Kakariki Mayor Tory Whanau

The Green Party has officially changed its name, adding te reo alongside the English words so that they can now be called “The Greens Te Pāti Kākāriki”. The use of the term “kākāriki”, or “green”, might also be adopted by the party’s only city Mayor, Tory Whanau of Wellington.

This isn’t only because Whanau sells herself as an environmentalist, but also as “green” also means “inexperienced”, “naïve” or “lacking knowledge”. That’s what Mayor Whanau is being associated with at the moment in Wellington, after two years of poor leadership, and then giving four media interviews in the last week that have been highly embarrassing.

Whanau’s claims of financial hardship

Whanau’s most embarrassing gaffes of the last week have revolved around her attempt to position herself as personally suffering from the economic downturn that her constituents are facing. When asked by broadcaster Nick Mills on Newstalk ZB about the cost of living in Wellington, the Mayor replied to suggest that she felt the same pain as those who are currently struggling in her city: “I’ve just sold my car recently to kind of help pay the bills. I walk to work again. My mortgage rates have doubled in the last two years, so I’m feeling the pinch as well”.

This reply has been met with incredulity. This is because Whanau is currently paid nearly $190,000 a year and won a Lotto prize of $1.4 million in the past. Commentators pointed out that she also recently received a four per cent pay increase.

Several observers have suggested that Whanau’s claims show how out of touch she is with the realities of her constituents, or even worse, that her financial complaints come across as narcissistic. The Post’s Tom Hunt commented that Whanau’s salary “is well over twice the average public servant wage of $84,000. It can’t have gone down well with public servants recently made redundant or facing the chop, or those struggling to feed their families after an average 18.5% rates hike around the city.”

However, the explanation that commentators missed is that Tory Whanau had taken a pay cut to be mayor after working as a corporate lobbyist. When she ran for office in 2022, she worked for the corporate lobbying firm Capital Government Relations, which was run by Neale Jones and Ben Thomas.

While Whanau was there, the highly-successful lobbyists had been leveraging their former roles in the Beehive for lucrative contracts with property developers, supermarket giants, and big technology firms like Google. Shifting from this to a politician’s salary of “only” $190,000 was probably a source of complaint for the green mayor. As one satirist posted on X, Whanau’s WCC salary “is probably chump change compared to the cash filled envelopes she was receiving on a regular basis from corporate reps.”

Whanau also explained this week that she shifted from lobbying to the mayoral job, expecting it to be easier. She told a podcast: “I kinda thought that mayors flew under the radar a lot more which is why I kinda went for council in the first place… The public interest side, the news side of things has completely blindsided me, I didn’t expect that. That’s been a huge learning curve”.

Car crash interviews

The fourth interview that Whanau has given in the last week was with Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q+A. Tame challenged the Mayor about her claims of having to sell her car to pay her bills, and she clarified that this by saying: “No, I actually didn’t”. She also claimed that it involved miscommunication: “It was an hour-long interview. You get a bit relaxed”.

However, after the interview Tame read out a statement from Whanau’s office to re-correct what she had said. The statement said: “The mayor sold her car to help with her mortgage, where her weekly repayments had doubled. It also made sense to sell as it was no longer needed because she had moved into a townhouse near the city centre.”

Whanau also complained in the interview with Tame that her statement about her needing to sell her car to pay her bills was “taken out of context”. But the original interviewer, Nick Mills, disagrees: “To say that those comments were taken out of context is rubbish. She said it. The comments are clear as day. She was struggling and she sold the car. What can be taken out of context from that?”

Mills labelled Whanau’s Q+A interview a “train wreck” and said it reinforced his existing view that “I don’t think she’s up to the job. And I don’t think she’s getting the right advice from people around her.”

So, who are the people around her giving her advice? Whanau gave another interview for a podcast, talking about the bad publicity that she’s been getting: “Every now and again I check in with all my mates. A lot of my friends worked for Dame Jacinda Ardern. They were in her office – Chief of Staff, Chief Press Sec, and all of them. And I just will go: ‘Is this normal? Is this level of negativity normal?’ And they are, like “Yeah, unfortunately”. When you are a progressive politician, especially a woman, especially a Māori, you just have to kinda unfortunately get used to this level.”

Whanau’s greenness laid clear

The journalist that has probably followed Tory Whanau’s political career more than anyone is The Post newspaper’s Tom Hunt. He said yesterday that her recent interviews have been “a car wreck, train crash and a catastrophe all folded into one.”

He points out that there were lots of other blunders in her Q+A interview, apart from the car selling claim: “Claiming rates would reduce despite the council forecasting them to increase hugely, and claiming a vote to end the council’s sale of its airport shares would likely succeed, then saying it would probably fail.”

