Only 31.61% of eligible voters bothered to vote in this month’s local body elections. In Auckland, turnout barely scraped 30%. If this were a company AGM with that level of shareholder participation, we’d call it a governance crisis. But because it’s just local democracy—the layer of government that actually affects your daily life—we shrug and call it “voter apathy.”
Apathy, my arse. What we’re seeing is rational disengagement from a broken system.
I’ve stood for council twice. The second time, I came within 300 votes of being on a District Council, despite my mother having just died, despite being angry at the world and picking fights on Facebook, and despite spending almost nothing on campaigning. That near-miss was both humbling and terrifying. Humbling because people nearly trusted me with the job. Terrifying because I saw who else was getting elected.
I’m glad I lost. Three years sitting around a table with people who are lovely human beings but haven’t got a bloody clue about governance, finance, or urban planning would have destroyed me. I don’t suffer fools lightly, and local government is absolutely full of them.
Here’s the dirty secret nobody wants to admit: local body elections are popularity contests masquerading as democracy. It’s not about competence, experience, or understanding complex infrastructure funding models. It’s about name recognition and looking good in a campaign photo.
“Oh, we should have a young woman on council”—never mind that she’s never managed a budget or read a balance sheet. “That young bloke seems enthusiastic”—ignore the fact he’s never held a proper job and thinks rates come from the rates fairy. “He won Mastermind” (even though his topic was the sex life of a butterfly)—brilliant, that’ll help when you’re trying to understand a 30-year infrastructure investment plan.
The results speak for themselves. This election saw 31 of 66 communities elect new mayors, mostly fiscal conservatives promising to cap rates. Sounds great, right? Except many of these new mayors are the same tired business people who think running a council is like running their plumbing supply company. They’ll turn up to a few meetings, realise they’re just one vote at a table of 12, discover they can’t get their pet projects approved, and either quit or become dead wood for the next three years.
I’ve been to more council meetings than some sitting councillors. I’ve watched business owners grandstand about fiscal responsibility while pushing for projects that benefit their commercial interests. I’ve seen well-meaning community leaders frozen like deer in headlights when faced with complex policy decisions. And I’ve witnessed enough bigotry and small-minded thinking to last a lifetime.
The Māori ward referendums perfectly illustrate how broken our local democracy has become. Of 42 councils that held binding referendums, 25 voted to scrap Māori wards while only 17 kept them. In Taranaki, every single council voted them out—58% in New Plymouth and South Taranaki, 63% in Stratford.
As I wrote in my previous article on this topic, the question isn’t whether Māori wards are perfect—it’s whether they’re better than the alternative. The alternative is what we had for decades: councils with token or zero Māori representation making decisions about Māori land, Māori heritage, and Māori communities.
But here’s the thing: the public voted them out not because they’d carefully studied the issue, but because they’d been fed three years of political rhetoric about “racial division” and “special treatment.” It was easier to vote against something labelled “Māori” than to understand why representation matters in a democracy.
This is what happens when you put complex democratic structures to a public vote in an environment where only 32% of people even bother to participate. The most engaged voters tend to be older, wealthier, and more conservative. The young, the poor, and the marginalised—the very people who might benefit from Māori wards—either can’t vote or don’t vote.
Democracy? This is democracy in name only.
Wellington elected Andrew Little in what’s being called the largest mayoral victory in 142 years. Good on him—he’s actually qualified for the job, with decades of governance experience and a functioning brain. I interviewed him once for an article I was writing, and he’s a down-to-earth, straightforward person. But his main opponent, Ray Chung, so the story goes, had pre-ordered a $90,000 watch as a victory present before the election. That level of hubris tells you everything about who seeks these positions.
Here’s the really brutal part: outgoing mayor Tory Whanau stepped aside for Little rather than contest the mayoralty she knew she wouldn’t win. Fair enough—reading the room, being strategic. But then she stood for a Māori ward seat and couldn’t even win that. Think about that. The sitting mayor, with all that name recognition and profile, steps down from the top job and then gets rejected by voters for a single ward seat. Whatever you think of her performance as mayor, that’s a spectacular fall from grace.
Meanwhile, Wayne Guppy, who’d been mayor of Upper Hutt since 2001, got turfed out. Twenty-four years in the job, and voters decided they’d had enough. Was it because he was incompetent? Or just because they were bored with his face?
