Mayor puts ‘transformational change’ ahead of re-election

In a single day this week, Wellington mayor Tory Whanau’s inbox included one man calling her a “drunk hypocrite”, another calling her “the laziest mayor in welly history,” and another calling her “an alcoholic maori supremacist with no grasp on reality”.
That’s just another day, and not even a particularly bad one, for Whanau and other New Zealand women leaders. Studies have found abuse in central and local government has risen to “extremely high” levels, especially since Covid-19 and on social media. They’re more likely than men to experience gendered abuse, sexualised comments, threats to their family, and threats of sexual violence and death.
Dame Jacinda Ardern faced up to 90 times more online vitriol than other leaders, according to a University of Auckland study. And last week, Finance Minister Nicola Willis warned of a normalised “toxic environment” of gendered abuse that is stopping women from wanting a seat at the decision-making table. She quoted from one message: “Eff up bitch, you ruin lives, that makes you an effing rhymes-with-munt.”
Willis announced that the Ministry for Women is working with Netsafe on a toolkit for workplaces supporting women in leadership positions, including for local council candidates.
And Harvard University’s Bloomberg Center for Cities was commissioned by Wellington City Council to investigate. Research fellow Shannon Zhan interviewed 16 women from across the ideological spectrum – councillors, mayors, MPs, a university student activist, and a communications staff member.
One took a phone call from a man who said, ‘do I need to come around and shove a softball bat down your throat?’ Some abusers threatened to rape women politicians and also directly threatened their daughters. One had people breaking into her home on multiple occasions; some get sworn at in the street.
That combined with other barriers like the gender pay gap, lack of access to large donors, imposter syndrome, and threats to their physical safety during campaigning.
Says one: “This drains my energy. It takes so much time. I could’ve been 10 times more effective without the hate. If I go into a non-public facing role, I’ll be able to dedicate so much more time to actually doing things.”
Tory Whanau was instrumental in commissioning the study. She sat down for a wide-ranging Newsroom interview at the Local Government NZ conference, which she hosted in the capital city.
The Wellington mayor has been going head-to-head with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon over his proposed central spending controls on councils. Last week he promised to go to war on council waste; she promised to “absolutely challenge” his regulatory agenda.
She admits she’s got her work cut out to win re-election, after high-profile defeats like losing Govt backing for Let’s Get Wellington Moving. “That was probably the biggest loss. But in terms of my campaign priorities, I’d say around about two-thirds are in train or have been delivered. So I feel really proud of that.”
There are also parts of her City Safety Programme that she won’t be able to deliver, because of cost constraints. And the failure to get the Reading cinema complex deal over the line was another loss, she says. “For me, it was a potential solution to revitalise the city centre. It didn’t happen. I got over it. We move on. Now it’s for sale, and I’m really excited to see what might come from that.”
But Whanau says she’ll keep fighting for priorities like the “deeply unpopular” rebuild of Wellington’s Golden Mile, even if it jeopardises her chance of winning re-election next year. “The election is going to take part in the middle of construction,” she says. “So I have wondered about my chances. I’m gonna go hard in my campaign, but I know what that will do.”
Whanau has fought hard to keep her political agenda and work-plan on track, in the face of public criticism over forgetting to pay the dinner bill on one evening out, and being accused of drinking to excess on another. Amid a barrage of criticism on social media and from some broadcasters, she publicly admitted to an alcohol problem. Subsequently, she was diagnosed as having ADHD.
She’s not the first politician to face such criticism. Former Wellington mayor Mark Blumsky was found lying bloodied with facial injuries in a stairwell to his apartment, after going out drinking till 1.30am. He denied being drunk. Winston Peters once verbally abused a Somali taxi driver and refused to pay his fare after a big night out, and John Key once said Peters smelled of alcohol in the Parliamentary debating chamber.
