Some of the most interesting electorate contests this year are between Labour and the Greens. In 2023 Labour lost both of its central Wellington seats to Green MPs, Wellington Central to Tamatha Paul and Rongotai to Julie Anne Genter. Both seats have since been redrawn and renamed, and both Green incumbents now face high-profile Labour challengers: former health minister Ayesha Verrall in Wellington North and Craig Renney in Wellington Bays. If Paul and Genter both hold on, Wellington will look like a durable Green constituency, and 2023 like the start of something rather than a one-off upset.
Paul won Wellington Central with Labour votes. About a quarter of Labour’s party voters in the seat gave her their electorate vote, according to the official split-vote figures, and her majority of 6,066 ended Labour’s hold on a seat it had held since 1999. Verrall needs those voters back, on boundaries that now take in some of the city’s wealthier hill suburbs, and the only electorate poll has the two of them less than three points apart.
The electorate
Wellington North is mostly the old Wellington Central. It has lost Mount Cook and parts of Brooklyn, both student and renter suburbs, to Wellington Bays, and gained the more affluent hill suburbs of Khandallah, Ngaio and Wadestown from the old Ōhāriu seat. Writing about the contest today, Richard Prebble points out that the new northern suburbs “once elected me” and says Wellington North “should be National”.
The old seat was what Curia’s David Farrar calls “the heart of liberal NZ”. In 2023 it was the best general electorate for the Greens, Opportunity and Te Pāti Māori, and among the bottom five general seats for National and Act. Farrar’s figures give the new seat the highest median household income in the country, at $140,000, and on 2023 Census figures around a fifth of its employed residents work in public administration and safety.
With so many residents working for the state, public service job cuts have dominated the campaign, along with the Moa Point sewage disaster, transport, a retail downturn and rising homelessness. Verrall says Wellington has been “kicked in the guts” by the Government, Marc Daalder reported in Newsroom. Paul and Verrall both oppose the cuts, and their argument is about which of them would be the more effective voice for the city.
The incumbent
In the 2023 race a Reid Research poll had Paul third, on 27%, yet she beat Labour’s Ibrahim Omer by 18,439 votes to 12,373, helped by a large volunteer operation. Erin Gourley reported in The Post that around 700 volunteers made 40,000 door knocks across Wellington Central and Rongotai in 2023, and this year The Post’s Anneke Smith and Tom Hunt reported her saying her campaign had knocked on 1,780 doors in the weekend before advance voting opened.
In Parliament she has been combative and highly visible on social media. Her clearest legislative achievement is an amendment to the Government’s stalking law, and her term has also brought a run of controversies, most damagingly her inaccurate claims in August about government MPs’ property purchases and her 2025 comments about police patrols, which Labour leader Chris Hipkins called “stupid”.
The challenger
Verrall is a doctor and former health minister, Labour’s spokesperson for health and for Wellington issues, and sixth on its list. Her candidate statement, which does not mention Paul, says “I do not believe in point-scoring or protest for its own sake.” At the first debate, Lyric Waiwiri-Smith reported for The Spinoff, she promised to take “the issues of Wellington North” to “the highest decision-making table in the country”.
At The Post’s debate, Andrea Vance asked her why progressive voters should not give Paul their electorate vote, given that her list place made her “virtually guaranteed” to return to Parliament. Verrall replied that both of them would be returned “based on almost every poll this year”, before making her pitch: “When I was a doctor at Wellington Hospital I didn’t just look after the progressive patients, I looked after everyone who came through the door.” The implied criticism, that Paul looks after only her own supporters, is about as far as Verrall has gone in criticising her.
Verrall’s reluctance to attack the incumbent makes it harder for Labour to argue that the seat needs a new MP. At the final candidates’ meeting, where each candidate was asked whom they would vote for if they were not standing, the two front-runners all but nominated each other, Daalder reported. Paul called Verrall her “brain choice”, and Verrall told her: “Tam, I’m very impressed with everything that you’ve accomplished, and … if I wasn’t on the ballot, I’d vote for you.” When the Alliance’s Josh Harford said his party wanted to be “Labour, if it had more guts”, Verrall replied, “We’re like the Alliance with votes”, and got the biggest laugh of the night.
In February, Ethan Manera reported in the Herald, Verrall took issue with the handling of the Moa Point failure by Andrew Little, the Labour mayor and her former caucus colleague, saying “it’s not good enough to kick everything to a review and then we hear radio silence”. Little replied: “I don’t think that’s very fair.” For all her experience, she has never won an electorate, and when pressed at The Post’s debate for the first thing she would do for the city, she recited Labour’s policy list and then said: “Well that’s it, that’s the plan.”
The rest of the field
It is effectively a two-horse race. National’s candidate, Jonathan Pitts, is a lawyer and former PwC director who has defended further public service cuts. Prebble credits him with “an impressive CV”, but Pitts had only 16% in the electorate poll, about half the support of either front-runner. Opportunity’s Jessica Hammond, third on her party’s list, NZ First’s Taylor Arneil, Act’s Matthew Hague and the Alliance’s Harford all made clear at the final candidates’ meeting that they were campaigning for the party vote, Daalder reported.
What the numbers say
The only electorate poll, an automated phone survey of 541 people taken from 15 to 18 October, had Paul on 35.3%, Verrall on 32.6% and Pitts on 16%, with a margin of error of 6.2%, Nick James reported in The Post on 24 October. Paul’s 2.7-point lead is well inside that margin. On the party vote, Labour led the Greens 31.5% to 25.6%, with Opportunity on 13.1%. The survey was commissioned by Victor Consulting, a lobbying firm run by Clint Smith, who previously worked for Labour as a staffer and strategist. Its main finding, that Paul leads on the candidate vote while Labour leads on the party vote, could be read as an argument for tactical voting in either direction.
The Tally Room’s recalculation of the 2023 votes on the new boundaries, reported by The Count, puts Labour 0.5 points ahead, although that estimate rests on 2023 votes rather than current support. Prebble now calls the contest “too close to call”.
What will decide it
Paul’s organisation and her record of winning Labour votes give her a slight edge. Both leading candidates are near-certain to return on their party lists, so the result would not ordinarily change the combined Labour–Green total in Parliament, only who represents Wellington North.
Much depends on whether the Labour supporters who split their ballots for Paul in 2023 do so again, and on where the 13% of poll respondents backing Opportunity cast their electorate vote, since Hammond is not asking for it. On election night, the booth results from Khandallah, Ngaio and Wadestown, which have never had Paul as their MP, will give the first evidence of whether her appeal extends to the added suburbs. The official split-vote statistics, published after the final count, will show how many Labour voters backed her again.
In the Further Analysis section below: a closer examination of Tamatha Paul’s first term. What she set out to achieve and what she has delivered, how she describes her record, the controversies that have followed her, and the unanswered questions from her time overseeing the city’s infrastructure. See: “Further Analysis: Has Tamatha Paul earned another term?”
Further Reading
Nick James (Post): The Green Party and Labour locked in tight Wellington North race with Opportunity on 13% (paywalled)
Richard Prebble (I’ve Been Thinking): Interesting electorate races: Wellington North
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): After ‘ugly start’, Wellington North campaign wraps in harmony
Andrea Vance (Post): A hard sell in the capital: National’s Wellington North candidate drought (paywalled)
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith (Spinoff): Wellington North candidates face off on student issues in first debate
Ethan Manera (Herald): Labour’s Ayesha Verrall calls out Moa Point sewage failure response, Andrew Little says comments not fair (paywalled)
The Count: Wellington North
The Post: Wellington North Candidates Debate (video)
