A political commentator believes parties on the left lost control of the election campaign in the last week, with candidates drawing heavy criticism for campaigning with gangs.
By Finn Blackwell for RNZ
A video emerged of the Labour Party's Tāmaki Makaurau candidate Kerrin Leoni campaigning alongside Mongrel Mob members, wearing a Labour Party jacket and talking to gang members about enrolling to vote and changing the government.
Leoni resigned as Labour's candidate for the seat on Friday morning.
A photo from the same event, published by Newsroom, showed the former Auckland councillor posing with a group of people, including some in Mongrel Mob regalia, making hand gestures associated with the gang.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the footage was "inconsistent" with the standards he expected from his candidates.
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He had earlier heavily criticised Green and Te Pāti Māori candidates for their recent election campaign visit to a Mongrel Mob pad.
Political commentator and director of the Democracy Project, Dr Bryce Edwards, said Labour could no longer blame its allies for the scandal.
"This is a candidate for a key, important seat that Labour's contesting that is now stepping down," he said.
Edwards said there was a lot of speculative polling showing Labour may have won the seat.
"There's no doubt that Chris Hipkins would've been extremely reluctant to bring this to the conclusion he has, but he could obviously see that it wasn't viable for Leoni to stay as a candidate for Labour."
Edwards believed Hipkins would be extremely disappointed by what has happened.
"Because Chris Hipkins had already set the standard for what he expected of politicians when he criticised the Green and Te Pāti Māori candidates for their involvement of this, he really then had to do the same with his own candidate," he said.
The Electoral Commission confirmed Leoni would still be on the Tāmaki Makaurau ballot paper next to the Labour Party logo, and on the Labour Party list.
"Under the Electoral Act, electorate and list candidates cannot withdraw their candidacy after the close of nominations. Parties also cannot replace a candidate with another candidate after close of nominations," a spokesperson said.
Edwards said the National Party was campaigning strongly on what they saw as the dangers of a Labour-led coalition with the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori.
"Labour is therefore vulnerable for whatever those parties do in the public sphere, and so Chris Hipkins has therefore been quite strong in the way that he's come out during the last week when it was the Green and Te Pāti Māori candidates that were the ones in trouble."
Hipkins had done a robust job distancing his party from what had happened, Edwards said.
"But in a sense, it's now hoisted him by his own petard in that he's set the standard very highly, thinking he was just doing it to distance Labour from those other allied candidates," he said.
"Now of course, he has to really keep his own representatives to that high standard."
Edwards said scandals like this would be incredibly unfortunate for any political party.
"It's not clear that this means the election is lost for Labour and the left bloc," he said.
"We've still got two weeks to go, this is a volatile election campaign, other eventualities might occur, but it's certainly the case that the parties of the left have lost control of the campaign in the last week."
It was bad timing, Edwards said.
"The major leaders debates and television set-pieces are over, I think probably all the policies have been launched, and so it's quite hard to reset the public agenda away from this gang story."
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