OPINION

Tory Whanau has said no.

She's said no to standing for Wellington mayor for the three terms she always said she’d run for. She's out; she's thrown in the towel.

We won't get the exciting election campaign of Tory Whanau v Andrew Little, which I must say I was looking forward to.

And I’ll be honest; I wanted her to run. I wanted to know if Wellington as a city really believes in the green idealisms she promotes.

This election was going to tell me whether it was a flash in the pan or whether it was real. But Tory has pulled out.

What I can't quite work out is why this was announced on the same day that she stood on Courtenay Place with her brand new Bunnings shovel, digging up the ground to celebrate the start of the Golden Mile redevelopment works.

Clearly, the hole she dug was simply too big. She couldn't climb out of it.

Tory says her decision not to run is a better outcome for everybody involved. She now wants to run for the Māori ward on council.

She also told the Herald this morning she’d like to be a government Minister one day. You can make your own mind up on that one.

Now there have been rumours around Tory pulling out for a while now. Firstly, the rumour was she was going to pull out to let Justin Lester have a crack. Then Andrew Little stepped out of the shadows, and the rest is history.

So now all we can do is reflect on her legacy. And what a legacy it is.

Tory will always talk about the Golden Mile and her ambition to get the work underway. She’ll always mention the amount of work the council has done on our pipes.

She’ll mention her fight to upgrade the council's social housing, and of course she'll praise her work on building the cycleways that split the city in more ways than one. She told me she rates her mayoralty a nine out of ten.

But that’s her saying those things.

Wellington as a city will reflect on some more colourful aspects of her leadership.

The drinking; Whanau admitted to being a bit tipsy when she left The Old Quarter restaurant without paying her bill, and how can we forget the alleged 'do you know who I am' comment.

Who will forget Whanau bringing her dog into the council office. That was a no no.

And in November 2023 she publicly acknowledged having an alcohol problem following a drunken incident at a bar.

Then there was that interview on Wellington Mornings that made national news. Whanau, who earns $180,000 a year, mentioned she was selling her car to help pay her bills.

She later admitted that the car had been sold months earlier, and her comments were supposedly taken out of context.

But that’s her personal legacy. What’s her political legacy?

Well she pushed the terrible Reading Cinema deal that was going to cost Wellington City Council $32 million in a corporate welfare deal. That failed.

She advocated for the sale of the Wellington City Council’s 34% stake in the Wellington International Airport. That failed.

She got her Bunnings shovel out yesterday to dig up the Golden Mile, but most contracts still haven’t been signed and it may never fully go ahead.

I think it's fair to say most people in this city feel Wellington has gone backwards in the last three years.

That’s her legacy.

Personally, I have always had a good relationship with Tory.

Yes, she cut her connections with our programme. She felt it wasn't talking to her people, and she probably thought I was too tough on her.

But we got along. I respected her, and while I didn’t like a lot of what she did as mayor, she was a character. I did like the fact we had a character as mayor.

Unfortunately for us, it went too far. We started to be the butt of everybody's jokes.

Her decision yesterday is a bad good thing for Wellington. I’m sad we won’t have an exciting race or a strong contest of ideas.

But it means the city is guaranteed a new direction - something a lot of us have wanted for a long time.

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