Barry Soper wildly wrong on Whanau's election
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UPDATE: It looks like the editors at Newstalk ZB were paying attention to the storm of criticism around Soper’s column, as they’ve now removed the opening paragraphs of it and put a correction in place. It was such a howler that the whole column should have been binned and an apology issued. Handily, Greater Wellington councillor Thomas Nash has preserved the horrendous paragraphs for posterity.
Veteran journalist and now regular Newstalk ZB opinion columnist Barry Soper has had a long and storied career, but on Wednesday night he published an absolute howler of a column about Wellington mayor Tory Whanau. Soper wrongly claimed that Tory Whanau’s 2022 election win was only possible because of Wellington’s Single Transferrable Vote system.
A quick check of the 2022 Wellington mayoral election results show that Tory Whanau would have romped home on first preferences along. Whanau’s 42.56 percent of first preferences versus the 16.57 percent for Paul Eagle would be considered an absolute landslide under the First Past the Post system that Soper evidently is pining for.
For comparison, Wayne Brown’s 44.9 percent to Efeso Collins’ 30.9 percent in winning the Auckland mayoralty was widely considered a landslide. Whanau’s 42.56 percent in first preferences was more than double that managed by either Paul Eagle or incumbent Andy Foster (and easily more than both combined).
In fact, Whanau’s first preference margin of 25.99 points was the biggest for any candidate since the 2004 mayoral election (where Kerry Prendergast’s first preference margin was 27.04 points), which was when Wellington first moved away from FPP.
Whanau won the election because she was a far better campaigner and voters judged her to be a far better candidate than either of her two main rivals.
In case Soper needs reminding:
Andy Foster was the incumbent mayor whose council had been mired in infighting for most of the triennium, had spent tens of thousands on an exclusive leadership retreat that caused a scandal, and things got so bad that the council had to initiate its own governance review in an attempt to get ahead of growing calls for central government intervention.
Paul Eagle’s campaign was flat, the local Labour Party was deeply divided on his candidacy being forced on them, and there was a perception that his candidacy was the Labour Party trying to shuffle him out of Parliament given his career there was going nowhere. Eagle’s candidacy was so bad that he only narrowly avoided finishing fourth behind Ray Chung who was a complete unknown to most Wellingtonians.
It’s really not surprising to see why Whanau won so comprehensively.
Barry Soper has been a feature of New Zealand’s political media scene since long before I was born. He’s well liked and well respected by many in the media, while many of those in power regularly chat to him off the record about the issues of the day. Given all that, there’s really no excuse for someone of his knowledge and experience making such a basic error. It’s also beyond belief that nobody at Newstalk ZB carried out even the most basic of fact checks on his column. Defending it as an opinion piece, when he’s so clearly factually wrong, won’t be credible.
With trust in our media continuing to rapidly decline, established media organisations such as Newstalk ZB and experienced journalists like Barry Soper need to do much better.
