A whole new layer of politicians will soon be helping run the country. Once elected, these local government councillors and mayors won’t, however, get the same degree of scrutiny as MPs and Ministers at the central-national level of politics. And yet some of them will actually have more power than those in Parliament. And many of them will be subject to greater influence by non-democratic forces, such as lobbyists, political donors, pressure groups, and local business networks.
Therefore, should the links between local politicians and lobbyists, political donors, and networks of influence be scrutinised more? I think so. This Integrity Briefing therefore delves into some recent cases, from Auckland to Queenstown, revealing how campaign donations, cosy lobbying relationships, and development deals can sway decision-making, raising serious concerns about transparency and public trust.
The Anatomy of influence – A Wellington case study
Many of the powerful vested interests behind local politicians are barely acknowledged. For example, how many Wellington voters knew that the current Mayor of Wellington, Tory Whanau, had her successful 2022 campaign essentially run by corporate lobbyist Neale Jones?
Jones co-owns and operates the Capital Government Relations firm with fellow political commentator Ben Thomas. The firm is the epitome of the “revolving door” between the Beehive, business and local government, as most staff utilise their backgrounds in politics to help big business. Their latest employee is former MP and Deputy Leader of New Zealand First, Fletcher Tabuteau. And immediately before Tory Whanau entered the Wellington Mayoral Office, she worked as a lobbyist for Capital Government Relations. Notably, on taking the top job, she never had to disclose her firm’s various clients, such as Wellington property developers.
Now in 2025, who’s running Andrew Little’s campaign to replace Whanau? Once again, it’s Neale Jones, alongside his partner Alex Marett (another former Beehive staffer). The relationship between Jones and Little is not new; Jones served as Little’s Chief of Staff when Little was Leader of the Labour Party, a long-standing political alliance now transplanted from the parliamentary to the municipal sphere.
What’s in it for Jones’ lobbying firm to effectively select the Wellington Mayor each election? The answer is unparalleled access and influence. By helping Little campaign, a lobbyist gains intimate knowledge and influence of the candidate’s strategy, priorities, and incoming personnel. They build a relationship of trust and indebtedness that is invaluable post-election - especially for a lobbying firm assisting Wellington businesses wanting to influence decision-making.
The fundamental problem is the complete lack of transparency. There is no real regulation or transparency about these relationships — except if journalists and researchers expose them.
We should scrutinise the vested interests in local government at election time
The NZ Herald published a story yesterday that quoted me on some of these issues – see Hannah Brown’s Careful who you vote for: Foreign states target local councillors (paywalled).
The story was mainly about the NZSIS’s attempts to alert the public about foreign states – presumably, China in particular – that the spies think are trying to influence local politics. Director-general Andrew Hampton told the Herald that such countries “are persistently trying to interfere in our local councils, exploiting sister city relationships and attempting bribery through proxies”. Hampton is quoted: “Councils are attractive targets for foreign state interference and espionage because they have decision-making powers over critical national infrastructure. They own controlling stakes in New Zealand’s ports.”
My own commentary to the Herald is more about domestic influence, from the likes of property developers, lobbyists, and political donations. While the foreign threat is real, it can act as a spectacular distraction, drawing our gaze to an exotic danger while the more mundane and pervasive influence of domestic money and power continues to shape our communities with insufficient scrutiny.
Here’s the part reporting on my analysis:
Dr Bryce Edwards, director of The Integrity Institute and politics lecturer at Victoria University, said it’s tricky but there are a few things voters can evaluate. “They need to think about integrity issues and the existence of any vested interests, and whether people standing for office are somehow beholden elsewhere… I think there is actually a growing scepticism in society about politicians and that’s healthy. People no longer take everything at face value, voters are less naive… Globally we’re less trusting of institutions, candidates, parties, we’re already suspicious of promises, ties to things behind the scenes. I’m optimistic that people can’t easily have the wool pulled.” Edwards doesn’t think there are any particular signs voters can look for beyond that. “Yes, you can ethnically profile and wonder what countries they have links to, but that can also be dangerous.” He said voters should be on the lookout for high-spending candidates with a lot of advertising and a lot of billboards. “If it’s flashy it means they have a lot of resources – or someone else is funding it. “There’s nothing wrong with that but I think that’s probably the easiest shortcut to find out how someone could be beholden to someone else.” Ultimately, he asked, how much should voters be expected to investigate these things? “It’s incumbent on the media and academics to be scrutinising councils. A lot of trips mayors and councillors go on are quite questionable and I think local government is under-scrutinised as part of the political system.
The Currency of influence: Political donations and campaign expenditure
The path to being “beholden elsewhere” often begins long before a candidate is elected, on the campaign trail itself. The financial barrier to entry in local politics is substantial, creating a system where access to money is a prerequisite for a viable candidacy. As I advised voters in the Herald, if a candidate has lots of money to run advertising, it doesn’t mean there’s any corruption, but it’s some sort of sign of getting resources from somewhere.
The costs are formidable. Running a meaningful mayoral campaign in Auckland can cost around $500,000, while a council seat can require an outlay of $20,000. This financial reality systematically filters out candidates who lack personal wealth or access to affluent networks, reinforcing the demographic imbalance that characterises our councils.
