Auckland Central clash: Chlöe Swarbrick's bid for history and the two candidates trying to unseat her

In 2020, Chlöe Swarbrick became the second Green MP ever to win an electorate, following Jeanette Fitzsimons' win in Coromandel in 1999.

In 2023, Swarbrick is confident she will be become the first Green MP to hold one.

"We're absolutely going to do that. This has been the honour and privilege of my life, the last three years," she said.

But there are two candidates who also think they are in with a chance for the seat. National is standing entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mahesh Muralidhar, while software engineer and housing advocate Oscar Sims will contest the electorate for Labour.

Auckland Central is home to a high proportion of renters, a high proportion of residents born overseas, and, even within its boundaries, large demographic differences.

It does not just contain the city centre, but also suburbs like Grafton, Newton, and Ponsonby, as well as Hauraki Gulf islands like Waiheke and Aotea.

Each has its own issues for the MP to tackle.

RNZ caught up with all three candidates on the campaign, and asked what they thought were the issues facing the electorate, and what they would do to address them.

Chlöe Swarbrick pointed to local issues with regional significance she had achieved in the three years as the MP, such as saving the St James Theatre, bringing in marine protected areas, and most recently, the scaling up of safety hubs staffed by Community Patrols volunteers and Māori wardens.

Swarbrick said all of those had come from participation from communities, and pointed to a "litany" of letters to ministers to obtain funding.

"Being able to point to all of those things as demonstrations where we built the community mandate for political change, I think has offered a platform for people to see where politics actually really impacts their lives, and where they can participate in creating change," she said.

Swarbrick acknowledged the challenges the electorate has faced since 2020. Covid and the Auckland-specific lockdown and border, the cost of living, and the flooding and cyclone at the beginning of this year, all left Auckland Central residents weary.

"I've seen time and again that our community has risen to those challenges. And we've seen their Aucklanders' values in practice, you know, nobody was means-testing their neighbours to see if they needed or afforded help. But we were reaching out and we were doing those things, we were showing our values in practice.

"I guess the call to action this election is to say that those values deserve to be prioritised outside of crises, because that's how we go about creating a system that works for everybody, and for the planet."

Swarbrick has spent the last three years balancing her duties as an electorate MP with her many spokesperson roles in Parliament.

The Greens also want to get into Cabinet, and if successful Swarbrick would likely get a ministerial position.

This is something National's candidate, Mahesh Muralidhar, believes can work in his favour.

"Auckland Central has not had, for all intents and purposes, an electorate MP," he said. "Auckland Central seems to have had a list MP who occasionally addresses the electorate's issues."

In his electorate office on Ponsonby Road (close to the site of an infamous moment of the 2020 campaign), RNZ met with Muralidhar after a morning campaigning on Waiheke Island.

Powerade Zero in hand (blue, of course), Muralidhar estimated he had personally knocked on 7000 doors throughout the electorate. He said the community and its problems around cost of living, crime, and homelessness were not being heard.

"It is ridiculous, the lack of leadership and acknowledgement by Labour and the Greens in regards to the woes of Auckland Central. They've come out and said something about police hubs, but people have died. And the current MP has not come out in full force and gone 'this is not okay, this is completely unacceptable'."

Swarbrick said she worked with police when it came to safety concerns, especially when high-profile incidents occurred.

She said crime was often a region-wide approach, and it was unhelpful to conflate gun violence with ram raids or antisocial behaviour or homelessness, which each required different interventions.

"When you're talking about these issues, we need to take a region-wide approach. That's the call I've been hearing from our police, is that it actually is not beneficial at all to have political point-scoring based on what are actually quite artificial boundaries in the minds of the people who may be the perpetrators of these kinds of crimes."

Muralidhar makes sure that whenever he criticises the government, he includes the Green Party in the same sentence.

"This current government, with the Greens joyously guiding them along, have gone on this ideological Alice in Wonderland journey where they've completely lost track, lost capacity to be pragmatic and practical."

Muralidhar, describing himself as a socially liberal, "fiscally aware" candidate, hopes to sell voters on his story, and his background.

Nineteen years ago, while competing on a reality TV show (something former Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye also did before entering politics), Muralidhar suffered third-degree burns. He rattles off a list of companies he has helped build and invest in.

He said an election campaign was nothing compared to those strains or stresses, but it was the longest period of time he had been under the pump.

"I am very comfortable in saying that I am capable of solving these problems and addressing their ails, and also being part of a team that can solve and take New Zealand to a whole other level."