“We all know the stairwell story, but I suppose it’s just a it’s become a bit of a reality for a lot of women in politics and with certain issues and our personal lives coming to the fore. I’ve kind of just accepted it. I’ve adapted to it, and I don’t want that to be a thing. I just want to commit to my job, so I’m making sure that I have measures in place to be able to do that.
“There are no hard feelings about anything that happened last year. Yeah, it was unpleasant, but my goodness, what it’s built for me has been incredible in terms of my resilience, in terms of my focus and in terms of really prioritising and remembering why I do this.”
Not everybody is politically tribal. Not everybody is polarised. But those “frequent fliers” who are behind most of the abuse carry a disproportionate weight.
One political communications staff member analysed monthly Facebook engagement data to understand exactly what impact “frequent fliers” have. Out of almost 2,800 comments, the top 50 commenters averaged 11 comments a month. “It’s more personal,” says one leader. “They are relentless,” says another.
It isn’t just online, says that staffer: “My first six months we issued three trespassing orders. I have a really high bar for the standard of behaviour that comes through our door. If you aren’t respectful and calm, my team is trained in de-escalation and will report you.”
Among those surveyed for the Harvard University study are MPs from National, Labour and the Greens. More than 70 percent report fearing for their own staff and 80 percent say their staff or family are fearful for them.
That’s led to mental and emotional stress for most, and sometimes caused problems with friends or family. 64 percent of MPs have had to increase security at home and 51 percent have increased security at work. Many have altered their behaviour by changing their routine or reducing their outings.
Almost every single interviewee chose to ignore or block all instances of online violence they received. Two women had tried to call out and push back on abusive comments and were immediately subjected to intense backlash. One woman successfully called out and pursued legal action against some of her trolls, but it required an enormous investment of her own time.
Even one high-profile violent incident can have an enormous chilling effect on those who are thinking about running and are currently in office, the study finds. Participants brought up the murder of MP Jo Cox in the UK as a disturbing example of what they worry might happen to them. Others brought up Jacinda Ardern, Golriz Ghahraman, and James Shaw as frightening examples of both physical and online violence.
Although these incidents are rare, in the words of one of the participants, “it only takes one” – even one incident can have an enormous impact on the willingness of women and young people to stand for public office.
So what’s the answer? The Harvard report proposes supporting individuals with training, counselling and security, using AI tools to remove hate speech from social media accounts, and creating a fund for victims to sue for defamation.
It proposes training for police, judges and the news media on recoinising and handling gendered and racialised online violence and hate speech.
And perhaps most important, it suggests community and systemic changes: criminalising some offences, and updating the Harmful Digital Communications Act ensuring it’s enforced by a government agency, rather than the not-for-profit Netsafe.
It recommends new legislation to regulate social media and technology companies to increase transparency, add preventative measures and safety features, and ensure faster response and enforcement.
I spoke with Tory Whanau about this. She says the report highlights the scale of the problem for women, and especially women of colour: “It’s a reality of online violence towards us.”
Whanau wants to work with women across the political spectrum to create a safer pathway for women and marginalised communities to be able to stand for politics. “That’s truly the tragic thing, that as a result of these awful online trolls, we have someone like your daughter who now faces a big barrier to standing.
“I’m used to it. I’m going to just keep going. But it has the potential to stop other really great candidates from stepping up and creating a truly representative local government and central government.”
She sees the changes to her personal life, like not drinking and being careful where she goes and what she does in public, as being necessary compromises to avoid attacks on her, in the mayoral role. “I just see it as a like a sacrifice to make for now, for the job. The job was more important. Once I got through a few months of not drinking, yeah, it’s not a big deal.
“I tried to not accept it last year, and look what happened. I don’t want to put my family for seeing that again. The diagnosis has been a bit of a life-changer – I feel like more of a well-oiled machine, now that I’ve got medication and setting boundaries and knowing what my mind needs to do a good job. The last four weeks have probably been the happiest I’ve been in this role.”