Independent council candidates attended 'study group' sessions where they say they were given campaigning advice by Paul Eagle and Diane Calvert. Marc Daalder reports.
Independent council candidates running against Labour candidates say Labour MP and Wellington mayoral hopeful Paul Eagle has been giving them campaign advice.
Eagle, who is running as an independent but has the endorsement of the Labour Party, helped councillor Diane Calvert run advice sessions for first-time independent candidates, according to attendees. Two candidates said the meetings could be described as a "study group".
Eagle denied to Newsroom he had ever given campaign advice to independents running against Labour candidates.
"I was invited to meet for informal coffee meetings with people who were considering running and to share my vision for Wellington," he said. "I happily shared my experiences from 2010 to 2017 as a councillor and nearly 15 years as a council officer with them (and others)."
Independent candidates also told Newsroom that Eagle had encouraged them to run after Labour candidates had already been selected in their wards, with one saying he had been "shoulder-tapped" by the mayoral frontrunner – something Eagle also denied.
For weeks, local Labour members have privately worried Eagle is assembling an "alternative ticket" of independents aligned against housing intensification and cycleways. In the wake of a Q+A poll showing Eagle in a virtual deadlock with Greens-endorsed Tory Whanau, as well as an incident on Tuesday in which Eagle appeared to publicly endorse the independent Calvert over a Labour opponent, those concerns are now being shared more widely.
At a candidates' event in Khandallah on Tuesday evening, a Labour activist asked Eagle and Whanau which candidates in the Wharangi/Onslow-Western ward they most wanted to see on council. Eagle reportedly backed Calvert by name, before saying the rest was up to the voters.
In a statement to Newsroom on Wednesday, Eagle endorsed Labour's Rebecca Matthews explicitly.
"I 100 percent support and endorse all the Labour candidates running for WCC and GWRC. I could have been clearer about my support for Rebecca at the Khandallah event last night but honestly, I assumed it was a given – I’m a Labour-endorsed mayoral candidate and she’s a Labour candidate. We were in the bluest part of the city and it felt like the only Labour voters there were those who came with me and Rebecca."
In addition to his support for Labour candidates, Eagle said he "welcome[d] the mix of independent candidates running for council seats this year too and think many of them are sensible people I could work with, should they be successful". He denied being part "of any independent ticket or team".
For her part, Calvert said the study groups were just "one of many conversations".
"What we do know from a council perspective and what I know after working on council is, to take the city forward, everyone’s got to be prepared to enter into a robust consensus. And it’s no good taking party political sides and having voting blocs, it’s not what Wellingtonians need or want," Calvert said.
Study group sessions
Eagle's friendship with Calvert is no secret.
Tony Randle, one of the independents who attended the study group sessions, described a "link" between the two.
"I think Diane and Paul have got their link to each other, in the sense that they’re supporting each other," he said. While Randle found out about the study group meetings through Calvert, he confirmed that Eagle attended and spoke at several of them.
"One time [Eagle] brought along a few of the old pamphlets and said, 'Look this is good, this is bad'. He’s got some experience too. He did help give people some advice."
He conceded he had encouraged some independents "to link into this group", confirming the accounts of others.
"It was pretty organic, really," Jane O'Loughlin, an independent running in the Pukehīnau/Lambton ward, told Newsroom. "In my recollection, I was chatting to Paul just getting advice about whether to run, as well, and he put me in touch with a few other people who were running."
Tim Brown, an independent running in Motukairangi/Eastern ward, said he was encouraged to run by Eagle and then invited to the group.
"I'd been having a long-term discussion with Paul Eagle about my support for him. It was sort of really out of the conversations with him that I ended up becoming a candidate myself," he said.
"He said we’ll have these informal gatherings because a whole bunch of people around that room are pretty much novices. And we had Diane who was very, very helpful in terms of just suggesting how we could do things."
Inoke Afeaki sought a Labour selection to run for council, but had missed the deadline. He said Eagle encouraged him to run anyway, when a candidate had already been selected by Labour to run in his ward.
"I got a shoulder tap from Paul about three months ago," he said.
Eagle disputed this, saying he had just a single conversation with Afeaki in which he urged him to seek a Labour nomination.
"I did not shoulder tap Inoke to run against a Labour candidate. I know Tim, Jane and Inoke separately and encouraged them to network with each other," he said.
