Turnout at local elections is notoriously low. But this year, more than ever, voters are being urged to do their homework about the candidates standing in their area.
Election hoardings in central Auckland. Photo: The Detail/Sarah Robson
Local government, whether you like it or not, affects you.
Green spaces, potholes, community centres, what housing looks like, which events your city hosts, and how much sewage flows into the sea near you.
If you own property, and pay rates, what the council does is more obvious because the evidence arrives in your letter box.
"You may be a renter," says the local democracy reporter for the Rotorua Daily Post, Felix Desmarais, "but your rent will be affected by whatever your landlord is paying in rates. If your bin doesn't get picked up because your council is inept, that affects you of course."
So why is there so much apathy over local body elections? At the last ones, in 2019, voter turnout was just 42 percent across New Zealand.
If you think councils pretty much run themselves and the group of community-minded individuals who put their names forward for local boards and council seats will have your interests at heart, this year might be the year to revise that idea.
A couple of weeks ago Stuff Circuit released a documentary called Fire and Fury.
"What that revealed was that Voices For Freedom, or VFF, had plans to infiltrate decision making positions - to make, in their words, New Zealand ungovernable," says Stuff senior journalist Andrea Vance.
She talks to The Detail about the job she and her colleagues are doing of checking the credentials of candidates standing for office.
"We started to realise there were candidates across the country, if they weren't VFF, they were certainly candidates who had a colourful history of sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation, and participating in fringe movements. We've rooted out quite a few.
"A lot of it has echoes of the alt-right, or they are alt-right, and that's basically another way of saying white supremacy. But they're also meshed in with these other fringe movements so becomes quite hard to define.
"You've got anti-vax, climate change is a hoax, the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax...you've got theories about the United Nations or the World Economic Forum which wants to take control of all of our lives...all these strange theories."
Ironically in some parts of the country we are short of candidates, which raises the prospect that some of these people may sneak into power.
Vance says they don't have any evidence of that.
"Certainly there are fewer candidates and that's a worry. But the idea that a VFF candidate would stand unopposed...we haven't quite found that yet.
Vance says it's easier to target local body politics than central politics for a number of reasons.
"It's cheaper, you have a platform that maybe doesn't get enough scrutiny, there's lots of local level candidate events that you can use to platform your ideas, the media coverage doesn't scrutinise your views quite as closely."
Name recognition is important, and just standing and getting your picture out there can be a step in that direction.
"You know, this is not inevitable," Vance says. "People can pay really close attention to the people standing in their areas. People have the choice, they have a vote, they can go out and do research, they can ask questions of their candidates really easily.
"A real red flag we've noticed is if someone just pops up in a local area and doesn't really have a profile, hasn't really done a lot of local community work to speak of...those are people you should really do your due diligence on."
The elections will be held between September 16 and October 8, with voting closing at midday. The printed electoral roll has closed but you can still get special voting papers from your local electoral office. The last day to do that is October 7.
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