Most seats are a simple battle of red vs blue. But these candidates are each fighting battles on two fronts.

Labour held the electorate from 1919 to 2008, barring a three year period from 1993 when it was won by the Alliance's Sandra Lee.

Last time around, Labour's Helen White rather infamously told Swarbrick to stand down in case they split the vote.

This year, White's moving to contest Mt Albert instead.

In her place, Oscar Sims hopes to return it red.

He said people were most concerned over the cost of living, safety, resourcing police, and renters' rights, things he said Labour had been addressing.

"There's some thinking around how you get social change. And obviously that starts at the grassroots level but also it has to be at the highest reaches of our government, and Labour is a party that has that and has had a long recorded history of that," he said.

At 25 years old, Sims would be one of the few MPs to benefit from Labour's proposed free dental care. Should he win, he would become the first Gen Z MP (potentially along with Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke from Te Pāti Māori).

But he is not worried about what voters or other MPs might make of his age.

"It's called the House of Representatives for a reason, right? It's not just about selecting people by CV blindly.

"It's actually about having people who can represent you, and you could see as someone who's like you, and similar to you, and knows your issues. Being a renter who relies on public transport is, I think, a big part of that for me in a seat like Auckland Central."

Sims, who was selected in April, compared the campaign to running a marathon, something he used to do regularly before putting his hand up for politics.

He still has one more week of his full-time job as a software engineer before he can throw all of his efforts into the campaign.

"I think this is one of the barriers for young people, or people who aren't independently wealthy standing for Parliament. I have to pay rent, right? I have campaign expenses. And that means I can't take six months off work to campaign full time, so I have to be doing my job."

National and Labour have not 'parachuted in' candidates. Sims has been the secretary and treasurer of the City Centre Residents' Group, while Muralidhar, who lives in Ponsonby, moved to the electorate straight out of high school.

"I think it's positive for democracy that we have three candidates in this race who have local links, I think that's quite a good thing," Sims said.

Sims said he had a lot of respect for Swarbrick, and it did not serve himself nor her to slam each other in the media.

But he did raise a similar point to Muralidhar, in that the potential for Swarbrick to take on more roles in a Labour-Green coalition was something he could raise with voters as a potential point of difference.

"My focus has been on local issues. The core of my advocacy is to say, 'look, Chlöe is the spokesperson for all of these different things, and that's nice but we need someone in Auckland Central'. It's a seat with a lot of specific local issues and I want to be that voice for those local issues."

Both Sims and Muralidhar are under no illusions their only path into Parliament is winning the seat.

Muralidhar is ranked 43rd on National's list, while Sims is at 63 on Labour's.

Muralidhar said his first priority and commitment was to change the government.

"If we keep going down the way we're going down, New Zealand's going to be a wreck. So that is my first priority. That was my commitment to the party.

"No problems, I'm a team player. And I always am and always will be, because I'm very clear about the goals. The team has goals. And I agree with the team goals. Let's go! Obviously, I want to be part of the next journey."

With Swarbrick third on the Green Party list, and practically guaranteed a return to Parliament, Sims says it means constituents can vote strategically.

"For people who want more young progressives in Parliament, then they can vote for me with their candidate vote without feeling like there's going to be any risk of her being dropped out of Parliament."

Swarbrick, however, said no political party was entitled to an electorate, and was unconvinced strategic voting had ever worked.

"What does that say about how their parties value them?

"I didn't seek to try and win Auckland Central for the sake of vanity, or platform, or position, or whatever on the hierarchy. It was because I believe in my community. And I want to fight tooth and nail every single day for the things that we deserve, that all Aucklanders, all New Zealanders deserve."

Swarbrick said she wanted people to realise politics was not just the Shakespearean soliloquies that occur in Parliament's debating chamber, but about everyday decisions that affect everyday lives.

"If I have achieved, kind of at a high level, one really meaningful thing, it is the bringing together of community, for people to understand their power to change the way that politics operates in this country.

"And that's always been why Auckland Central has been so fundamentally important to me, it's my home and community but it's also where I see the opportunity for us to present grassroots solutions, localised solutions, where people get a sense of hope and proof of concept that this stuff is possible and we can then scale it up to understanding that systemic change is totally possible."

In the run-up to the 2023 election RNZ is profiling a number of key electorates. See profiles on Te Tai Hauāuru, and Ikaroa Rāwhiti.