The Green Party announced last week that it won’t be standing a candidate in the Ohariu electorate this year. The move improves the chances that Labour Party candidate, Greg O’Connor, ousts United Future’s Peter Dunne. Since the announcement, the Greens and Labour have repeatedly tried to play down what really does looks like a deal. “It’s not a deal,” Labour leader Andrew Little said, rather, it’s an “electoral accommodation” and there’s no quid pro quo on his part.
Green Party co-leader James Shaw won’t even clearly and openly encourage the electorate’s Green voters to vote for O’Connor. In a press release last week James Shaw said: “I think New Zealanders will understand that, in an MMP environment, it makes perfect sense for us to not stand a candidate in Ohariu.” No matter the language and despite the sensitivities of ‘the messaging’, the non-deal deal is an effective and pragmatic move for the two opposition parties, who signed a memorandum of understanding last year promising to find areas of cooperation and communicate on important policy.
As Shaw rightly stated last week, “Ohariu has a significant impact on the makeup of Parliament.” Indeed, the only reason Dunne, the resident bow tie aficionado, centrist and Internal Affairs minister, is in parliament, let alone the government, is because 13,569 people in this affluent North Wellington electorate voted for him. Dunne, who split from Labour in 1994 to form and join a bunch of centrist parties, has been the United Future MP for Ohariu since the 2008 election, when John Key became Prime Minister. Since then, Dunne has been a support partner to the National-led government, giving them (along with the ACT and Maori party seats) a safe 63 seat majority, enough votes to comfortably pass legislation - even when the Maori Party is in revolt.
This could all change. In the 2014 election, Dunne won by a 710 majority over Labour’s Virginia Andersen and the Green’s candidate, Tane Woodley, got 2,764 votes. If most of the electorate’s Green voters cast a tactical vote for Labour’s candidate, then Dunne is gone.
However, there is a catch. Labour’s Greg O’Connor, the former president of the NZ Police Association, doesn’t exactly match up with the Greens ideologically. Metiria Turei reminded her Twitter followers: “Greg O’Connor is not our candidate [sic].” Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper referred to O’Connor as the “loquacious, former defender of anything the cops ever got up to”. When it comes to law and order, O’Connor has been labelled a social conservative and appeared to support arming police in 2010 and in 2014, when he said, “I believe the time has come to arm every frontline officer”. Responding, Shaw encouraged Ohariu’s Greens to “question him about those statements.”
There’s another catch too, and it could be what saves Dunne. In the 2014 election, National’s local candidate, Brett Hudson, won 6,120 votes. If Ohariu’s National voters make a concerted effort to save Dunne then the maths from three years ago dictates he holds on. That kind of uniform tactical voting would need a nudge in the right direction by local pro-National community leaders, but, coupled with the unattractiveness of O’Connor to those leaning left, a little nudge could be all that’s needed. Either way, it’s evident that Ohariu will be one of the popcorn electorates to watch on 23 September.