"I have never encouraged anyone to stand against a Labour candidate – I’ve strongly advised against it on a case-by-case basis for every ward. In some cases, people have chosen to still stand, others did not eventuate (such as Matt McLaughlin)."
Everyone Newsroom spoke to agreed that the three or four in-person meetings (and a few others by Zoom) never traversed policy.
"Basically, there is a loose group of independent candidates who have been working together - partly to swap notes on the business of campaigning, and partly in the hope that if we are elected we will have a group of people who can work together effectively," O'Loughlin said.
"I hasten to add it is not a party of any kind and our policy platforms are different, but given the in-fighting that has plagued the WCC in the last term we thought it would be good to get off on the right foot."
Alternative tickets
Afeaki said Eagle had put together a group of people who he thought could work effectively together on council and had encouraged them to run.
"That's a good sign of leadership," Afeaki said.
"He gets a team of people and then communicates well what he wants to do. If you get a group of people that are aligned like that, then you’re gonna get a ton of work done. If you have people who undermine the mayor, which is the current case, that’s where party politics have not sorted themselves out and that’s where the culture of party politics is I think dated."
Labour activists have repeatedly pointed to a minor Facebook page, called 'Lets Fix Wgtn', as evidence of Eagle's supposed alternative ticket. The single post on the page contains endorsements for 10 independent council candidates, including the six who attended the study groups. Some of those mentioned shared the posts to their own social media pages, praising the entire list of candidates.
"Looks like some good candidates on here," Calvert wrote.
When Newsroom asked Afeaki who the others Eagle had "shoulder tapped" were, he referred to the Facebook post.
"I think there's a document floating around on the internet. It's on Facebook, on social media," he said, before later confirming it was the Lets Fix Wgtn page.
Eagle said he had no role in the creation of the Facebook page. He also said the independents he had spoken with "are focusing on the non-Labour vote".
That seems to be correct. Most of the independents Newsroom spoke to independently brought up their distaste for political party involvement in local politics and their opposition to Labour and Green candidates.
"We’re united, if you like, in the fact that the council’s party-driven agenda seems to have just dominated," Randle said.
"I think the local council need to stay away from party politics. So that’s why I prefer to work with independent candidates if possible," Rachel Qi, another independent who was involved in the study group sessions, told Newsroom.
The entire saga has rankled local Labour Party members. Complaints have been laid with the party about Eagle's initial failure to endorse Matthews on Tuesday evening. The Labour Party declined to comment for this story.
Eagle said the memorandum of understanding he signed in order to get the party's endorsement requires him to endorse all Labour candidates in Wellington and bars him from endorsing other candidates in races where Labour is running.
The incident on Tuesday, therefore, would seem to be a breach of this agreement. The rest of the quiet effort to support independents against Labour exists more in a grey area, a Labour source said.
The final piece of evidence cited by anti-Eagle Labour members is the similarity between the independent candidates' branding.
Many of the independents who attended the study group sessions have hoardings which use the same font, colours and logo as Eagle's prominent advertisements. While yellow and black are classic Wellington colours, Eagle's '1' logo is not as common. It encourages voters to rank him first – the single-transferable vote equivalent of a 'tick' logo.
"It replicates the design of the box on voting papers – hardly a huge creative leap," he said.
He used it in 2010 and 2013 races, while Calvert used the same symbol in 2016. Both are using it again this year.
"I’m aware that many candidates have used branding similar to mine, which is a format I’ve used for local and central government campaigns for more than 10 years. The use of this format and the Wellington colours of yellow and black is not indicative of anything other than tried and tested branding," Eagle said.
"I have been asked about what branding I think works and have happily shared my views."
Similar or identical logos have cropped up on other candidates' hoardings. Afeaki and Randle both said they intentionally copied existing symbols. O'Loughlin said she had actually suggested to the group that they align their branding.
"I think it was my idea actually. People were like ‘That sounds like a sensible idea, let’s all just do a similar thing'. So we just kind of adopted all the same colours," she said.
Brown said the similarity between his logo and Eagle's was "just incidental".
"As far as I’m concerned, there was somebody who organised the branding for me and I didn’t have much to do with it. And I don’t think they were talking to anybody either."
Qi also said she hadn't seen anyone else's designs when she chose her own.
"My designer shared with me that kind of design, which I think is great, because many people use the circle. I have no preconception of what branding to choose," she said.
But, later in the conversation, she suggested there was a more conscious branding effort.
"We just want to brand ourselves and promote for the campaign. I have no secrets to hide."
