You know a seat is in the balance when party leaders dedicate serious time to campaigning alongside their candidates. When he’s not holding weekend street corner meetings in his Epsom stronghold, Act leader David Seymour regularly appears on the streets of neighbouring Tāmaki with candidate James Christmas.
In the blue corner Christopher Luxon took two hours out of his compressed weekday Prime Ministerial schedule to launch Mahesh Muralidhar’s campaign at the Akarana Yacht Club in Ōrakei, one of the electorate’s wealthier suburbs.
And during his keynote speech at the party’s annual conference, Luxon made a point of naming Muralidhar (one of only two candidates he highlighted) and saying he would be the next MP for Tāmaki. “Exactly the voice New Zealand’s newest generation of business talent deserves in Parliament,” he said.
A string of senior National Party Cabinet ministers, including Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford, will campaign alongside Muralidhar in coming months
Seymour, for Christmas, and Police Minister Mark Mitchell for Muralidhar will hold competing public meetings in the electorate this Friday and Saturday, and the Labour candidate Max Harris has the party’s finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds at a community meeting on Friday evening.
Act is fighting hard to hold Tāmaki. National wants it back. Badly.
Tāmaki electorate chair and former National Party president, Peter Goodfellow, appeared to be in physical pain at Muralidhar’s launch describing the 2023 loss of the seat as “very disappointing…given that National had won the party vote by four to one.”
National’s Simon O’Connor held the seat for nearly 12 years. At the 2020 election he soundly beat Labour’s Shirin Brown with an 8068-vote majority. But four months out from the 2023 election he damaged his chances of a fifth term by commenting on a US court decision.
When the Supreme Court in Florida overturned the Roe v Wade decision [eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion] O’Connor, who is Catholic, posted on Twitter ‘today is a good day’.
Tāmaki voters would have been aware of his conservative views but pushing them out to the Twittersphere unsettled enough of them to open the previously locked door.
Act spied an opportunity and Brooke van Velden ran an energetic campaign to beat O’Connor by 4158 votes, breaking National’s 63-year continuous hold on the seat.
National selected Muralidhar before learning van Velden would retire from politics. Within the party there have been quiet questions about whether a different candidate -perhaps even a current list MP – might have been chosen had the vacancy been known earlier.
Muralidhar, who was born in India, grew up in Singapore before completing his education in New Zealand. He contested Auckland Central at the last election losing to the Greens Chlöe Swarbrick by 3896 votes. In Auckland Central, Muralidhar campaigned full time for months and poured considerable effort into door knocking. He is following the same formula in Tāmaki.
The tactic was highlighted by Luxon when he spoke at the yacht club. He told the 150 or so supporters, who paid $250 to be there, that every Monday he “and Sylvia [party president Sylvia Wood] named and shamed,” candidates for the door knocking they did or didn’t do. “Mahesh is the leader,” said Luxon. Muralidhar says he has “sore knuckles” from knocking on more than 5000 doors already.
Luxon also made a point of Muralidhar’s involvement in tech companies saying it would be handy in Wellington. “You need to vote for this man. I need him on my team when I disrupt the public service.” And the National leader had a message which he is probably hoping will be relayed to the wider party faithful, “I don’t need you to do anything tricky like a strategic vote.”
Act’s James Christmas will, at some point in the campaign, need to push the idea that Tamaki voters should stay with the ‘strategic’ option where they give their party vote to National if they wish but keep a high-profile Act candidate as their local MP.
Like the party’s latest recruit, Paul Henry, Christmas is a defector from National. He narrowly missed selection for the seat of Ilam in 2023. The Auckland-based lawyer, quietly touted as a future leader of Act, repeatedly says the opportunity to be an electorate MP is what draws him to politics.
Seymour will need to send a clear signal to Tāmaki voters that Christmas has a strong future in the party. A high placing on the list will be an obvious sign, but Act’s rankings aren’t due out until September.
