s home to four train stations, along with the 4000-home Carrington development. But just like everywhere else, residents are concerned about the cost of living, the economy and health. We’ll be covering those as well.

I’ll be blogging all the zingers, gotchas, slip-ups, stammers and even cogent arguments for the next couple of hours. Put on your National swanndri, your Green undies or your Labour fare cap and follow along.

OK, The Spinoff’s editor, Veronica Schmidt, has announced the big news: we’ve commissioned our first ever election campaign poll. The Curia poll asked 400 Mt Albert residents who they would have given their candidate and party votes to if the election were held the day before they were polled, and the headline result is kind of a massive bummer for Opportunity. Its leader Qiulae Wong sits in fourth place in the Mt Albert electorate race with just 10% of the vote, behind Labour’s Helen White on 33%, National’s Melissa Lee on 32% and the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March on 14%. On those results, it would need to make it past the 5% party vote threshold to get into parliament. But there’s better news for Op-heads on that front, with 6% of respondents saying they’ll give Opportunity their party vote and 51% saying they’d like to see them in parliament. 

The tight race at the top between National and Labour echoes the 2023 election, where White beat Lee for the seat by just 18 votes. Go here for the full story on the poll results, but here are the basics:

Candidate vote:

• 33% said they would vote for Labour’s Helen White.
• National’s Melissa Lee is right behind her on 32%.
• The Greens Ricardo Menéndez March is at 14%.
• Qiulae Wong is on 10%.
• NZ First’s Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri is at 5%.
• Act’s Alex Price is on 3%.

What about the party vote?

• In Mt Albert, Labour and National are neck and neck, both on 32%.
• The Greens are at 19%.
• Opportunity are over the threshold to make it into parliament at 6%.
• NZ First is also on 6% and Act is on 3%.
• Te Pāti Māori is on 2%. They haven’t announced a Mt Albert candidate.

The candidates are giving their pitches. They each get a minute, and if they go over they get kicked out of the building. 

Act’s Alex Price spends a long time giving biographical details before using the final 10 seconds of his spiel to talk about why he’s standing for Act. For the record, it’s because he believes in economic freedom and the rule of law. The Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March talks mainly about what he achieved this term. One highlight: stopping autistic children being deported. National’s Melissa Lee delivered the National stump speech. She wants YOU to keep more of YOUR money. Labour’s Helen White’s pitch is more memorable. She talks about her connections to Mt Albert, namely that she got married here and got divorced here. When that prompts a bit of laughter, she explains that the divorce “enriches the experience”. “I raised it because it taught me what it’s like to have to keep your kids in the family home.”

But NZ First’s Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri probably wins this round. He gets Toby Manhire to call time off before his speech begins so he can give our moderator a gift. He invokes “our greatest ever foreign minister”, party leader Winston Peters, before saying unlike him, this is his “first rodeo”. He spends the last part of the speech bemoaning residents getting ripped off by the supermarkets and the “Wahs being ripped off by those Aussie referees”. Populism at its finest.

Only one, as it turns out, and that’s Opportunity’s Qiulae Wong. But she’s not expecting to take up the post imminently. “I need to learn the ropes a little bit first.”

Her answer comes as part of a quickfire question round. Other interesting tidbits: only Helen White commits to saving the old Carrington hospital from demolition. Every candidate on the other hand is committing to saving the Pt Chev Bowling Club from demolition. What does that say about society? I don’t know. Alex Price was the only one to admit he had yet to go through the new CRL tunnel – “I have to work for a living and it’s in Greenlane,” said the Act candidate, who’s the CEO of Fertility Associates. Also, Price and NZ First’s candidate  Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri only want your party vote. “Winston needs an army,” Eden-Whaitiri explains. He’s apparently here to deliver it to him in Wellington.

Every poll says cost of living is voters’ number one issue, so how are our candidates going to address it? For Eden-Whaitiri, it’s about buying the BNZ, breaking up the gentailers and breaking up the supermarkets. Wong reiterates Opportunity’s message on groceries, which is that the Commerce Commission needs more powers to ensure competition in the sector. White highlights Labour’s $20 fare cap on public transport. That’s money in your pocket, she says. It’s not a study, like National is promising on breaking up the supermarket duopoly. Neither is it that spectral horror that dogged the last Labour government. “It’s not a working group,” she says. Price says we need to work with the market, not against it. “If we want to address the cost of living we need to talk about wages and salaries for people, we need to have better bodies of education and we need capital, you’re not going to have capital coming into New Zealand if you tax it.”

Melissa Lee interrupts the Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March as he talks about National making cuts to the accommodation supplement while Louise Upston takes a $52,000-a-year accommodation supplement. She talks about National bringing down the number of people in emergency housing. Wong takes Menéndez March’s side, saying they’re being kicked out of their houses and coming to Mt Albert. She also rebukes Price when he points out that rents increases are more flat than they’ve been in a generation. “That’s because people are leaving for Australia,” she says. They may say they’re neutral on who to negotiate with after the election, but Opportunity appears to be aligning with the left blog tonight.

NZ First’s Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri gets the biggest laugh line of the night, but it’s not necessarily for one he wanted to read as a joke. He’s responding to Menéndez March, who’s been pointing out NZ First’s double standards in calling the Greens’ KiwiMart plan “communism by stealth” while promising to buy the BNZ. “It’s not a nationalisation, it’s a buy-back,” says Eden-Whaitiri.

