A meeting with a prominent mayoral candidate was influential in the decision not to run this year. David Williams reports.
Judging by what’s sitting on his fence, John Minto’s not sitting on the fence.
As you’d expect from the veteran activist, the boundary at his property in Waltham, Christchurch, is adorned by banners shouting “MAKE POVERTY HISTORY”, and “SAVE THE MACKENZIE”. Palestinian flags flutter above the swimming pool.
But there are also placards for city mayoral candidate David Meates, the former Canterbury District Health Board chief executive. Meates and incumbent councillor Phil Mauger, whose family business is contracting and property development, have been anointed frontrunners. Minto’s name, meanwhile, is absent from the race.
For once, there’s the chance to write a story about what he’s not doing, as opposed to what he is.
Sitting on the sidelines is a big change for Minto, who rose to prominence in protests against the 1981 Springbok rugby tour, and, in the past 11 years, was a national figure in the now-dormant Mana Party.
After moving to Christchurch in early 2015 to be closer to wife Bronwen Summers’ children and grandchildren, he contested the past two mayoral races, in 2016 and 2019, with the main aim of pressuring the council to retain its share in big assets like maintenance, property, and facility management company Citycare Group, Lyttelton Port Company, Christchurch International Airport, fibre broadband company Enable, and electricity lines company Orion.
“I stood as a KOA candidate: Keep Our Assets Canterbury,” says Minto, sitting at the dining table, sunlight streaming onto a copy of the daily newspaper, The Press, being read by Summers. “And so it’s always a KOA decision rather than mine.”
In 2016, sparked by the spectre of council assets being sold, Minto took on incumbent Lianne Dalziel and was trounced, but gained a respectable 14.6 percent of the vote, or 13,117 votes. (Dalziel, in her third term, is stepping down at this election.)
Aside from assets sales, KOA’s main issues were climate change, clean rivers, affordable housing, increasing wages, and rebalanced rates. For the past year or so, the group has mulled whether a candidate needs to stand, to push the issues further.
“I think we made a lot of progress on them,” Minto says.
He runs through them.
The assets are intact. Council’s social houses damaged or demolished after the earthquakes have almost all been rebuilt. Free public transport is becoming mainstream – “I think we will have it in Christchurch within a couple of years”.
Work’s being done on the rivers but the council still needs an overall strategy. The biggest omission, he says, is a living wage for every person working for the council, including contractors.
Minto’s point is the ideas pushed by KOA over the years have gained traction.
“Then we heard David Meates was standing,” he says, and so KOA organised a meeting with him, about five or six weeks ago. “It was around the table here, actually.”
He goes on: “After that, we decided that we wouldn’t run a candidate, we wouldn’t stand this year, that we would support his candidacy because it was a continuation of the policies which we’ve raised.”
Meates confirms he attended the meeting, stating it’s one of several he’s had with groups exploring his views and perspectives. “I was not looking to adopt or pick up any particular policies from anyone.”
He adds: “I’ve ruled out asset sales.”
Newsroom asks Meates if Minto not standing helps his campaign. “I hadn’t really thought of it like that.”
To highlight his fiercely apolitical stance, the former health chief throws off talk of grabbing votes from the left by talking up how he’s spoken to business groups and individuals who support the National Party.
Very middle of the road, you’d think, which makes him an interesting choice for Minto to back.
Minto, 69, is a retired high school teacher who comes across as thoughtful and mild-mannered. When asked a question he’ll often look away, towards the floor, as he considers the response.
But he’s also happy to dispense advice, even to Meates, and cut to the quick without sparing feelings, like those of incumbent mayor Dalziel, who he dismisses as a “placeholder for business”.
“It is just so untrue,” Dalziel responds. “I was supported by communities as much as I was business.”
One of Minto’s main criticisms of her council was the slow pace of the social housing rebuild. But Dalziel says it was always a given, and there were delays, especially because of Covid. “I'm really proud of the fact that our city is the second-largest social housing provider in the country.”
(The council’s head of city growth and property Bruce Rendall says in a statement the “aggregate total of facilitated properties” is just shy of the pre-earthquake total, of 2649 units. “There are currently 150 units in either the construction phase or in the development pipeline with expected completion dates in 2023.”)
Minto is adept at spinning simplistic narratives to suit his world view. On particular topics, he gets on a roll, and an activist exasperation creeps in, at an amplified volume.
For example, the decision by all but three councillors to find another $150 million to build Te Kaha, the city’s yet-to-be built, $683 million stadium.
“When you get people at council, who argue line-by-line for every dollar that’s spent – they want to save money, they want to save ratepayers’ money – and then they want to blow the whole lot on this on this fricking gold-plated, $200 million extra on top of what was already [being spent], I think it’s fricking ridiculous.”
That’s a crack at a group of councillors aligned with mayoral candidate Mauger.
When Newsroom asked Mauger yesterday about his views on asset sales, he repeats the phrase: “I will go over the books line-by-line to see where we can save money.”
Interestingly, his line on asset sales echoes Meates: “Rather than sell assets, I will look to grow the value of our city’s assets.”
On the stadium itself, Mauger points to huge public support and vows the stadium won’t become a burden for Christchurch ratepayers.
Minto’s advice to mayoral candidates is to pour more money into public assets, like establishing its own bus company, and working closely with the regional council, ECan, to improve public transport patronage.
