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Election power shift? Roy Pilott
editor@thewanakasun.co.nz
ust over a week out from nominations closing, lobby group Stand Up Wānaka is going a step beyond thinking about getting a full field of local body candidates. They are asking: could Wānaka elect a homegrown mayor? The country is dawdling its way to the 2022 local body elections, nominations numbers recorded across the country by election.nz are woeful – and as of Tuesday night there were two nominations for the 16 positions available across the Queenstown Lakes district – and one for the Wānaka ward of Central Otago Health. No nominations were recorded for the Dunstan ward of the Otago Regional Council where there are three seats. The Queenstown Lakes district website, though, had more names, suggesting elections.nz, which has not advertised the election in the Wānaka Sun, is hardly sprinting to the finish line either. It's the lowest level of interest, retiring Mayor Jim Boult told the Sun last week, he could recall. Even the four mayoral candidates have yet to show up on the electionnz.com website. And on the subject of mayoral nominees, “Stand Up Wanaka have been crunching the available numbers and point out that 2022 presents a completely different electoral landscape than our last election in 2019,” Andy Oxley of Wānaka said. She says there is no apparent front runner among the four listed mayoral contenders who all come from the Queenstown-Whakatipu ward. “It is a common misconception that Whakatipu will always outvote Wanaka because their population is greater than the WanakaUpper Clutha ward,” she said. “This certainly was the case a decade ago, but in the last few years our population growth rate appears to be outstripping Whakatipu’s, and, most importantly, both our number of registered voters and our
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Wānaka’s influence in Queenstown Lakes is increasing.
voting turnout is higher than that of Whakatipu.” The thought of Wānaka being involved in a Queenstown Lakes power play is a big jump from the discussions in recent times of Wānaka going it alone. But Stand Up Wānaka notes Wānaka Upper Clutha has 10,771 electors – more than Queenstown-Wānaka, 8912, and ArrowtownKawarau, 7888. And the Department of Internal Affairs says in 2019 Wānaka had a significantly higher voter turnout rate than Queenstown - 57.7 per cent compared to 44.8 per cent.
Playing devil’s advocate as a group committed to lifting interest in the election, Stand Up Wānaka takes that a step further. “If we assume that no Queenstown or Arrowtown Ward voters will vote for a Wānaka mayor and we also assume that the WanakaUpper Clutha ward are prepared to throw their voting power behind a single Wānaka mayoral candidate - as they did in 2019 for a relatively unknown Nik Kiddle who achieved nearly 70 per cent of his votes from Wānaka - then there is a real chance for a Wanaka mayor,” Oxley says. “Another advantage of an Upper Clutha mayor
is that it arguably offers a fairer division of power, with built-in checks and balances. An Upper Clutha mayor and four Upper Clutha councillors would be moderated by seven councillors from the Whakatipu side of the Crown Range.” She said there were complaints that Upper Clutha did not have sufficient say in issues around the QLDC table, yet the community was diffident about coming forward to take advantage of the opportunities an election offered. “Either that or we may see a last minute flurry of nominations next week… but what if we don’t?”
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