In Gore, 23-year-old Ben Bell got re-elected as mayor. He’s New Zealand’s youngest mayor, and his first term was apparently rocky enough that there were calls for him to step down. But he’s young, he looks good in photos, and Gore voters gave him another go. Maybe he’ll be brilliant. Or maybe in three years they’ll be wondering why they elected someone whose main qualification was being born after 1998.
Here’s what really terrifies me about local government: the funding model is completely broken, and nobody elected last week has any idea how to fix it.
Rates are a medieval form of taxation. You tax property owners to pay for infrastructure used by everyone—tenants, tourists, and businesses. It’s regressive, inefficient, and totally inadequate for the infrastructure investment New Zealand desperately needs.
Every council in the country is facing the same crisis: pipes installed 50-70 years ago are failing, climate change is increasing storm damage, population growth demands new infrastructure, and rates simply cannot cover the cost. So councils borrow, rates go up, incumbents get tossed out, new councillors promise rate freezes, infrastructure deteriorates further, and the cycle repeats.
The new crop of “fiscally conservative” mayors promising to cap rates are either lying or clueless. You can’t cap rates without cutting services or deferring maintenance. And when you defer maintenance on water pipes or roading, you don’t save money—you just move the cost to future ratepayers while making the problem worse.
This is the uncomfortable truth none of the smiling candidates talked about during their campaigns: local government funding is fundamentally broken, and fixing it requires central government intervention that won’t come.
There are good people on councils. I’ve met them. They’re passionate about their communities, they do their homework, they understand the complexities of local governance, and they make thoughtful decisions.
But they’re rare. For every excellent councillor, there are three or four who are just warming seats, pushing personal agendas, or genuinely haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.
The problem is structural. We elect councils using systems designed for a different era. No qualifications required. No competency testing. No requirement to understand finance, infrastructure, planning law, or resource management. Just be popular enough to get more votes than the other lot.
That’s not democracy working. That’s democracy failing.
New Zealand needs to have an honest conversation about local government. Not the polite consultation process where councils pretend to listen before doing what they planned anyway, but a genuine reckoning with reality.
We need to acknowledge that the current system—low turnout, popularity-based elections, inadequate funding, and no competency requirements—produces mediocre governance at best and dangerous incompetence at worst.
We need to consider whether binding referendums on major spending might force councils to justify their decisions rather than just implementing them. Switzerland does this brilliantly—its local government has far higher trust precisely because citizens get a real say.
We need to accept that some decisions are too complex for simple majority votes. The Māori ward referendums proved that. Democracy isn’t just “51% wins”—it’s about protecting minority rights and ensuring fair representation.
And we need to demand better from both candidates and voters. If you’re standing for council, you should understand what councils actually do. If you’re voting, you should know more about candidates than their campaign photo and three-word slogan.
The 2025 local body elections delivered exactly what they always deliver: a mixed bag of the competent and the clueless, elected by a minority of voters who mostly picked names they recognised. Some councils will muddle through. Others will lurch from crisis to crisis until the next election delivers a new batch of well-meaning amateurs.
This isn’t democracy. This is local government on life support, and nobody seems to care enough to save it.
Steve Baron is a New Zealand-based political commentator and author. He holds a BA with a double major in Economics and Political Science from the University of Waikato and an Honours Degree in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington. A former businessman in the advertising industry, he founded the political lobby group Better Democracy NZ. https://stevebaron.co.nz
Frank Gibson says:
I regard the public consultation about the swimming pool as one of the most important things that happened in Whanganui local government recently. The reason for the lack of engagement of Joe public is that they feel they only get a chance once every few years to have a say. This is why I regard Maori wards as so important. Whoever wins the seat for a Maori ward will not have an easy time because they will be expected to discuss every issue at length on the marae. We need to have similar recorded but organisationally informal meetings open to all who can behave themselves stick to the issues under discussion and not indulge in personal comments. If this leads to mistakes in public policy then the blame goes back to these informal meetings and where matters are discussed further and recommendations passed to the elected reps who are expected to be present.
Robyn says:
You’re onto something here. The pool consultation worked because people felt heard for once but like you say that hardly ever happens. Really like what you’re saying about the Māori ward accountability model with regular discussions at the marae means those reps can’t just disappear until election time. Why shouldn’t the rest of us have something similar? Regular meetings where locals can actually talk through issues before council makes decisions would be a game changer. As long as everyone keeps it civil and on topic and the elected reps actually show up and listen it could work well. Sure it might lead to some mistakes along the way but that beats the current setup where most people feel ignored until it’s too late to change anything.