“There’s a lot of cohesion that comes from just people sharing the same spaces together,” he says. “Public transport is one of those.”
The shame is, as Minto points out, the council used to own a bus company, Red Bus, which it sold in 2020.
Cohesion needs to be the next mayor’s priority, he argues. Without it, you end up with a balkanised Christchurch, “where you’ve got the east, where people are still complaining about their bloody roads and footpaths, and you’ve got the west of the city, which are demanding a stadium”. (There’s that simplistic narrative at work.)
Decision-making needs to be more localised to communities, Minto says, giving far greater power to neutered community boards controlling “piddling little” money. The boards “provide a nominal face for a community in a neoliberal city”.
This vision jars with what’s on display while sitting at Minto’s table.
The background beat to our interview is nails being hammered into a new greenhouse, being built from second-hand windows. A neighbour pops over to suggest they put a vent in the roof. Later, a friend of Summers' delivers a bag of leftover supermarket bread rolls. (They are offered to, and gratefully accepted by, this correspondent.)
Minto makes a compelling, if currently unworkable, case for local decision-making.
“Every community should be able to decide whether we’re going to have bottle stores, whether we’re going to have fast food outlets, we’re going to have pokie machines. If the community says no, that community has to be respected.
“And I know that some of those things are national policies rather than local city policies, but the city has to advocate hard for them.”
As much as he enjoys the cut and thrust of political debates, Minto isn’t a fan of how Kiwis seem to vote.
“We don’t vote for candidates we want, we vote to keep the other side out.”
He complained of that in Auckland, as voters coalesced around incumbent Len Brown to block John Palino, and in Christchurch’s 2019 mayoral race, as Dalziel secured a third term over her closest rival, businessman Darryll Park. Minto finished third of 11 candidates three years ago, with 9827 votes.
In this year’s Minto-less mayoral race in Christchurch there are 11 candidates, including the Wizard of NZ, Ian Brackenbury Channell. (“This city badly needs cheering up,” he lamented on Facebook.)
Minto sees this race very much shaped like the last – two main candidates, Meates and Mauger, followed by some nice people, and the rest. “Many of them are not there for any discernible reason.”
What worries Minto about Meates, his horse in this race, is the blandness of the message. He points to the billboard on his fence, which spruiks Meates’ “vision, leadership, and something else”. (For the record, it’s “experience”.)
“People don’t respond to that,” Minto says. “People respond at an emotional level.”
He recalls a recent visit to the Linwood pool, and a chat he had with three tradies, who recognised him and asked if he was standing again.
“They said, oh, ‘Phil Mauger’s the man; he’s going to do the business’.”
Minto countered, saying jumping on your bulldozer wasn’t always the first thing a local politician should do. (Mauger is something of a vigilante. Last year, he was fined $300 for digging an unauthorised trench to fix flooding in the eastern suburb of Bexley. The fix cost the council $30,000.)
When he suggested to the trio Meates might be the best person to lead Christchurch, the tradies “had nothing with which they could label him”.
On the other hand, they knew what Mauger stood for: getting things done.
“That, I think, is the challenge that David Meates has to counter,” Minto says. “He’s got to assume a role, a persona, where people can sum him up in three words.”
He goes on: “That image gets cut-through, and David Meates hasn’t got cut-through.”
Minto has said as much to Meates via email.
The former DHB chief tells Newsroom he knows there are parts of the city in which he’s well-known, some parts he’s less well-known, and others where he’s not known. “That always remains the challenge, of continuing to get yourself out and in front of as broad a range of groups as possible.”
Shades of 2016
To employ my own simplistic narrative, Christchurch’s mayoralty has the slight resemblance of the 2016 presidential election in the United States: a populist candidate with snappy slogans versus an establishment figure whose values and policies aren’t as memorable, perhaps.
(Mauger has proved himself to be unorthodox, by donating money to four city councillors, and naming them as part of a group of 13 like-minded council candidates. He also made a mis-step in calling for a change to airport noise boundaries but not disclosing his family’s property interests.)
“Most people don’t have time or inclination to look in detail at what candidates say,” Minto says. He points to the newspaper. “There was a big write-up in the paper on the weekend, and 95 percent of people in crisis won’t read that; they won't know about it.”
Minto says Meates has a huge amount of integrity, and presence, and the ability to run a complex organisation. Hundreds lined the streets when he left the DHB, resigning after an incredibly tough fight for health services in this province against hard-headed bureaucrats in Wellington.
“He can bring that same expertise here to fight for Christchurch, to get value for money for everything we do,” Minto says. “Somehow he has to get that message out to the people of Christchurch.”
So, what next for John Minto, retiree? He coordinates the Palestine Solidarity Network, and is a keen tramper. He’s been so busy he hasn’t done any relief teaching.
I tell Minto my conspiracy theory about him was he might be missing the mayoral race to ready himself for a return to national politics. “No, no, no,” he chortles.
Minto maintains he stands to promote issues, spark debate, and to get people talking and thinking. He certainly didn’t stand for mayor to become mayor, he says.
“Bronwen said to me, ‘If you win the mayoralty, I’m moving to the West Coast’. And I said, if I win the mayoralty I’m moving with you.”
So is he done with politics? His response might set some people’s teeth on edge.
“No, I’m never done with politics; I’m always involved in politics.”
At least he’s not sitting on the fence.
