Wellington Bays is a new electorate this election, but its history is a classic story of where the old Labour Party of manual workers, trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals came to die.
Now, this election it is a microcosm of the way the small parties are likely to play an outsized role in the result while National and Labour grapple with their identities.
The electorate is made up of parts of the former seats of Labour legends Bob Semple, Arnold Nordmeyer, Peter Fraser and more recently Gerald O’Brien, Frank O’Flynn, Annette King, Fran Wilde, Marion Hobbs and Grant Robertson.
Solid red.
A Political Shift
That is, it was until the last election when the two main electorates which make up the new seat, Rongotai and Wellington Central went Green.
Labour lost the core part of the electorate, Semple’s old seat, Rongotai, to National in 1966, but it was always a knife-edge result until Peter Neilson won it back for Labour in 1981.
Then in 1993 Dame Annette King won the seat back for Labour and, by attending virtually every school or club event in the electorate, won the hearts (and votes) of the electorate to the point that, at her last election in 2014, she had a majority of 9617.
But King was a one-off; the Labour Party beat National by only 1578 on the party vote.
The biggest employers in the electorate now are the hospital, the airport and Peter Jackson’s film companies.
It is no longer a Labour seat; Green MP Julie Anne Genter won it at the last election.
But now, she faces a direct challenge not just from Labour but also the Opportunity Party.
She believes she beat Labour’s Fleur Fitzsimons last election because Labour had taken the electorate for granted.
“I think that no party from the left ever tried to win the seat before and so I think it’s a solid left electorate that would never vote for a National Party candidate and that’s why it was perceived to be a safe quote-unquote Labour seat, but it’s actually I think open to different representatives and parties from the Left,” she said.
But she now faces a major challenge from the Opportunity Party, who are running a heavily credentialled environmentalist, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, the just-resigned CEO of the New Zealand branch of the World Wildlife Fund.
Labour, in turn, have selected the high-profile Combined Trade Unions economist, Craig Renney, as their candidate.
He will get the endorsement of Annette King, who is coming from her home in Australia to open his campaign next month.
And National has a Wellington lawyer, Kuruna Muthu, as its candidate.
In 2002 Muthu, a Tamil migrant from India, confronted Winston Peters on the steps of Parliament to protest an attack on Asian migrants that Peters had made at his party’s annual conference.
With the divisions among the three progressive parties, it is entirely possible that Muthu could come through the middle to win the seat.
Ultimately, though, this is a test for Labour. Simply, can it survive in the face of two other centre-left parties, one of which wants a more left-wing big-government approach to policy and the other which wants a more bipartisan approach.
Being the sitting MP gives Julie-Anne Genter some advantages, including access to the Government. When she spoke to POLITIK yesterday, she had just come from a meeting which included Police Minister Mark Mitchell about the problems created by rough sleepers in the suburb of Newtown.
Julie Anne Genter & The Green Grassroots Campaign
At her campaign launch in the Lyall Bay Surf Club with Cook Strait breakers rolling into the beach for a backdrop, she was surrounded by young enthusiastic volunteers.
She is relying on them to deliver this election.
“I’ve just got such a huge team of amazingly committed volunteers; I’ve never seen the level of volunteer turnouts that we have this year,” she told POLITIK.
“We’re just getting out talking to and listening to as many voters as we can one on one, because that’s the best way to understand what people’s aspirations are, what their desires are, and I think generally the people in this electorate are very aligned to green values and are happy with the engagement they’ve seen this term from their local MP.”
Genter says unapologetically that the Greens are a left-wing party. She advocates Government-led solutions for many of the problems facing the electorate, from housing to setting up a state insurance company to keep insurance affordable in an electorate which is frequently battered by ocean storms and floods.
“There’s a real risk that global reinsurance companies won’t be there for us and I think one of the harder things about the current insurance situation is that when things go wrong, they’ll often just reinstate and not do the extra funding that might be needed to prevent future problems because the insurance company can always just decline you in the future,” she said.
“So they don’t have quite the long-term investment approach that we need, and I think there probably will be a role for New Zealand to look at a public option.”
The Tax Debate: Wealth Tax vs. Capital Gains vs. Land Tax
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a party looking for more Government activity in the economy, Genter believes the main issue that will get her cut through is tax.
“I hear that on the doors all the time that people want to see fundamental reform of our tax system so that we can afford to invest in the infrastructure and public services that we know are needed,” she said.
And this is where she meets Labour head on.
Their candidate, Craig Renney, a former Treasury economist, adviser to Grant Robertson and currently the Combined Trade Unions economist, is a tax expert.
He was deputy chair of Labour’s Policy Council when it rejected the idea of a wealth tax in favour of a capital gains tax.
The Greens are advocating a tax of 2.5 per cent on all net wealth above $10 million.
Renney agrees that the tax system needs to change.
“We’ve had tax review after tax review in this country telling us that we need to deliver a capital gains tax,” he said.
“We have a simple, straightforward capital gains tax on the table that will help pay for something that we know desperately needs paying for, which is the health service.”
He is not a fan of wealth taxes.
“We’ve had a few tax working groups now, and a few expert groups have looked at a wealth tax and have rejected it as a proposal,” he said.
“If I look around the world, a wealth tax is being used by a decreasing number of countries.
“And the closest example would probably be Spain, and the Spanish example draws a very small amount of income, much smaller than what is being proposed by the Green Party.”
However, the most radical tax proposal in the Rongotai campaign is that of the Opportunity Party, which wants to impose a 1.75 per cent land tax on property and at the same time, in what has been a consistent policy since the party was founded in 2020, institute a Universal Basic Income of up to $390 a week.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said that is sufficient to rule them out of any post-election deal with National, who do not support any tax increases.
