The split scarlet vote of Mount Albert

NEWS | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n 

On the western side of the Auckland Isthmus, the electorate of Mount Albert stands as the culmination of its namesake suburb, Point Chevalier, Waterview, Wesley, Ōwairaka, Sandringham, Morningside, Kingsland, and a chunk of Mount Eden and Balmoral taken out of Epsom’s back side. I, and many of you, live in this area, owing to its proximity between the relaxed Waitakere Ranges and bustling city centre with a wide variety of nearby amenities and restaurants, and some of the only music venues that aren’t on Karangahape Road. 

This year, voters have been presented with the same menu of candidates that split the area in 2023, with one glaring teal exception. While she fell eighteen votes short of winning the electorate last election, Melissa Lee has remained present on billboards and ballots as the National candidate for Mount Albert since Helen Clark resigned in 2009. While Labour leaders like Clark, David Shearer, and Jacinda Ardern held onto the electorate as their reliable scarlet safe zone, Lee continued to contest the area and represent the National party in local meetings and events. I respect her fundamentally as the first Korean MP in New Zealand, but the sixth National government probably hasn’t been her favourite. She lost her role as Minister for Media and Communications after her past as a journalist failed to manifest as a coherent plan for the sector after mass layoffs in early 2024, before she lost her other ministerial portfolios in Economic Development and Ethnic Communities, handed over to Nicola Willis and Mark Mitchell, who does not feel the need to mention the role on his website. To top it off, last month, it was revealed that Lee had dropped from 13 to 30 on the party list. I couldn’t get into contact with Lee despite repeated attempts at an interview, so the jury’s out on whether she voted for or against Luxon in the coup. We still have a couple issues left for an interview Liz, let’s go to the Beer Spot!

While the right bloc sees Mt Albert contested by Alex Price for ACT and former MAGS rugby coach Sheldon Eden-Whaitiri for NZ First (Did anyone have this dude as their PE teacher? Was he any good?), the interest remains in the left wing, as the suburbs merge yuppies with migrant communities and various artistic organisations and families between them. After Ardern vacated the seat in early 2023, six months before the election so the populace weren’t forced to select the next Labour leader in a by-election, campaigns ramped up from incumbent MPs Lee, Greens’ Ricardo Menéndez March, and Labour’s Helen White, who won by the skin of her teeth. Clearly, everyone is keen for seconds – or in the case of Lee, sevenths that could very easily be her last meal. Despite the electorate's reputation as being painted red, Menéndez March’s 9,000 votes wasn’t much to scoff at compared to the 13,330 Lee and White both received, and with the Opportunity Party’s most momentous campaign yet finding its home in the same suburb, there’s no way of knowing where the vote will go. I spoke to White, Menéndez March, and TOP’s Quilae Wong to learn the state of the scarlett suburbs. 

I met Helen White at Crave in Morningside, and immediately apologised for embarrassing myself when our tables were next to each other at the Sem 2 Clubs day and I couldn’t properly respond to her korero as I had a Musashi mint chocolate protein bar taking up every corner of my mouth. It was good to catch up properly - I’ve seen her across billiards for years, and despite conservative leaning publications stoking the flames of dissatisfaction, there’s not a single part of her that would want to give up the seat to another candidate.

When we caught up, the leadership challenge that was totally just Chris Penk and nobody else framing him for mutiny had concluded with the Kaipara ki Mahurangi candidate confirming he would not seek re-election at the end of the year. White shared the sentiment echoed across the political aisle: “I know Chris Penk, and I like Chris Penk. He doesn't believe a lot of the same things I do, but I know he's got little kids and he's a nice guy, and there's a lot of respect for his style across the spectrum.” I think back to accusations of him secretly being the wokest minister in cabinet, to which he responded that the word “can mean almost everything and nothing – if it means not wanting to be a horrible person who wants to kick people down for the sake of it, then, sure, guilty!”. You wonder how many MPs that were in power years before Luxon wish that Judith Collins had just stuck around. 

