JOHN TAMIHERE IS OUT MEETING VOTERS AND IT’S MAKING HIM MISERABLE.
The man challenging Phil Goff to be Auckland’s next mayor is at the Otara Markets at 9 on a Saturday morning, walking around with a small team of campaign staffers and volunteers. But it’s early in the campaign and few people are focused on the city’s mayoral race. Most have no idea he’s running for the job. Hardly anyone wants to talk to him. It’s awkward.
When faced with this kind of adversity, many politicians would plaster on a fake grin, don a campaign badge and glad-hand every potential supporter in sight. As he often has during a career pockmarked by controversies, Tamihere adopts a more defensive posture. He seems resentful of this ritual humiliation; embarrassed by his relative anonymity. Instead of strolling up to the shoppers, he strides around the market sipping a coffee. He briskly bypasses the man preaching about Jesus, avoids the customers buying fruit. Only two stalls warrant stop-offs. At one, he buys a mere as a birthday present for an employee of the Waipareira Trust, the housing and medical-care provider of which Tamihere is chief executive. At the other, he talks to an elderly woman selling hand-knitted baby clothes. Mostly he zeroes in on people he already knows, talking in hushed tones to his staffers or stalling for time by holding overlong conversations with the few people who recognise him from out west. When asked whether he’s enjoying himself, he shrugs in resignation and says, “All politicians have to prostitute themselves like this.”
For someone who’s spent a lot of time as a politician, Tamihere doesn’t seem comfortable with the expectations of politics. Most political figures are motivated by some strange concoction of neediness and civic duty. They aim to please. Tami-here can be prickly and standoffish. His motivations often seem more personal: frustration, or, sometimes, revenge. The last time he ran for mayor, it was because he got mad. It was 2007. He was two years removed from losing the Tamaki Makaurau electorate seat he’d held for Labour to Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples. He hadn’t planned on going into politics again until what he describes as a heated meeting with then-Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey at the mayor’s office in Henderson. Tamihere says he criticised Harvey for not doing enough for the Maori of west Auckland. The mayor responded indignantly. “He said, ‘I’m the first mayor to set