Suffice to say the crowd’s not necessarily seeing a clear difference between the two manoeuvres.

Labour’s candidate is definitely the night’s most passionate speaker. She seems genuinely angry talking about her constituents who are struggling with the cost of living, saying she knows couples who are both working jobs but still needing food parcels in order to get by. “I was an employment lawyer for 30 years and there was huge damage being done by low wages in this country – because of this kind of absolutely barren philosophy. It is not OK to suggest that lowering the minimum wage – it’s absolutely immoral, absolutely.”

Wong backs her up, saying we need a better plan to wring more productivity out of the economy, and right now we don’t have one.

The poll result may not have been ideal, but Opportunity’s leader is the first candidate to be able to name the restaurant behind which The Spinoff held its first ever Mt Albert electorate debate in 2017. That was Satya, for the record. Wong earns a chocolate fish.

Now things are getting more serious, with the topic moving on to homelessness and poverty. Wong says we need a night shelter. Menéndez March interrupts Lee’s response to point out that prime minister Christopher Luxon once referred to lower income New Zealanders as “bottom feeders”. “He did actually apologise for that you know,” she responds. She says you can phrase things poorly in the heat of a debate. For the record, Luxon’s comments were made in the white hot furnace of Kerre Woodham’s show on Newstalk ZB. Meanwhile, Price talks about his job as a teenager of going down with a bucket of Janola scrubbing out urine and faeces from the alcoves of his father’s offices in Henderson. “That’s what the move-on orders are about,” he says, enigmatically.

Things are getting fired up as the candidates continue to debate rough sleeping and poverty. Helen White makes one of the night’s boldest conversational gambits. “We’ve all read the Ezra Klein book that talks about how we need a lot more affordable housing to deal with these sorts of problems,” she says. The book she’s raising is called Abundance, and her point is that supply is part of the solution. One thing her and other left-leaning candidates don’t think is part of the solution: move-on orders. White says the orders are simply, literally moving problems along rather than solving them.

Lee thinks there are no excuses for people being abusive, insisting they should be able to access help or social housing. “It’s not about moving everyone away, it’s about moving the bad behaviour that exists. White obviously disagrees. “They can’t [access social housing]” she says.

Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri hasn’t spoken in some time and Manhire has noticed. “I’m worried about Sheldon,” he says. Eden-Whaitiri says he has just been waiting to be given the go-ahead to speak. “I always respect the referee,” he says. If you haven’t picked it up by now, he used to be a rugby referee. Now he’s using his newfound speaking time to talk about the perils of immigration. Wong immediately rebukes him, saying that type of rhetoric can be dangerous. Lee agrees, saying she’s been told to go home to Korea. Here’s that teal alliance we’ve been hearing about. Menéndez March is getting on board as well, condemning the “racist rhetoric” he sees spewing out of NZ First.

Manhire challenges Eden-Whaitiri to condemn his leader telling Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go home”. Eden Whaitiri refuses, saying he doesn’t have an opinion, and repeating that line about sometimes things getting said in the heat of debate. Now Price has pivoted talking about fertility rates. It’s slightly worrying, but his point in the end is a relatively liberal one. He’s saying all of us, in the end, are migrants. 

Toby Manhire has challenged every candidate to rank their leader out of 10. Predictably, everyone is going with 10, including Melissa Lee. “Even when he demoted you from cabinet?” asks Manhire. Lee says that’s the great thing about being in a democracy: we can get along even when we might disagree. But wait. Helen White has gone for a nine! Wtf is going on? I’m adrift. She says it’s because Chris Hipkins himself would say he could always improve. He listens, White says, and that’s a good thing.

Eden-Whaitiri gets things back on track, offering Winston Peters a 10. “That’s a fail,” says Manhire. “Anything less than 12 is a red card.” The candidate is trying to recover, listing all the great things about Peters. “Don’t we just love him on the world stage,” he enthuses. “The pinstripe suits!” Wong, disappointingly, refuses to rate herself.

There’s a clear split when it comes to assessing the nation’s mojo, which Christopher Luxon has vowed to restore to the heights it reached when he was the chief executive of an airline. Lee ranks our mojo seven out of 10. Price gives it an eight. Eden-Whaitiri delivers a six, but adds the proviso that the mojo will start flowing along with the oil and gas we discover in the depths of the Pacific. White and Menéndez March are predictably less sunny about the nation’s current butter-starved state. 

The debate is winding up with each candidate giving a treatise on hope. What do we all have to hope for? What is this life all about? When will I be able to buy a single gram of mince again? White is the most direct. Hope will be restored, she says, when we “kick this government out”. Lee, for some reason, disagrees. She begins her answer on hope by pointing out that Labour raised the national debt from $60 billion to $180 billion. “National will be very safe,” she says, before concluding with her ultimate thesis statement. “Melissa Lee for candidate vote, party vote National.”

Menéndez March says hope will rest on overhauling this country’s politics and economy, and that’s why we should probably vote for the Green party, which wants to achieve those aims. Price is talking about how we are now in the “Asian century”. As a country in the South Pacific with close ties to China, “we’re in the right time and the right place,” he says. We just need to vote Act to ensure we have the economy in place to take advantage.