This high cost of entry creates a dependency loop. Candidates must seek funding, and the most organised and readily available sources of significant non-party funding are often business interests, property developers, and wealthy individuals.
A stark example of this dynamic can be seen in Wellington, where the “Independent Together” ticket received a single $40,000 donation from Vlad Barbalich, a major donor to and member of the New Zealand First party. This one contribution effectively bankrolled an entire slate of candidates, raising immediate and legitimate questions about the ideological alignment and potential obligations of those elected under its banner.
Wealth itself can become a powerful campaign tool, creating an uneven playing field. In Dunedin, mayoral candidate Andrew Simms, a successful businessman, pledged to donate his mayoral car allowance and a portion of his salary to a homeless outreach programme. While presented as an act of philanthropy, this pledge simultaneously functions as a potent piece of political marketing. But it’s one entirely unavailable to candidates of modest means. This highlights the inherent advantage that wealth confers in the political arena, where personal financial capacity can be translated directly into perceived public virtue.
This system effectively functions as a form of pre-selection. Before the public casts a single vote, the pool of “viable” candidates has already been filtered based on their ability to attract funding. Those whose platforms are hostile to the interests of business and development lobbies are less likely to secure the necessary resources to run a competitive campaign. This is not about direct bribery; it is a more subtle and systemic form of capture that shapes the entire field of political competition, skewing it towards those who are, at a minimum, ideologically compatible with their financial backers.
I’ll write more on the political donations made to the local government candidates in another Integrity Briefing.
The Mechanics of influence: Business and astroturf organising
More overt still is the advocacy from formal business lobbies. The Local Government Business Forum — a coalition including Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Initiative, and Federated Farmers — openly calls for voters to elect candidates with “commercial and financial acumen” and a “pro-growth and pro-development mindset”. This is a transparent effort to populate councils with representatives who share their economic worldview.
The Taxpayers’ Union is the other business representative organisation trying to influence the local elections while claiming to represent grassroots residents. The well-funded organisation has been inserting itself into local election debates, effectively acting as a lobby for a particular economic ideology, particularly by championing the idea of capping rate hikes by law.
Some of the most insidious influence efforts wear the disguise of grassroots citizen concern. In the past couple of years, a network of innocuously named “ratepayers” groups has sprung up across the country – Concerned Ratepayers here, Residents and Ratepayers there – campaigning on slogans like “back to basics,” “common sense,” and “fiscal responsibility.”
Journalists Andrea Vance and Charlie Mitchell found an orchestrated effort behind several “Concerned Ratepayers” and “Better councils” (“Better Wellington”, “Better Waipā”, “Better Hamilton”), linking them to the far-right anti-mandate group Voices for Freedom (VFF) and to political figures associated with NZ First. Perhaps most concerning, these groups were able to draw on undisclosed funding sources to promote their aligned candidates, evading the transparency requirements official political parties face. It’s a clever end-run around electoral rules: if you don’t call yourself a party, you can influence an election without the same scrutiny on where your money or ideas are coming from.
These examples demonstrate that the most effective influence is often ideological. By successfully framing public spending on libraries, parks, or social housing as “wasteful” or “nice-to-haves”, and defining “core services” as merely “pipes and potholes”, these groups shift the entire spectrum of acceptable public debate. This is a deeper form of capture than influencing a single vote; it is about capturing the public conversation itself, making it politically difficult for councils to pursue any agenda that does not align with a narrow, commercial-centric model of governance.
Systemic failures in transparency and oversight
The influence of vested interests thrives in the shadows, enabled by systemic failures in transparency and accountability. A culture of secrecy, combined with weak oversight mechanisms, creates an environment where decisions can be shaped away from public view, making meaningful scrutiny impossible.
A stark example of this is the failure of financial oversight at Auckland Council was brought to light by the Sunday Star Times, with their latest report being published this week. An investigation by councillors Mike Lee and John Watson uncovered what they termed “a systematic failure in general accounting practice”, where millions of dollars in “out-of-pocket” disbursements to consultants went entirely untracked because they were not separately coded in accounting systems.
A probe was launched into a $3.5 million contract with Australian consultancy Flagstaff Partners, which found nearly $136,000 in expenses were paid without receipts, including a mysterious $12,000 line item labelled only “expenses while travelling”. Despite these findings, the Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) refused to conduct a wider review of past payments, a decision Councillor Lee described as a “cop out”. This demonstrates a critical failure of the primary watchdog to enforce accountability, leaving a “grand canyon of credibility” between the council’s rhetoric of cutting waste and the reality of its untracked spending.
This lack of transparency extends from financial records to the decision-making process itself. In Gisborne, the District Council held 55 workshops during its current term without any public notification. While technically “open”, the failure to inform the public rendered that status meaningless. The council’s justification (that notification “may not always be practical or reasonable”) flies in the face of guidance from the Chief Ombudsman, whose recent “Open for Business” report recommended that workshops be open by default to reduce the perception of secret decision-making. This practice creates a parallel, non-transparent forum for deliberation where substantive debate occurs, reducing the formal public meeting to a mere rubber-stamping exercise and undermining the core transparency principles of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 (LGOIMA).
