The results of the 2025 local government elections have delivered a verdict on the state of New Zealand’s democracy, and it is a damning one. The most telling statistic is not who won, but who refused to participate. As reported by Virginia Fallon in the Sunday Star Times: “This year’s local government elections have seen the lowest voter turnout in 36 years, with less than a third – or 32.65% – bothering to have their say”.
This is not a simple case of voter apathy but of voter antipathy. It’s a collective shrug of the shoulders by about two-thirds of voters, who simply haven’t been convinced that it’s worth participating. Such a silent vote of “no confidence” in the entire local government political establishment should be taken seriously as a strong political signal of public discontent and disillusionment. It signals that local government is yet another part of “Broken New Zealand” that needs serious reform rather than the standard tweaks that the political class are normally more interested in.
Has local government lost its legitimacy?
Nothing captures the farcical state of this democratic deficit better than the story of Jamaine Ross, the television producer who stood for the Waitākere Ranges Local Board on a bet and actively campaigned not to be elected. His candidate statement was a plea: “Don’t vote for me. This isn’t reverse psychology. I’m serious. I don’t want this job”.
His profound relief upon finishing second-to-last — “I have not been happier to be a loser in my entire life” — serves as a damning metaphor for a system where civic participation is viewed by many as a punishment to be avoided, not a privilege to be exercised. Such a notion is widespread. Local government is seen as a joke.
This public scorn and silence force the most fundamental question: Has local government lost its legitimacy? When the victors of these contests wield mandates delivered by a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of the public, the very foundation of their democratic authority begins to crumble. This crisis is not an isolated event but a clear and alarming symptom of a deeper, systemic malaise.
The core of the crisis lies in the numbers, which paint a grim picture of a democracy in retreat. Only about one in three voters showed up. The national affairs editor for the Sunday Star-Times, Andrea Vance, captured the mood perfectly today: “The public is both disillusioned and disengaged. With turnout this dire, the local government sector needs to have a long, hard look at itself”.
This record low turnout signals more than apathy. It marks an angry repudiation of the political status quo. Kiwis have effectively staged a silent revolt at the ballot box. This “rejection election” saw dozens of incumbents – including high-profile mayors and even the president of Local Government NZ – turfed out by fed-up ratepayers.
Nationwide, preliminary results indicated only about 31.6% of eligible electors cast a vote. This will increase, once final votes are counted, but is likely to be lower than a 40% turnout. For context, local election turnout hovered around 57% in the 1980s, before a long decline to around 43% in the last few elections. New Zealand seems to have settled into chronically low local engagement, but 2025’s slump breaks new ground.
Crucially, this isn’t just casual apathy. It looks more like active alienation. Voting was easier than ever this year. For example, the voting period was extended from 22 days to 32 days, ballot boxes were readily available, and public campaigns urged people to have their say.
Yet the extended timeframe proved futile. Kiwis consciously chose not to participate, even when given more time and nudges to vote. Such a widespread boycott of the ballot suggests New Zealanders aren’t merely forgetful or busy – many are deliberately disengaging, sending a message of dissatisfaction with local politics as usual.
A Revolt against the political class
If low turnout signalled quiet anger, the voting choices of those who did turn up made the message explicit. The 2025 local elections turned into a “throw the bums out” backlash across much of the country – a referendum on incumbent leaders and policies, with many voters choosing any candidate who promised change. In what one journalist dubbed a “ratepayers’ rout”, communities up and down New Zealand ejected mayors and councillors associated with high rates, costly projects and perceived incompetence.
Consider this extraordinary statistic based on the preliminary results: in 66 mayoral races, at least 31 cities and districts (nearly half) elected a new mayor, booting out the incumbent. Among the high-profile casualties were Local Government NZ president Sam Broughton, who was ousted as Selwyn Mayor, Dunedin’s one-term mayor Jules Radich, Napier’s Kirsten Wise, and Queenstown’s Glyn Lewers.
Many of these vanquished mayors had something in common: they presided over steep rates increases. In fact, according to Newsroom’s Jonathan Milne, of 18 councils that imposed double-digit rate hikes this year, 13 saw their mayors voted out of office. It appears voters took an “axe the taxers” approach, rebelling against what they saw as unsustainable costs being piled onto ratepayers.
As defeated Hamilton councillor Sarah Thomson bluntly observed, “To be completely frank, it’s been a really shitty time with rates increases ... and I’m not surprised by some of the results”. In other words, households feeling the squeeze of rising council bills used the ballot to deliver some punishment.
This anti-incumbent wave wasn’t just about rates. It tapped into a broader “throw them all out” mood driven by frustration with poor local services, endless council infighting, and high-profile failures.
