Tonight at the Spinoff debate, the rivals meet in what promises to be a thriller contest.
Every election throws up a handful of seat-edge battles. This time, in a field with some tasty prospects – Te Tai Tokerau, for example, or Wellington North – there’s a good case for Mt Albert as the buzziest, most bells-and-whistles electorate race of the lot.
Why? Let us count the ways.
The cutting edge of Auckland
Before we get to the mathematical battle and ballyhoo, the place.
The Mt Albert electorate covers a bunch of inner-west suburbs in New Zealand’s biggest city with a mix of vibrant communities from Sandringham to Pt Chevalier, from Owairaka to Kingsland. New Zealand’s biggest stadium, Eden Park, is just inside the border. The newest temple of outdoor music, the Western Springs Bowl, is just outside, thanks to boundary changes, but spiritually it’s part of the electorate, just ask the swans.
A surge in intensified housing is just around the corner, centred on the Carrington development, alongside the famous hospital structure campaigners are fighting to save. Slated to add homes for 12,000 people, the development pose opportunities and challenges for schools, health providers, businesses and infrastructure.
Home to one mouth of the Waterview tunnel and the onramp to the glittering new City Rail Link, this is the vivid, fastchanging frontier of city-fringe Tāmaki Makaurau.
A nail-biter in 2023
In 2023, the battle was as fierce and the gap as close as rival noodle bars on New North Road.
It took a full month to confirm the winner. Labour’s Helen White was ahead of National’s Melissa Lee by 106 votes on election night. After specials came in, that shrunk to just 20. Lee sought a judicial recount, and the court ultimately declared White the winner by 18 votes. Eighteen votes!
The top three from 2023, for the record:
Helen White, Labour: 13,238
Melissa Lee, National: 13,220
Ricardo Menéndez March, Green: 9,296
In the party vote, National came top, with 12,706 votes, ahead of Labour on 10,341 and the Greens within touching distance on 10,023. Down the field, Act won 2,681; Opportunities (as they were) 1,318; and NZ First 1,219.
A box-office battle in 2026
White won Mt Albert but three candidates won seats, with Lee and Menéndez March heading to parliament as list MPs. To those three sitting members in the race today you can add someone who has been more visible in the campaign than any: Opportunity Party leader Qiulae Wong.
That heralds what’s being called a “four-horse race”. If it were a straight fight with Labour, Lee might reasonably have chucked it in by now, given how National has fared in the polls. But given Menéndez March’s performance last time, and the emergence of Wong, she can reasonably calculate that she could yet break the long red rule – more on that in a moment – and take the seat. After all, under New Zealand’s system you don’t need to win a majority of the votes cast, you just need to win more than anyone else.
Permutations, oh the permutations
Wong is a Mt Albert resident and has been for some years, but there’s no doubt that one of the reasons she and the Opportunity Party are targeting the electorate is with a view to obviating the need to hit the 5% threshold in the party vote. The party has lately been passing that mark in almost all polls – making it comfortably its best period since Gareth Morgan founded TOP a decade ago. If you’ve got a string chart on your wall, you could argue this is good news for Wong’s electorate opponents.
White is 38th on Labour’s list, which puts her in the liminal zone – the party would need to boost its current polling by a few points to get her back in parliament that way.
Lee, meanwhile, is 33rd on the National ranking and, given the strength of the party across electorates, looks unlikely to get in on the list. By some projections, National could win just a handful of list seats, if any at all – a scenario that has been seized upon by some as an invitation to rort the system.
And given the growing appetite from the leaders of the Act and NZ First parties for the “overhang strategy”, do their candidates in Mt Albert, Alex Price and Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri, actually want you to vote for them? We’ll ask them tonight.
A history of prime ministers
Since its creation in 1946, Mt Albert has been won by a Labour candidate every time.
Across the last 16 Mt Albert elections (including byelections), 12 have been won by future or current prime ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern. If you include Auckland West, a constituency covering roughly the same territory that pre-dates Mt Albert, you can add Michael Joseph Savage to the list. He won it seven times.
That’s quite a legacy, especially if you’re representing Labour. Does it mean you get to be prime minister one day if you become MP for Mt Albert? Of course it doesn’t. But it can’t hurt.
The Great Mt Albert Debate will be livestreamed on The Spinoff at 6pm on Wednesday September 30.
