What would it take for National to lose Rodney?

Paul Goldsmith is weighing a switch from Epsom to Kaipara ki Mahurangi. History suggests the seat will not much care whether he fits.

  Senior National list MP Paul Goldsmith is considering a switch from Epsom, where he has stood since 2011 without ever threatening ACT leader David Seymour, to Kaipara ki Mahurangi, the seat Chris Penk is vacating after his failed leadership challenge against Christopher Luxon.

The Kaipara ki Mahurangi electorate boundaries are close to identical to Auckland Council's Rodney Ward. Strip away the 'gifted' name change and this is still Rodney.

  I have spent a book’s length on this electorate’s history, and the pattern holds. National takes it for granted and hands it to whoever the machine prefers that year.

The real question is not whether Goldsmith fits Rodney. It is what, short of a National logo tattooed on a pig, would ever make the seat say no.

A seat built to survive its MPs

  Rodney’s National lineage runs deeper than most voters realise.

I have traced the corridor to Gordon Coates, who held the seat from 1911, before becoming a founding figure of the party itself.

Air Commodore Frank Gill sat in Cabinet through the 1970s; his grandson Mark Mitchell went on to hold Rodney itself from 2011.

The seat has never needed its MP to be local, or to be new blood.

The trouble with carpetbaggers

  The pattern is imported candidates who barely live in the electorate they represent.

John Key held Helensville, the seat’s predecessor, for fifteen years from Parnell. To make way for Key, sitting MP Brian Neeson was controversially forced out to make way for a former banker with no political or local experience. His electorate secretary, Genelle Bailey, worked the office for almost a decade and was the face constituents dealt with, yet when Key resigned she was passed over for Chris Penk, another import who started out doorknocking for Paula Bennett.

Mark Mitchell’s own path into Rodney in 2011 came with help from strategist Simon Lusk and blogger Cameron Slater, whose campaign against his rivals surfaced in Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics. None of it cost these men the seat.

When I volunteered in the National Party Headquarters in the 1990s, the person who analysed statistical data and drafted electoral boundary changes for their submissions, Jack McFaull, found that the area was so loyal to voting National that the locals would elect anyone, including a pig chased down the main street.

What the corridor still trades on

  Rodney’s reputation for institutionalised corruption is not abstract.

There was a string of transparency issues in the former Rodney District Council throughout its history. The dysfunctional council was sacked, replaced with commissioners, the culture gave influence to ratepayers associations and unelected officials.

Former CEO Rodger Kerr-Newall was caught, not punished, then caught in Australia, described as the "embodiment of corruption." Former Rodney District Council and Auckland Transport manager Murray Noone were behind a “cascading culture of bribery” in what the Serious Fraud Office called the country’s largest bribery case. Police valued the unlawful benefit at $20.3 million; most was never recovered, and the SFO director admitted further prosecutions would take up too much of the court’s time.

The racket outgrew Rodney District Council and followed its officials into Auckland Transport, and its residue still sits inside the corridor Goldsmith is now eyeing, where fast-track consents, motorway funding, donations, planning decisions, contracts, listings, and access to police and officials remain the real currency.

Rodney does not run on ethical strictness. It runs on who you know.

A seat that forgives itself

  In 2020’s so-called red wave, Labour won the party vote in Kaipara ki Mahurangi, 40 percent to National’s 34, and Penk still held the electorate seat by 4,435 votes.

Voters split their ballots to keep a National face while telling the party they preferred someone else.

That is not enthusiasm. It is habit.

What Goldsmith brings

  Goldsmith arrives with baggage unlike Penk’s.

He already holds Justice and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, on top of the Defence, Veterans, Space, GCSB and NZSIS portfolios inherited from Penk this month.

Rodney sits inside a donor-heavy northern Auckland corridor I have written about at length, and its cultural politics were shaped at Orewa, inside these boundaries, where Don Brash’s 2004 speech redrew National’s relationship with race for a generation, the subject Goldsmith’s new portfolio now obliges him to manage.

Epsom rewards a technocrat who coasts clean because there is little worth chasing. Rodney runs on relationships and access, and has never cared whether its MP fits so long as he doesn’t ask too many questions.

So, in other words, Goldsmith is the minister in charge of justice and racial reconciliation when the voters in the electorate he is considering representing are polar opposite. 

Goldsmith doesn’t need to fit Rodney. Rodney has never needed its MP to fit either. It just needs the rosette.