In the late 1980s, I was part of Garry Knapp’s campaign team in East Coast Bays. Looking back, the way we won votes then seems a world away from how it’s done now.
Before MMP, every MP in Parliament held an electorate seat. There was no list to fall back on and no party vote to fill the gaps. If you wanted to sit in Parliament, you had to convince the people of one patch of New Zealand that you were the right person to speak for them.
That made campaigns intensely personal. The party mattered, but the candidate mattered more. Voters wanted to look you in the eye and decide whether you’d stand up for them in Wellington.
Under first-past-the-post, third-party and independent MPs were few and far between. The system was stacked in favour of National and Labour, so a Social Credit candidate had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously.
Garry’s success was no fluke. It was built on organisation, persistence and a lot of tired feet.
There was no social media, no email and no website. If you wanted to reach voters, you went to them:
There were no Corflute signs to bolt on and walk away from. Our posters were paper, printed in three sections and pasted directly onto wooden hoardings with buckets of paste and wide brushes.
Line the panels up badly, and the candidate’s face looked like a jigsaw puzzle. If someone tore it down overnight, you went back out and did it again.
With no digital tools, getting noticed took imagination and sheer effort. One election was a real cliffhanger, so we built a huge banner overnight and hung it from the cliff overlooking Browns Bay beach. Nobody heading to the beach the next morning could miss it.
We also dressed the main street of Browns Bay with giant green-and-gold rosettes hung from the lampposts. The whole town centre carried the campaign colours. You couldn’t scroll past it. You walked through it.
Today’s campaigns are faster and far more targeted. A candidate can reach thousands from a phone, and that’s real progress.
But something has been lost. Online, it’s easy to talk at people. In a draughty hall or on a footpath, you had to talk with them, and you were accountable on the spot.
MMP has given us a fairer Parliament, and I wouldn’t want to go back. But the old campaigns taught a lesson that still holds: there’s no substitute for turning up, listening, and earning every vote the hard way.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Franklin Local Board as a whole.
Gary Holmes is a local body politician and business association manager who made Waiuku his home and has never stopped asking questions about how it is governed. Elected to the Franklin Local Board in 2022 to represent the Waiuku subdivision, he has built a reputation as a fiscally conservative voice prepared to take on Auckland’s bureaucracy when the numbers don’t stack up. He believes good local government starts with reading the data yourself.
https://stevebaron.co.nz/author/garyholmes/