Independent or party aligned? For good candidates it doesn't matter
An AI-generated image of a voting paper being dropped into a ballot box.
Every time local government elections roll around there emerges like clockwork a discussion on the role of political parties in local democracy. Unlike Parliament, political parties haven’t quite managed to entrench themselves in our local government system, though not through a lack of trying from some of them. Even in our major metropolitan centres the influence of established political parties, while greater than elsewhere, is still limited. So what’s going on then?
What got me thinking about this was a tweet from Thomas Nash, a Green Party councillor on Greater Wellington Regional Council who was commenting on an opinion piece about the underperformance of local government elected representatives from former ACT Party MP an minister Heather Roy who briefly mused about the possible benefits of political party vetting of local government candidates.
As a party aligned councillor, it should come as no great surprise that Nash is a fan of candidates standing for councils being affiliated to a political party. In fact, he went so far as to advocate it as essentially a form of gatekeeping on who might decide to run for office. The issue with this is that political parties have not covered themselves in glory with their ability to vet their candidates in recent years, nor necessarily about the probity of their selection processes in general. Or, if you look across the Tasman, political parties can stuff things up entirely and fail to nominate their selected candidates at all. So the idea that political parties is some sort of quality assurance is dubious at best.
There’s also this notion that being endorsed by, or being affiliated with a political party provides voters with an easy way to know the values of a given candidate. Setting aside the elitist sentiment that voters are simple beings that this line of thinking infers, a quick glimpse at voting records at councils shows that this is pretty meaningless too. Wellington City Council provides a couple of great examples. Green Party endorsed Mayor Tory Whanau has gone against the party’s long-held opposition to asset sales with her proposal to sell Wellington City Council’s stake in the city’s airport, while Councillor Iona Pannett who was effectively booted from the Greens’ selection as a result of her voting record going against the party’s values.
Proponents of party alignment also often cast those identifying themselves as independents as not being honest or open about their own party affiliations. Now I don’t doubt for a second that this happens, especially as the National Party doesn’t run or endorse local government candidates and there are more than a few National Party people who are currently in local government offices, or have come through the ranks of local government. In Auckland there’s the Communities and Residents ticket that, while nominally independent, is very intertwined with the same people who make up the Auckland branches of the National Party, but beyond that there’s really no established right wing local government political party presence.
However, from my experience and from having followed local government for some time, most independents are just that. Political parties simply aren’t mass movements in New Zealand like they are in other parts of the world, and the chances are candidates aren’t members or associated with them at all.
Of course, it would be remiss at this point to not point out that in Wellington City’s 2022 election both Paul Eagle and Tory Whanau both ran as independents while carrying endorsements from Labour and the Greens respectively. Depending on the logic you’re using, Eagle and Whanau were either being duplicitous in using the title independent, or they were offering a genuine commitment to operate independently of any political party, and I think it’s fair to give them both the benefit of the doubt on that.
On the flipside, detractors of party alignment are happy to turn these arguments around. For example, they’d be quick to argue that political party affiliation or endorsement requires an adherence to toeing the party line (despite this having been demonstrated above to not being the case). Likewise, they often like to portray independent candidates as being somehow beyond party politics and ideologies, and cast shade and attempt to police anyone who dares to use the independent label while having been endorsed by a party as being dishonest about their use of the term.
These detractors of party alignment often try to make non-party aligned candidates out as somehow being paragons of pragmatism, that they’re free to advocate unapologetically for their community without regard to party loyalties, and that their votes are decided by the merits of the evidence rather than political considerations. I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve read or heard “political parties shouldn’t be on council” thrown around in this regard.
Of course, this is nonsense too. Independent candidates just like the rest of us, and regardless of whether they have some secret party alignment or not, will still have pre-existing preferences about how local government should operate and what its priorities should be. Nobody is an island in this regard.
However, just as it’s unfair to taint party affiliated candidates as automatons for a given political party, it’s also unfair to infer that independent candidates are automatically hiding some secret political party agenda when most of them won’t be.
For what it’s worth, I think that being endorsed by or running on a party ticket comes with pros and cons that ultimately net themselves out.
On the one hand, endorsement by a party or running on its ticket will typically give you access to a ready network of resources and volunteers to help with your campaign. To a point it makes your pitch to voters sijmpler too because they will associate you to some extent with the wider political party in Parliament (or outside of it as may be the case).