Like Muralidhar, who has already been campaigning for five months, Christmas has put his career on hold to chase votes on a full-time basis.
Christmas alternates between wearing a pink windbreaker “because Brooke and her pink coat became synonymous with Tamaki” when he is doing street corner meetings and a more formal blazer or suit when he is door knocking.
“I don’t really like the pink jacket. I am much more comfortable in a suit and tie. When I knock on someone’s door I want to look like a person who could be their MP.”
This is a battle being fought on multiple fronts. Door knocking and handing out pamphlets is amplified by social media campaigns and digital billboards. Both Christmas and Muralidhar have advertisements displaying in the large billboards near Mechanics Bay at the start of Tamaki Drive.
Both candidates claim they are able “to get things done.”
Muralidhar, who lives in the electorate, mentors budding tech entrepreneurs at high schools and has joined the local community patrol. Law and order is a live issue in Tāmaki after two people were stabbed on a bus in Glen Innes and Ōrakei in December 2025; one later died.
Christmas says his time as a ministerial advisor for former Attorney-General Christopher Finlayson, and Prime Ministers Sir John Key and Sir Bill English makes him someone who can ‘cut through’ with politicians and solve problems for constituents.
Apart from law and order and the universal “cost of living” concerns, the biggest local issue, at least in the more affluent parts of the electorate like Mission Bay, St Heliers and Glendowie, is housing intensification.
Infill housing in these suburbs has already increased stormwater runoff, flooding and exposed the aging infrastructure.
Plan changes driven by Housing Minister Chris Bishop to increase Auckland’s housing capacity by two million homes were met mainly with dismay in Tāmaki’s beachside suburbs.
Residents in St Heliers point to the impact floodwaters and sewage mixing with stormwater is having on Dingle Dell, the suburb’s prized nature reserve, and the quality of the water at nearby beaches.
Under public pressure from Act and behind the scenes efforts of local National MPs, Bishop has reduced the requirement for possible new homes to 1.4 million but according to Christmas it remains an issue and his party’s stronger stance will win him votes.
While Act and National have campaign offices in the bay suburbs, Labour’s Max Harris has set up shop in Glen Innes, a less affluent suburb in the southern part of the electorate.
A lawyer, with connections to Tāmaki through his time studying at Auckland University, Harris is 29th on Labour’s list and on current polling is likely to squeak into Parliament without having to win the seat.
Labour has previously held Tāmaki, albeit a while ago. Tom Skinner won it in 1946 and Bob Tizard in 1957. Tizard lost to Robert Muldoon who then held the seat for 31 years.
Harris says recent boundary changes will help Labour. “With Point England, 2000 more votes will be coming into the electorate”.
The working class suburb of Pt England has been shifted out of Panmure-Ōtāhuhu electorate and into Tāmaki.
At a local residents association meeting where the four candidates were invited to speak, Harris said he was a person with “heart and hope”. The former Rhodes scholar received the strongest applause of the night when he emphasised his desire to bring “positivity” back to the electorate.
The right leaning candidates like to remind reporters that Harris regards “tax as love”. The phrase belongs to economist Shamubeel Eaqub but Harris endorsed and expounded on it in a 2018 article for The Spinoff.
For Harris to win, it would require a swing to the left and for Muralidhar and Christmas to split the right vote equally. Not impossible, but unlikely.
The fourth candidate contesting the seat is the Greens’ Donald Mayo. The young medical doctor did well against his more experienced opponents at the residents meeting. The Greens didn’t stand a candidate in 2023 but still got 4582 party votes. That placed it fourth, not far behind Act and well ahead of New Zealand first. Mayo’s job here is to increase that if he can.
The deciding factor in the seat will be how many traditional National voters, particularly women, who defected over O’Connor’s conservative views, return to Muralidhar and how many choose to stay with Act’s Christmas.
One former politician who has kept a close eye on the seat over many years expects it to go down to the wire. “Will Tamaki turn blue again? I think it will be a drag race to the very end.”
