‘Accountability really matters,’ said the woman Ray Chung found to take accountability on his behalf.
It was standing room only at the Miramar Community Centre on Monday night for the 14th edition of the Zero Rates Roadshow, the campaign event for mayoral candidate Ray Chung and his politicial-party-that-insists-it-isn’t-a-political-party Independent Together.
Chung has been feeling the heat of the media spotlight after revelations that he had sent an email to council colleagues spreading an unverified and likely defamatory rumour about Wellington mayor Tory Whanau – and repeating the rumour in a live radio interview.
The controversy hasn’t dulled his base of support, though. According to Independent Together candidate Ken Ah Kuoi, Monday’s event drew the biggest crowd so far. Seven council candidates spoke, followed by an address from Chung and a Q&A session. Alistair Boyce from the campaign group Better Wellington (and owner of The Backbencher gastropub) MCed the event as if he was the party president; often stepping in to answer questions on the candidates’ behalf, using the collective “we”, and at one point cutting Chung off when he started to answer a question in a way that Boyce didn’t like.
As the event began, Chung sat in the front row while candidate Paula Muollo made the first speech and addressed the elephant in the room: Chung’s controversial comments.
“We believe that most people, if they reflect honestly, can recall moments where they exercised poor judgement,” she said. “What matters is taking responsibility for it. We do not condone inappropriate comments or language, and Ray has acknowledged his deep regret for this lapse of judgement. Accountability really matters.”
It was a much stronger apology than anything that has come out of Chung’s mouth so far. He hasn’t publicly acknowledged that his emails were inappropriate or admitted it was a lapse of judgement.
The “apology” video he released on Sunday included nothing of the sort. There was a brief reference to regret – “I regret writing it and regret sharing it with people I thought trustworthy” – but the rest of the video was an attack on a “deliberate attempt to discredit me” that was “designed to undermine our campaign”. On Monday night, Tory Whanau said she had received an email apology from Chung, but he hasn’t released this publicly.
When Chung finally spoke to the crowd, more than 50 minutes into the event, there was no hint of the “deep regret” he supposedly felt.
“The smear campaign against us this week has the Labour Party and Green Party all over it. They do not want to surrender control of the council coffers. They lost central government and now they want to keep their claws in local government money,” he said.
“The allegations have been thrown at us by a complicit media working hand-in-hand with political party lobbyists are designed to knock us out of the race. I say: give it your best shot… we don’t be deterred, we won’t be threatened, we won’t be bullied.”
That was the only time Chung acknowledged the scandal. Then, he was back to his stump speech about council spending. “Every time I look at our finances, I stagger,” he said. He highlighted the cost of the Tākina convention centre and the temporary fencing around the waterfront. He honed in on the proposal to build a new regional organic waste facility, which would cost $35 million shared between Wellington, Porirua and Hutt City councils.
“Why not just get people to do their recycling at home? It’s much, much cheaper to just get people a recycling bin and a composting bin and do it at home,” he said, apparently suggesting everyone own their own recycling plant.
The questions from the audience were overwhelmingly supportive, often drawing applause at both the questions and the answers. There was one notable exception; an elderly man carrying a disorganised stack of papers who asked a long, rambling question about why he should believe the candidates’ claims that a 0% rates increase was possible when councils nationwide had faced a 15% average increase this year. Boyce tried to cut him off, and the crowd shouted the man down, but he kept going until Chung agreed to answer the question.
Chung’s big idea was that he would ask other people for advice on how to save money. “Other councils are looking at different ways of actually reducing the cost of running their cities, so I will be meeting them to understand exactly how they go to see what we can actually use in Wellington. So there are ways of doing this.”
Most of the other Independent Together candidates offered little more by way of specifics. Muollo said the council needed to cut “ideological pet projects” so they could fund her own pet projects of saving Begonia House and repairing the City to Sea bridge.
The clear standout was Andrea Compton, who is running for Independent Together in the Takapu/Northern ward. The self-confessed “infrastructure nerd” is the Group Financial Controller at StraitNZ and has previously worked on iRex and Transmission Gully. She spoke at a level of detail far beyond all the other candidates, including and especially Chung. She proposed changes to the council’s budgeting procedures, selling Tākina, and reducing the downtown development levy. She gave examples of how the Whanganui District Council had kept their rates increases to 2.2%.
After Chung’s idea that everyone should do their own recycling and composting, Compton tried to save him by proposing an actual alternative: the council could work with Lower Hutt-based company Earth Starch, which has developed a scalable organic waste processing technology called Rosie2500.
And so Ray Chung’s campaign continues. He got himself and his entire team in trouble by spreading baseless and defamatory rumours about a woman’s sex life. Then a woman colleague apologised on his behalf. Then, when it became clear that he didn’t understand his own policy, another woman did the work for him.
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