On the other hand, having a party endorsement or affiliation can be a turn off to many voters and automatically put you at a disadvantage in terms of winning their support. It can also limit your ability to add nuance to your pitch to voters, as ending up in policy positions contrary to the wider party’s stance is going to be problematic for you - and Labour’s three waters reform was a good example of this with Labour endorsed or aligned councillors around the country last triennium finding themselves in a spectacularly awkward position. Likewise, if the wider party is facing popularity issues, you too might be caught up in them, or if they’re in government face a protest vote against you given you’re seen as their proxy.
As a non-aligned independent, you don’t have the same ready made access to those networks and resources. There’s no email database, no volunteer pool, no ready made branding for you. You have to do this all yourself. You also have to articulate your own vision and values without being able to fall back on ready made talking points from a wider organisation. Similarly, there’s a limited ability to ride any wave of popularity (or protest) that might exist or be building.
However, being an independent gives you a lot more flexibility in how you approach things. You aren’t bound by pre-existing party positions and neither will voters necessarily put in you a specific box based on the party ticket or endorsement they’ve seen associated with you. You can explain your vision for your community and values which you’ll bring to the council entirely on your own terms without having to worry that you’re going to trip up on anything. If you’re particularly astute, you can position yourself politically to take advantage of whatever the prevailing mood of the community is towards whoever is in government at the time to be that fearless advocate that they often want.
Naturally, this is a very simplified take on it the dynamics at all and good candidates, party aligned or independent, are going to make the most of either situation.
For perspective and transparency, I’ll share my situation.
When I ran for Kāpiti Coast District Council and its mayoralty in 2019 I did so as an independent because that was the best way to describe my personal politics which typically sit to the left of Labour on most issues bar a few centre-right economic ones, and that was reflected in the 49 policy points I released during the campaign. I’d worked in Parliament for the Fifth National Government so was open about that in my advertising material. It was a source of plenty of amusement to me during the campaign when someone who pipe up with “Gwynn worked for John Key” as if I was some secret National Party sleeper agent, to which I’d point out my left leaning policy programme and the fact I’d voted and donated at that point to National, Labour, and the Greens over the years. My volunteer team was made up of party members from National, Labour, and the Greens, which was a nice reflection of my worldview too.
As it was, I ended up less than a thousand votes away from the mayoralty, and was the top districtwide council candidate by a country mile, which all in all was a good result for a first time candidate who had nearly zero public profile prior to the campaign and self-funded it all.
Ultimately, I think the pros and cons of party alignment in local government net themselves out and there’s far greater factors at play that influence the outcome.
For example, we saw both Efeso Collins in Auckland and Paul Eagle in Wellington bottle what were initially considered as their elections to lose. While both ran as independents, Collins carried the endorsements of Labour, the Greens, and outgoing Mayor Phil Goff, while Eagle was endorsed by Labour. Their campaigns are widely considered as disasters. Collins managed 30.9 percent of the vote compared to Wayne Brown’s 44.9 percent, a huge gap. Eagle ended up in third behind incumbent Andy Foster with just 22.18 percent of the vote to Tory Whanau’s eventual 52.4 percent.
In Auckland, despite having what was on paper a libertarian background, Wayne Brown successfully positioned himself as an independent without any party endorsement who has proven happy to fire pot shots off wherever was politically advantageous and ultimately romped home over the centre-rights initially preferred candidate of Viv Beck. In Wellington, Tory Whanau - who ran as an independent too - managed to make her Green Party endorsement work for her as she navigated a sense of dissatisfaction with then Mayor Andy Foster’s leadership of council, and both Paul Eagle’s candidacy and the then Labour Government.
Basically, good candidates will make the most of whatever position they find themselves in and will leverage the advantages while mitigating the disadvantages. Wearing a badge of political party affiliation or carrying a shield of sanctimony for being an independent isn’t going to help you much if you’re a poor candidate. Voters aren’t stupid. They make their decisions based on a range of factors, of which in local government party affiliation, endorsement, or independence is just one small contributor.
As for whether party politics have a place in local government? Of course they do. It’s an election. Voters are making a political choice. The whole thing is political despite people sometimes nobly trying to pretend they’re electing something akin to a company’s board of directors. Political parties are going to have some sort of role if they feel so inclined by the very nature of the people who get involved with them, especially in larger centres were there’s the critical mass to make it worth the effort for parties to invest in backing candidates council elections. That’s just the nature of our modern democracy. So long as it’s helping participation in and engagement with local democracy, it’s a good thing.
But we just as we shouldn’t pretend not having political parties leads to some mythical utopia of purely pragmatic decision making, we shouldn’t also delude ourselves by thinking that political parties are some sort of panacea for raising the qualify of or making candidates more transparent. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hinders, but neither approach is the be all and end all.
