Democracy is everyday. 

LOCAL ELECTIONS 2025 / ŌTAUTAHI-CHRISTCHURCH

Politics doesn’t run on a three-year schedule, it’s everywhere, all the time.

This year in Ōtautahi, three city council races were won the day nominations closed. With only their right-wing incumbents standing in the seat and not a single competitor; Harewood, Waimairi, and Hornby wards will not even have a chance to express their discontent with the current councillors through a vote. Not a single person of the ~26,000 residents in any of those wards felt that they could run against the incumbents there. That is a deep shame for democracy. I don’t blame any of them for not running, it’s an exhausting process to put yourself through even if you’re barely campaigning it drains you physically and mentally. Rather I’d like to propose what I think is the best tool we have to keep that from happening in the future and that is community with direction. Now you’re probably thinking “Beatrix, that’s much easier to say than do,” and you’d be right, it is difficult to create a community to engage with politics together. But I’m going to give you three quick tips for forming community and also tell you about some forms of political engagement:

1. Find a specific but definable issue that you care about, e.g. accessibility in your community or financing of genocide by local organisations.

2. Find other people who care about this issue and get together to determine the best ways to influence people to fix the issue or even fix it yourself.

3. Go do it, and adapt as you need to, don’t forget to celebrate your wins and recalibrate your tactics when you do so.

If voting is all you are able to do then do it, but there are more ways to engage with the political process. You can go through other structural channels, like making submissions on specific pieces of legislation or plans (this can be extra effective at the lower levels of government such as community boards given that they don’t get as many people bringing issues to them) and you can start campaigns to get people to make a submission or sign a petition. There’s also a wide range of non-structural channels that you can engage in to influence politics, getting involved in protests, supporting union strikes, influence decision makers directly through lobbying them (you can just be nice to them and it will work sometimes) or, and this is my favourite, create art to bring attention to the absurdity of a situation that needs to change. There are so many more ways to engage non-structurally in politics, but it would take too long to list them all. What's important is to get together with others and use your imagination and your connections with the people around you to make changes. Community that has direction will lead to change.

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Beatrix Gilling