The most potent symbol of this public revolt was the total political defenestration of Wellington’s Green Mayor, Tory Whanau. After a torrid three years of controversy, failure, and big rates rises, her position became so untenable that she was forced to abandon her re-election campaign. In a final, brutal humiliation, she then failed to even win a seat as a councillor in the city’s Māori ward.
In Invercargill, long-time mayor Nobby Clark declined to stand again amid acrimony on the council. Even in usually sedate rural councils, voters tossed out entire slates of incumbents. For example, Buller’s mayor and all his councillors were sent packing, largely over a sense that the council was not delivering and was too aligned with contentious central reforms. There was a palpable “time for a clean-out” sentiment abroad. As one ousted mayor ruefully put it, there was simply a “mood for change” and an appetite to sweep out the old guard.
Swing to the right
A striking feature of this rejection election was a discernible swing to the right in many areas. Voters gravitated toward more conservative or anti-establishment candidates, often those promising fiscal restraint or anti-“woke” platforms. For the first time, the Act Party aggressively contested local elections, fielding dozens of candidates under an “Act Local” banner – and it met with considerable success, winning up to 10 council seats nationwide in its first foray.
Many other victorious mayors and councillors, while nominally independent, campaigned on classic right-wing populist themes: stop wasting money, cut the rates, stick up for ordinary people. A notable example is Hamilton’s new mayor, former National MP Tim Macindoe, who beat a progressive opponent by tapping into discontent over a 41% rates rise in the past three years.
Similarly, Auckland’s Mayor Wayne Brown – a curmudgeonly conservative who ran on “fix it by slashing waste” rhetoric – not only cruised to re-election, he did so with an emphatic 90,000-vote majority. Clearly, a large segment of the electorate saw the status quo councils as bloated or misguided, and delivered what they perceived as a corrective swing.
It would be too simple to cast this as a left-versus-right partisan shift. Local issues and personalities play a big role, yet the overall pattern is hard to ignore. The “anti-incumbent” vote often aligned with anti-establishment, anti-cost, or anti-central-government sentiments, all of which the political right has harnessed.
Where councils were seen as too close to Wellington (or too enamoured of big spending and social engineering agendas), challengers promising to “take our towns back” found receptive audiences. Even traditionally moderate provincial cities saw staunch conservatives triumph. The public mood could be summed up as: “We’re over it – time for a reset.”
Populist backlash: Māori wards and elite reforms rejected
Another clear signal of grassroots discontent came through the dozens of referendums held on Māori wards alongside the council elections. These referenda were effectively a populist backlash against a reform driven by the political elite.
In recent years, central government encouraged councils to create Māori electoral wards to improve indigenous representation, and even changed the law to remove the public’s prior veto power over establishing such wards. The move may have been well-intentioned, aiming to give Māori a stronger voice in local governance, but it was rushed through without broad buy-in, leading to simmering resentment in some communities.
In 2025 that resentment was laid bare: 42 councils put the question to voters, asking whether to keep or abolish their new Māori wards. The result was a resounding rebuke. Only 17 of those 42 councils voted to retain Māori wards, meaning 25 opted to scrap them, often by large margins.
This is a startling statistic. Despite strong advocacy from government and iwi leaders for Māori representation, a majority of local electorates overturned or rejected the concept when given the choice. From Northland to the Deep South, majority communities made clear they view Māori wards as unnecessary or divisive.
It’s part of a broader anti-co-governance sentiment that has been brewing – a feeling among some voters that reforms involving Māori representation, water management (Three Waters), or other “Treaty” issues have been foisted on them undemocratically by Wellington insiders. The referendum results underscore a populist backlash against what was seen as top-down policymaking. As one observer noted, the public reaction suggests these changes lacked a sense of local ownership and fuelled a perception of “elites” pushing their agenda without listening.
An Anti-Wellington mood
The rout extended beyond individual mayors to the very heart of the local government establishment itself. In a stunning rebuke, the President of Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), Sam Broughton, was ousted from the mayoralty of Selwyn.
The carnage at the top of the sector’s peak body did not stop there. Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker, the chair of LGNZ’s rural sector, and Jules Radich, the chair of its metro sector, were also soundly defeated in their respective bids to retain their mayoralties. This was not merely a rejection of local politicians; it was a wholesale repudiation of the sector’s national leadership.
The crisis within LGNZ signals a deeper institutional failure. The ousting of its president and other senior figures was no coincidence. The organisation was already under severe pressure, with major councils like Auckland and Christchurch having withdrawn their membership, citing concerns over cost, value for money, and a political alignment seen as too close to the previous Labour Government. This suggests that LGNZ was already viewed by some of its own powerful members as an out-of-touch, Wellington-centric body.
