A conversation with mayor-hopeful Sara Templeton and her vision for a better Christchurch.

Sara Templeton’s mayoral campaign carries weight. Where Phil Mauger leans on name recognition and incumbency, Templeton is pitching a vision grounded in values, detail, and pragmatic future thinking. Her tagline For Our City. For Our People. For Our Future is a meaningful roadmap toward her vision for an affordable, liveable, and sustainable Ōtautahi-Christchurch and Banks Peninsula

I caught up with the three-term councillor, and former community board chair, on campus here at UC as she makes her bid for the mayoralty to have a frank discussion about her vision, obstacles, and the current state of the Christchurch City Council.

For Sara Templeton, the decision to run is about momentum, or rather keeping it. The city, she argues, is finally emerging from the wake of the post-quake rebuild and now faces the harder challenge of preparing for an uncertain future. Climate change, ageing infrastructure, and population growth pose city-wide obstacles, but she frames them as opportunities to build a city that is affordable, sustainable, and genuinely liveable for all. “We can be a really liveable sustainable city that’s also affordable because it’s cheaper to do that stuff and be a great place to live, but we have to plan for it and we have to plan for that now.” Her campaign tagline neatly maps this vision: the City as the foundation of our assets, infrastructure, and transport; the People as empowered, connected communities and participatory governance; and the Future as climate action, environmental health, and a resilient and sustainable local economy. While she sees the current make-up of the city council as broadly progressive, she worries that progress is slowing, or worse, risks being rolled back. The answer, she says, is leadership with the courage to keep building on what’s working, to “change the mayor to keep doing what we’re doing.”

Sara Templeton is giving up her home seat of Heathcote to go all in for this campaign (and hopefully entrusting it with ally Nathaniel Herz Jardine), she’s confident she can best serve Ōtautahi and Banks Peninsula from the head of the table, rather than around it. 

Top of the agenda for Templeton if she does secure the mayoralty in October is to restart work on the upzoning of the area south of Moorhouse Avenue between Brougham Street, coined SOMo (South of Moorhouse). This grey belt, which skirts the central city, was once zoned for industry but is now largely low-use. Templeton sees a vision for this to be transformed into a thriving mixed-use neighbourhood. The plan could see homes for up to 20,000 people built within walking distance of the central city, she says, a vital step as the city must prepare for an influx of 30,000 new residents over the next decade.

Templeton first pushed for the area’s rezoning from “industrial” to “mixed-use” in 2024 where it initially gained traction at council, however the proposal stalled after being rejected by the independent hearings panel and later failed to pass as an amendment with a tied vote. “It would be like the Atlas Quarter, Welles Street kind of area over time,” she says, pointing to the success of other mixed-use, medium density inner-city precincts which have created a vibrant neighbourhood south of the central city. The community backed the idea too, “the residents associations were in favour, the central business association was in favour,” she says. She doesn’t completely understand why it didn’t pass as an amendment though she suspects political gains were put ahead of the city’s future, “a couple of people mentioned it to me that it was partly because they didn’t want me getting a win in an election year.” This is the sort of short-sightedness that she is campaigning against, “it’s a shame for the city,” and insists the zoning change will be back as a plan change in front of council at the beginning of next year. 

Rates, she argues, need to be dealt with pragmatically and we have to stop the short-term thinking that prioritises low rate rises now without considering future costs. She points to rising reactive infrastructure maintenance as the result of underinvestment driven by rate suppression. Her call is for major investment and revitalisation now in our assets and infrastructure, notably water pipes, now, “we need to bite the bullet to keep rates low in the long term.” Despite $2bn in city council debt and another $2bn through CCHL, she remains confident there is still room to borrow, warning that delaying will only make future costs unmanageable.

What struck me most in conversation with Templeton was how consistently she speaks in systems. Where others reach for quick wins or piecemeal fixes, she loops back to the interconnectedness of housing, infrastructure, transport, and climate. It’s a stark contrast to the patch-job politics that so often dominate local government and it’s the kind of thinking that makes her mayoral bid feel less about managing decline and more about designing a city with a future.

Templeton mentions that among residents, the top concerns are not rates but the core services the council provides, the services that keep our city and our communities running. The upkeep of our water, transport, climate action, and our parks and facilities are on the minds of electors. Maintaining these services is vital, she argues, “shared services make the city cheaper for everyone.” Addressing these things now is the only way to make an attractive and affordable city in the future, she says, dismissing a lot of the rhetoric surrounding rate increases—including the government's proposal to cap rate rises—as distraction. She also ardently supports keeping strategic public assets in the city’s control to ensure the interests of the city and its people are kept at the centre of decision making. 

Templeton describes a “chicken and egg” dynamic between young people and politicians. Students don’t engage in local politics or show up to vote, politicians don’t reach out and try to talk to them, so students don’t have a reason to get out there when the next election rolls around. “Politicians need to offer things that students see are worthwhile,” she argues. She condemns Phil Mauger for pulling out of the mayoral debate organised on campus, and even more so for not rescheduling (in spite of him citing the 26,000 students in Christchurch as vital for a thriving city). The mayor later went on a tirade on Facebook snapping back at people criticising his decision to not engage with students, arguing his “mayoral responsibilities” (which we can agree includes engaging with his constituents) took precedence.

But for Templeton, true youth and student political engagement starts with making it 16. She says lowering the voting age brings the actual age of first-time voting closer to the intended 18, it’s currently 19 and a half, and enables an engaged generation of lifetime voters. She’s spent plenty of time on campus and in the Undercroft meeting students and discussing the issues that matter, “I know how intelligent and thoughtful and concerned young people are about the future, and I refuse to give up.”

Mayoral Debate, Cashmere

Through fret not, in lieu of the debate at UC, The Canterbury Memo attended a head-to-head between the candidates in Cashmere last month (one that Mauger did not pull-out of) and it’s our honest editorial opinion, politics genuinely aside, that Templeton absolutely schooled her adversary.

Templeton was clear, concise, and eloquent in her delivery and responses—not only actually answering every question but understanding and discussing them within the context of the wider systems of the city. There was no cherrypicking or strawmanning. Her answers were perfectly consistent with what she stands for and what she has campaigned on.

Conversely, Mauger's incoherent non-committal ramblings, at times, began to approach laughably tangential. In a question posed by a member of the Christchurch Youth Council, the candidates were asked how they will address acute youth poverty at a local government level, citing children in low-decile schools not having access to footwear in the middle of winter. Mauger, rather than even thinking about thinking about the cause of poverty, launches into a spiel about the Mayoral Welfare Fund. “At the moment, from what I’m told, it’s got $250,000, if things are that bad in theory, it should have nothing in it.” It’s hard to say if Mauger is suggesting that things are not as bad as postulated, or that people in need simply are not taking advantage of the Mayoral Welfare Fund and a quarter of a million dollars is in fact adequate to address acute poverty in Christchurch. It’s confusing and frankly absurd. 

He was more of a yes-man than a debate opponent, seemingly too scared to disagree with both his adversary and residents’ grievances and opinions. Highlighting a campaign which seeks to cling to power, rather than change the city.

Templeton reminds us time and time again what's at stake, and importantly that her campaign and vision for the city is one for all, “we’re not just here for rate payers, we’re here for residents. Some of them are the most vulnerable in our city.”