Maybe due to the party’s stronghold in the area, White seemed incredibly dialled in on Mount Albert. When I asked if she felt like she had taken on the torch when Ardern resigned, she took us back to the 2000s, joining the area’s Labour Electorate Committee while Helen Clark was in power. “She was very intimate about what she would tell us about what was going on and politics for her, and very straightforward, and it was quite an amazing experience.” White contested the Labour nomination for the seat when Clark resigned in 2009, but lost to David Shearer, kicking off a tradition of future party leaders and deputies besting her. Her next crack at a seat took aim at Auckland Central in 2017, losing to the late Nikki Kaye before she called it after a bad month as Deputy PM under Todd Muller in 2020. However, White’s second crack at the central electorate put her up against Chlöe Swarbrick, and her frustrations with the Greens splitting her voter base in 2017 led to a misstep in publicly discounting the rival as an unserious candidate, shortly before she became the first Green MP to independently win an electorate seat without needing the path cleared for her by a major party. With her time in the electorate secured in 2023 by the narrowest of margins after Ardern vacated the Mount Albert seat, it’s no wonder why White is holding onto it for dear life alongside Lee. 

“Nobody is entitled to their own seat,” says Ricardo Menéndez March with the confidence that he can steal Mount Albert from White and turn it green just as the party has pulled off before. Unlike White and Lee, both of whom are stuck in the risky thirties of their party lists, Menéndez March is steadfast in the top ten of the Green Party, allowing him to continue navigating their work against the endless fast-tracks in Parliament while understanding the area on a holistic level. We met a few weeks later at his old workplace of the Capitol Cinema, where a current staff member had already claimed him for a chat about the electorate by the time I arrived slightly late due to bus delays. Admittedly, Green MPs kill in these arts spaces given the standards are so low that their presence in music venues and indie cinemas is in of itself an act of defiance against the government’s consistent minimisation of their arts funding. In spaces like this, we’re all in our own echo chamber, which is why I wanted to get his perspective on getting through to the other side of the spectrum. 

“One of the things that I hate the most is when Christopher Luxon talks about people on the benefit as if he knew them, he respected them, he served them, and he makes humongous assumptions over what’s going on behind people’s doors when it comes to the policies he makes. Equally, I don’t want to make assumptions over why people may have chosen to vote National or ACT. The only way for us to connect with voters who have voted differently to us in the past is to actually take the time to listen to them, and be curious why they have voted differently. Yes, we can talk about, for example, Kiwi Mart or having a publicly owned supermarket taking on the duopoly, but I think those conversations are really hard to have when we haven’t first shown curiosity over what’s going on in people’s lives, and hearts and minds that had led them to vote in a different way.”

Between these two meetings, I took a hīkoīup to Kingsland for my first foray into a proper party HQ. At the upper end of New North Road, one of the sporadic heritage buildings is currently branded with teal, hosting a large truck out front and various billiards branded with the Opportunity Party. 

The Opportunity Party is a strange little beast. It runs on the lines of radical centrism, having been founded as the Opportunities Party in 2016 by Gareth Morgan and since running in an attempt to distance themselves from how much he hates cats. There were rumblings of a TOP victory last election, with party leader Raf Manji staking everything on winning Ilam in Christchurch before losing to National by 8,000 votes. Despite the 2026 base being led in Mount Albert, the new momentum of TOP is being felt nationwide, as recent polling has consistently suggested the party will be in parliament by January. 

Before the current campaign kicked off, the last major noise made by TOP came as their hunt for a new party leader was taken to SEEK with a little bit of media fanfare. Quilae was not somebody who came in from the streets with a CV and a dream, though – she’s been in the opportunity camp for a while. 

“I’d always been interested in politics and had done lots of advocacy work in my roles. So I was sort of part of Kiwis and Climate, which was a group of sustainability professionals advocating for policy positions, so exposed to the role of government in politics. I think the shift to this government in 2023 made me particularly more interested because I saw just so starkly with many of the clients we’re working with at KPMG, that they were on their well on their way to making investments to decarbonise and to change their business models and making some, you know, pretty significant shifts in the way they do business. But the real rapid change in rhetoric around the role of climate action in our future made them pull back, and that really frustrated me, and so I think that was what made me start thinking more seriously about being involved in politics.”

In speaking to these candidates (of which you can find extended interviews on our website), I couldn’t help but feel that despite the warfare of words, each of these candidates would work well together in parliament. It’s impossible to ask that of them, when they’re forced to prove that they’d be best at getting this government out - but they have to take on different tones and appeal to different audiences. You wonder if, by November, it’d be easier if they just called the bullshit and united to get National out. But then, it’s unlikely TOP would take away any National votes, and it goes against the point of their whole schtick. Either way, I hope that you all have your say by enrolling to vote by October 25th and voting by November 7th.