Well, is it? Is it about time? Why? Yes.

Because the voting proportion in local government has dropped steadily as it has in central government, but local government has dropped more than central government.

And there are a number of factors, but we believe that one of them is the postal vote.

There are probably many young enrolled voters now, possibly not even yet enrolled, who at all who have never either sent or received a mail item in their whole life and they probably can't even find a letterbox or may not even have their own letterbox a mailbox I mean or their own letterbox so you know it simply isn't working.

You think more people will vote if they do so in person?

Absolutely.

If you think about Election Day now for the parliamentary elections, there's quite a lot of hoopla about it.

You know, countdown to Election Day, yada, yada, yada.

What's that process look like that you've been through?

Well, we did it within our mayoral forum, which spans the whole of the Wellington region, which is the region covered currently by the regional council.

And don't forget that this was triggered by the government saying we're going to get rid of regional councils.

And then they said, oh, gosh, but what will replace them? Oh, we'll have unitary councils which do regional and local council work.

But how will we decide what they are? Oh, we'll ask the councils to decide what they are.

which may have been all right if we'd had a long amount of time to do it and actually get the research done on the cost and where the cost would lie and et cetera, et cetera.

But there simply wasn't time.

And

Was there any particular incident or event that occurred during that campaign that stands out for you and that you remember to this day because of the extraordinary nature of it, whether positive or negative?

Yeah, there were a few things actually.

One was the presentation of the petition that they raised against the bill, which at that time they said was the biggest petition in New Zealand ever.

And I'll talk about that in a sec.

And they presented it outside of Parliament and they had boxes of the petition signatures labelled by electorate.

So each electorate had a box and it was carried up the steps of Parliament to the waiting MPs who are the ones who are against the bill.

and they had kids in uniform.

If you had known what you were going to take on with this campaign at the outset, would you have done this anyway?