Hunt has also questioned her political strategy and communications skills, saying that Whanau should not have kept the car-selling story alive: “what should have been a silly aside from a week earlier was given fresh legs. It makes you wonder what sort of advice she was getting because to backtrack once was strange, but to backtrack again just seems like chaos. And all for a story that really didn’t matter until it became more about integrity than transport.”

Whanau promised to be a unity mayor

In her Q+A interview, Whanau was particularly combative about her council colleagues, accusing other councillors of displaying “dysfunctional behaviour” and not putting the public’s interest first. She lashed out at her colleagues, saying: “I’d just encourage the public – don’t let that sort of political riff-raff take over the good work that the council is doing”.

On this use of “riff-raff”, the Post’s Tom Hunt has also suggested that Whanau has badly mis-stepped: “The Collins Dictionary lists synonyms as rabble, undesirables, scum, and hoi-polloi. Even if she was not talking about specifics, it was a terrible term to use for a mayor elected on a platform of unity.”

Although it’s clear that Whanau’s ability to lead her council or to build bridges has been incredibly poor, what has been even more problematic is her policy agenda. This has revolved around some very conservative or rightwing proposals and projects: trying to negotiate a corporate welfare deal for the multinational Reading Cinemas, trying to bring in water meters for households, being unwilling to pause the restoration of the Town Hall that had blown out in costs to $330 million, and now trying to sell the council’s shares in Wellington Airport.

What is Whanau’s future?

Under her mayoralty, Whanau now says that more austerity and cuts to basic services might be coming. The Herald’s Azaria Howell reported this week that the Mayor admitted that “cuts in other areas such as social housing and water infrastructure” could be coming, especially if she doesn’t get her way on selling the Council’s airport shares.

None of this is good for Whanau’s chances of re-election. But could the Greens replace their kākāriki mayoral candidate next year? The Spinoff’s Wellington reporter, Joel MacManus, has penned a column suggesting that the Green Party needs to learn the same lesson that the US Democrats faced with President Joe Biden. Like the President, MacManus says Whanau has a “history of saying weird stuff and making unforced errors”, and so she probably needs to be retired.

MacManus also says that although Whanau “has terrible political instincts”, much of the criticism of her is “because she is a woman of colour”. It’s also true that much is made of Whanau’s title as a “wahine toa” – and she herself embraces that identity.

In an interview last month she said that she strongly feels the weight of her duty to pave the way for more Māori women to come into local government leadership roles, worrying that “If we don’t keep fighting for our place and fighting for representation, it’ll just get worse and worse over time”.

Whanau also says that she has paid a high price – especially by incurring bouts of depression – in order to help other wahine toa get to the top: “that’s just the price you have to pay for now, to ensure that we’re opening the spaces for other people”. In that interview, she explained that “local and central governments are incredibly colonised structures, set up to suit Pākehā” and that “It’s actually up to leaders like myself to create a better pathway for those behind us.”

That might all be true. Yet many Wellingtonians will identify her arguments as typically superficial-but-fashionable, capital-city managerial speak. In this sense, Whanau has been a genuine representative of the “professional managerial class” of senior public servants and consultants from the likes of Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and EY.

This has been Whanau real problem – she has been very disconnected from ordinary Wellingtonians, and has failed to comprehend the types of policies that they want to see from local government. Her elitist disconnect, is therefore perfectly encapsulated in her recent attempts to spin her financial hardship complaints.

In one of her interviews this last week she claimed to be the victim of “the privileged trying to stop progress”. But posing like this, is only likely to invite more disdain, especially from Wellingtonians that are truly suffering a financial plight at the moment.

In all of her campaigning and self-defence, Whanau always plays down her background as a top Beehive Chief of Staff and a lobbyist for one of the most powerful corporate government relations firms around. Yet when it comes to political leadership, her corporate lobbying skills are very much to the fore, and have clearly influenced her political direction as mayor – especially in her pursuit of corporate welfare deals and privatisation.

Perhaps if the Green Party wants to endorse a different kākāriki mayoral candidate next year, they should go for someone who isn’t from the lobbying Wellington beltway and instead choose someone with a better sense of what ordinary people want from local government.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

Key Sources

Mary Afemata (Stuff): ‘I wasn’t keeping myself safe’: How Tory Whanau regained her purpose

Herald: Editorial: Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau’s remarkable financial admission fails to relate (paywalled)

Azaria Howell (Herald): Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau’s TV interview labelled terrible and confusing by councillors

Tom Hunt (The Post): The car crash interviews Tory Whanau should have shut down (paywalled)

Joel MacManus (Spinoff): Tory Whanau keeps making unforced errors

Nick Mills (Herald): Tory Whanau’s train wreck interview is a moment we’ll all remember

Sam Smith (Stuff): Wellington mayor Tory Whanau regrets ‘mistake’ of car sale comments