Photo from David Small

We have a week and a half to send in our votes for local body elections and then a few days later we’ll have a dramatically changed city council. Quite an exciting time, but the main barrier to informed voting seems to be that most candidates are doing their utmost to portray themselves as being non-party-affiliated and sometimes even ‘non-political.’

For some reason, this phenomenon seems particularly strong in Christchurch – Wellington have a Green mayor and Labour candidates.

I guess candidates want to cash in on cynicism about politicians, and appeal to our lazy post-modern ‘post-political’ ‘post-ideological’ political ideology. But it does make it rather hard to tell what they’re actually standing for, when nobody really follows local politics, and then all we get from the candidates is vague billboards and a paragraph of meaningless platitudes.

I’ve been looking into what lies behind these meaningless platitudes. Here’s what I’ve found out – four quick questions I think are worth asking:

1. Who voted for Marryatt’s pay rise?
2. What do the parties mean?
3. Who are the independents?
4. How about the mayoral candidates?

1. Who voted for Marryatt’s pay rise?

The seven right-wing councillors who voted for Tony Marryatt’s $68,000 pay rise won’t hold the balance of power anymore after the election – Bob Parker, Sue Wells and Barry Corbett are stepping down.

But the other four are standing again – Jamie Gough and Claudia Reid are standing for I-Citz in Fendalton-Waimairi, and Ngaire Button and Aaron Keown are standing for City 1st in Shirley-Papanui. There’s been some helpful billboard adjustments to remind us of who they are.

Gough is grovelling and asked to be forgiven, pleading youth and inexperience. $538,529 probably doesn’t sound like too much to a member of the Gough family… I guess he didn’t realise how pissed off everyone would be.

Anyway, hopefully voters haven’t forgotten how pissed off we were. James Dann is predicting two of the four will make it back – hopefully it’s less.

2. What do the parties mean?

I-Citz (Independent Citizens) ≃ National

I-Citz are “in essence, the local body version of the National Party.” Their typo-riddled website boasts of formal independence from national political parties, and National officially don’t dabble in local politics (see John’s comment below). But I-Citz’ candidates are all right-wingers such as the aforementioned Jamie Gough, Helen Broughton (who’s taken a better stance on Marryatt than her I-Citz colleagues) and conservative blogger John Stringer.

The People’s Choice = Labour

People’s Choice (formerly Christchurch 2021) was founded by Labour Party members in 1995. They’re open about their connection to Labour on their website.

The current People’s Choice councillors (Yani Johanson, Jimmy Chen, Glenn Livingstone) seem to have done pretty well from what I’ve heard.

City 1st ≃ National/ACT

A new spin-off of I-Citz and the now-defunct City Vision, City 1st try harder than the other parties to act like they’re not a party. I challenged them about this on their Facebook page and while Ngaire Button responded, she didn’t give me a good explanation of what makes her party not really a party. There were a few more comments today, but before I got a chance to read them, they deleted the whole thread and seem to have disabled all comments on their page. Thankfully I was paranoid enough to expect this and save some screenshots.

Anyway, Aaron Keown stood for ACT in the 2008 general election, while Button appears generally right wing and stood for I-Citz last time.

Saying the names of these ‘independent’ parties with a Sean Connery accent seems to make them more accurate.

A ‘network of the like-minded’ ≃ ??? Greens ??? Student Volunteer Army ??? Gap Filler ??? A Paradise Built in Hell ??? Well-meaning yuppies ???

I learned today that apparently four other council candidates are standing as a loose alliance – Raf Manji, Vicki Buck, Ali Jones (more on them below) and Erin Jackson.

They’re not using shared branding and they don’t have a group name, but they know each other, agreed to stand in four different wards, and seem to be into the same kind of things: participatory democracy and budgeting, environmental sustainability, community collaboration, ‘e-democracy’ and social entrepreneurship. All four are endorsed by It’s Our City.

They’re arguably just as much of a party as the others, and perhaps a lot of the same criticisms I’m making to City 1st apply to them too. But I think they’re a more genuine alternative to ‘party politics’ than City 1st – they seem to have a quite different view of how to do democracy. They also seem more genuinely bipartisan – they seem keen to work with Dalziel as mayor, and they seem more left than right, but not in really a traditional sense. But they’re enthusiastically endorsed by the right-leaning Sam Johnson, who’s not standing this time but he’s amongst their group.

At least, this is the impression I got from the one not-very-critical article I read. I’m not sure how reliable that article is (Gen Y? Really? Vicki Buck was mayor when Gen Y-ers were born). Seems interesting though.

3. Who are the independents?

The best way to find out about unaffiliated independents seems to be to google them and see what they’ve done before, and check if they have blogs etc. I can only comment on a few…

Fendalton/Waimairi: Raf Manji seems an intelligent guy with his finger in a lot of pies. My impression was that Faimeh Burke is most famous for her husband, Sir Kerry Burke, a former Labour MP and one of the ECan councillors the government dumped in 2010 (but see Jean-Luc’s comment below).

Shirley-Papanui: Ali Jones is a prominent critic of EQC and advocate for claimants. Jono Corfe is the quizmaster at Chch’s best pub quiz.

Riccarton/Wigram: Vicki Buck is bringing herself back (yet sadly without taking great pun opportunities). She was a popular (independent) mayor from 1989 to 1998 and since then has worked in clean energy and set up Unlimited and Discovery One schools.