Compounding these issues is a normalised and often casual approach to conflicts of interest. In Auckland, councillors recently defended accepting free tickets and hospitality at Eden Park shortly before a crucial vote on the city’s stadium strategy, arguing it was part of their “civic function”. In Queenstown Lakes, a senior council communications manager was found last month to be acting as a “highly public cheerleader” for the incumbent mayor’s re-election campaign, blurring the lines between his official role and partisan political activity.
The accountability mechanisms designed to prevent such issues (the OAG, the Ombudsman, and internal codes of conduct) are proving insufficient. They often act reactively, lack robust enforcement powers, or accept procedural fixes that fail to address the underlying culture of opacity. This creates a significant “accountability gap” where potential wrongdoing is identified but not fully rectified, breeding cynicism and confirming public suspicion that the real decisions are made behind closed doors.
The Democratic deficit – and why it matters
Underlying all these examples of influence – the big donations, the lobby campaigns, the secretive processes – is a deeper structural weakness in our local democracy. New Zealand’s councils suffer from what has been called a “democratic deficit”: chronic low voter turnout, under-representation of certain communities, and a decline of local journalism that leaves citizens less informed. This environment is the perfect Petri dish for vested interests to thrive.
When only about 40% of eligible voters typically bother to vote in council elections (and those voters skew older, wealthier, and property-owning), it’s much easier for a motivated minority to capture the agenda. A developer, lobby group, or well-funded activist network will find it far simpler to make inroads in a low-turnout election or a low-profile council decision than in the glare of national politics. Fewer eyeballs watching means more opportunity for mischief.
Why does this matter? Because the stakes are high. When local government is captured, whether by a tight clique of business interests or simply by inertia and lack of scrutiny, communities suffer the consequences in very tangible ways. Think of the housing crisis: councils set zoning and development rules, and if those processes are dominated by developer interests or NIMBY-minded incumbents, we get outcomes that favour private profits or the status quo over affordable housing. Think of climate resilience: if a council’s big spenders lobby successfully to defer costly infrastructure upgrades (to keep rates low), the whole city pays the price when systems fail in storms.
Conclusion: Beyond foreign spies – The case for an integrity overhaul
The NZSIS’s warning about foreign interference serves as an uncomfortable but necessary mirror. The “soft targets” it identifies are not the result of some exotic espionage plot, but of deep, systemic weaknesses in the fabric of our local democracy. While foreign spies are a headline-grabbing threat, the more constant and corrosive pressure on local government integrity comes from domestic vested interests operating within a system that is ripe for capture.
This Integrity Briefing has outlined the key vectors of this influence: an opaque and dependency-creating campaign finance system; unregulated lobbying that privileges access and shapes policy behind closed doors; a pervasive culture of procedural secrecy that undermines public deliberation; and a casual approach to conflicts of interest that erodes trust. These tools are effective primarily because they operate within an ecosystem defined by a profound democratic deficit. Low voter turnout, unrepresentative councils, and the collapse of media scrutiny create a low-accountability vacuum that powerful and motivated interests are naturally equipped to fill.
The consequences are not abstract. They are visible in our crumbling water pipes, our politicised planning decisions, and a growing public cynicism that sees local government as either irrelevant or captured. Ensuring the integrity of our councils is not a “nice-to-have”; it is fundamental to addressing New Zealand’s most pressing challenges, from housing affordability and transport congestion to climate resilience and social cohesion.
Piecemeal fixes and reactive investigations are no longer sufficient. What is required is a comprehensive integrity overhaul: strengthening transparency laws for donations and lobbying, enforcing genuine openness in council processes, and fostering a democratic culture that encourages participation and demands accountability. Only by hardening these domestic targets can we build a local government system resilient enough to serve the public interest, whether the threat comes from a foreign spy or a local developer.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of The Integrity Institute
Further reading:
Andrea Vance (Post): Watchdog accused of ‘copping out’ on Auckland Council consultant expenses (paywalled)
Andrea Vance and Charlie Mitchell (The Post): Behind the boring promises: the protesters trying to reshape local democracy (paywalled)
David Long (Stuff): Has democracy died in the Auckland supercity?
Victor Waters (RNZ): Auckland councillors defend getting freebies for Eden Park events ahead of stadium vote
Zita Campbell (Local Democracy Reporting): Gisborne council held 55 workshops without telling the public
Crux: QLDC’s digital comms manager is a key cheerleader for Lewers re-election
Bravo! thank you Bryce for this excellent briefing.
One of the above mentioned ratbag groups here in Kapiti recently letter box dropped leaflets which were (intentionally?) not glossy, promoted concern about rate increases (and who isn't!) and suggested that responses to a questionnaire they had sent each candidate should provide the basis for decisions on whom to vote for. Most candidates hadn't responded to that group's questionnaire and this was displayed negatively - those who had responded were assigned ticks. Whilst not openly stated, these candidates were the ones the ratbag group wish to see elected. All presented as if the group's main interest was in helping the voter! A very skilful attempt to influence voting.