Technocratic tweaks fail to fix democracy
Local Government New Zealand has already spoken out last night about the low voter turnout, but has been typical in blaming the electoral process, especially postal voting. Unfortunately, there is too often a mania to find “technical fixes” for the malaise in local government. This is how we got postal voting in the first place – it was introduced as a measure to improve voter turn out. It’s now seen as part of the problem.
Similarly, there has been a move to extend the timeframe for postal voting to improve turnout. Yet now it’s the long timeframe that is being cited as the problem. For example, today in the Sunday Star Times, Professor Andrew Geddis of the University of Otago advances the novel theory that the problem is not that the voting period is too short, but that it is now too long. He suspects the three-week postal ballot window means “people had their papers on the bench, then in the recycling, and finally decided they cant be bothered doing a special vote.”
This line of thinking, which treats a political catastrophe as a mere logistical problem, gets most of the focus. The predictable, and tragically flawed, response from the political establishment to this crisis of legitimacy has been to misdiagnose the disease. Instead of confronting the profound collapse of public trust, the debate has quickly devolved into a familiar, superficial discussion about nudging the public to vote by making it easier to do so.
This entire debate over mechanics is a dangerous and self-serving misdirection. It allows the political class to avoid confronting the uncomfortable truth of its own illegitimacy. But the problem is not the how of voting, but the fundamental why. People are not voting because they have concluded, rationally, that the system is dysfunctional, captured by vested interests, and unresponsive to their needs. Blaming the postal service or a long voting window is a convenient deflection that reframes the non-voter as forgetful or lazy, rather than as a rational political actor delivering a damning verdict.
The persistent focus on voting mechanics is a mechanism of elite self-preservation. It presupposes that citizens are eager to participate but are being thwarted by inconvenient processes. All available evidence points to the contrary. The public is not suffering from a lack of access to ballot boxes; it is suffering from a lack of faith in the political system. Debating the logistics of voting is an easier and safer conversation for the establishment to have than one about its own performance, its disconnection from the public, and its catastrophic failure to inspire confidence. It is a calculated, if perhaps subconscious, act of avoiding accountability.
In the lead-up to these elections, plenty of “technical fixes” were touted as ways to boost turnout and engagement. Election planners tried a longer voting window, added more drop-off locations, and some have floated ideas like online voting or shifting to in-person polling booths. None of it made a dent in the fundamental problem. But you can tinker with the mechanics all you like, yet if people are alienated from the system, they simply won’t vote.
Democracy on life support: Where to from here?
The 2025 local elections are a wake-up call that cannot be ignored. It’s not hyperbole to ask if many council decisions truly have the “consent of the governed” in any meaningful sense. When a mayor is elected on 30% turnout, effectively perhaps 15% of the population actually voted for them – can they credibly claim a mandate for anything controversial?
As one newspaper editorial wryly put it recently, suppose they held an election and nobody came. We’re nearly at that point in some areas. Democracy is failing to inspire, and people increasingly feel that voting changes nothing or that the local council is so distant and dysfunctional that it scarcely matters who sits around the chamber table.
This public grumpiness has been long in the making. Years of rates hikes, infrastructure woes (water pipes bursting, potholed roads), endless planning debates, and perceived hubris or infighting among councillors have all taken their toll. Add to that a sense that central government often calls the shots anyway, and it’s easy to see why many people feel local politics is a bad joke.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of The Integrity Institute
Further reading:
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Ratepayers rout mayors who imposed big rises
Virginia Fallon (Sunday Star Times): Putting the meh into mayoralty: Voter turnout slumps to 36-year low (paywalled)
Andrea Vance (Sunday Star Times): Labour finds its pulse in Wellington, but don’t call it a comeback (paywalled)
Tracy Watkins (Sunday Star Times): A mandate for the few, by the few (paywalled)
Herald: TV producer Jamaine Ross’ message ‘not to vote’ pays off
Thanks Bryce. Along with your astute commentary, there's more than a suspicion that its the Council officers and CEO who run the show - and do the damage. It may be unfair but the proliferation of orange cones and raised crossings, especially when the safety aspect is lacking, suggests unreality around expenditure.
Casting a local body vote is hampered by the sparsity of information candidates provide about themselves and, more importantly what policy changes they intend pursuing. Many if not most of the candidates refer to issues such as “ better leadership” “ cutting waste” “being a team player” etc. but rarely mention policy issues. This contrasts with national elections where the policy differences are more evident.