Their Rongotai candidate Kayla Kingdon-Bebb is not too concerned about Luxon’s comments.
“I think it’s a really impoverished view of our tax policy, for one, that our kind of, the Opportunity Tax Reset platform has three components to it, and the land tax is only one leg of it, and the policy package itself doesn’t make sense if you advance only one leg,” she said.
“And so these sort of very simplistic and trite comments from National and others that we are going to just raise land tax and nothing else, really obscures what the impact of the policy is, which is not only to simplify our sort of social benefit system but also to drive investment into a productive economy and to shift us away from property speculation,” she said.
Renney agrees with the intent to shift us away from property speculation even if he doesn’t agree with Opportunity’s approach.
National’s candidate Kuruna Murthu is stuck with his party’s no tax increases policy and has to campaign very much on the defensive over the coalition’s record.
Coastal Exposure
Over the past fortnight or so, voters in Rongotai have been receiving their first bills from the water entity, Tiako Wai, that National developed to replace Three Waters.
The bills, which are up 13.3 per cent on last year to average around $2400 a year, have been a shock for many in the electorate, particularly those who live on the south coast and have had to endure the pollution from the broken-down Moa Point sewage treatment plant.
Muthu tends to blame the previous Government for part of the problem, though he does not temper his language, talking about Tiaki Wai and its history of burst pipes and broken treatment plants.
“The Tiaki Wai fiasco is something that people are going to be talking about, and it’s going to be an issue, I’m sure,” he said.
“And when we go out to the community, they are going to be asking all the candidates about what we are going to do about that.
“It is a local council issue, but again, nationally inherited from Three Waters.”
But the Moa Point breakdown and the burst pipes, along with more frequent flooding in parts of the electorate, have focused attention on climate change and infrastructure.
Muthu believes that climate change is not only real but having a direct impact on Rongotai.
The south coast is one of the parts of New Zealand most exposed to sea level rise, and in 2020 NIWA estimated homes there would find it difficult or impossible to get home insurance after 20230.
“National’s policy is to acknowledge the challenges we face,” he said.
“One in a hundred year events are happening in one in ten years or even every year.
“So the solution is to invest in the infrastructure so that we can not only just strengthen the coastline but also build infrastructure that can withstand such events.
“And so that infrastructure investment is what National Party is focusing on.”
Just a fraction of centre-left friction
However, National’s climate change policy is what motivated Kingdon-Bebb to stand for the Opportunity Party.
She had been an advisor to the Greens Conservation MInister Eugenie Sage and had a closeup view of the bipartisan agreement that led to the passage of the 2050 net zero legislation.
(Earlier versions incorrectly said she was an advisor to Climate Change Minister James Shaw)
One of the things that stood out was the willingness of National’s spokesperson, Todd Muller, to adopt a bipartisan approach with Shaw.
(a previous reference to Dame Kerry Prendergast has been ommitted — she is not involved with the Opportunity party)
“I do think there’s a need for something different in New Zealand’s political makeup,” said Kingdon-Bebb.
“And I think for me what that is is a pragmatic, centrist, environmental voice that can work with either major party and basically be a moderating influence on either one of them.”
Craig Renney is sceptical.
“The Opportunity Party is now selling itself specifically as a centrist party,” he said.
“If you’ve seen their recent proposals to cut what appears to be thousands of workers from the Ministry of Social Development, IRD, MB, MPI and a range of other organisations on top of the cuts that have already been proposed, that doesn’t look like a political party that’s representing a Wellington base.
“And if I look at the proposed changes that they’re making in terms of their universal basic income and land tax, again, these don’t look like the proposed changes that the people of Wellington Bays would benefit from.
“I think Wellington Bays needs a great local MP and when I think about the MP that it needs, I think of Annette King, and I think that’s my job. That’s what I want to do. My job is to turn up, listen to the people of Wellington Beers, listen to their needs, and then go and represent them.
“Not to do anything else, not to tell them what I think, not to talk about what I know, but actually to go and represent them.”
Muthu also stresses the need for a local perspective on politics in Wellington Bays.
“I know it intimately because I’ve lived here for more than twenty-five years, brought up my children here and my wife Chitra has a GP clinic here,” he said.
Calling Peters out
But one issue that Muthu is passionate about is not just local but national, and that is Winston Peters and racism.
He first confronted Peters about a racist speech he made to a New Zealand First Convention back in 2002.
About a dozen protesters and MPs met on Parliament steps at lunchtime to oppose Mr Peters’ recent speeches claiming that refugees are restricting New Zealanders’ access to health.
Peters tried to speak to the group but the organiser, Karuna Muthu, shouted him down so he gave up.
Chanting “Stop racism”, Muthu pursued Peters to the top of Parliament’s steps.
He is amazed that he still has to call Peters out.
“It looks like twenty-five years have done nothing to Mister Peters other than stoking the fears in small numbers of the population and getting their votes to be in power,” he said.
“He’s a racist, and that is exactly what it is. And his remarks are racist.”
Wellington Bays is headed for a spirited but likely well-mannered political debate over the course of the campaign.
The MP, Julie-Anne Genter, is not fazed by that.
“I love a campaign. I think it’s good that we have people standing and it’ll be a really interesting debate and I think ultimately, it’s up to the people in the community to decide who they want to represent them and that’s not for me to decide,” she said.
“I believe in democracy, so I think it’s good if you have more voices coming forward, putting forward solutions for the community, and then we’ll see what the outcome of the election is.”
Footnote: None of the candidates were born in New Zealand; Genter in the USA; Muthu in India; Renney in Great Britain and Kingdon-Bebb in Canada.
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