Sarah Lucas posted on her Facebook page about the new “far right” groups, promoting candidates, and how this is not good for all of the community.

Sarah Lucas put a post on her Facebook Page which we are responding to.

Her post is attached as a photo.

Our response to Sarah's post:

Sarah you mention on your Facebook page all these “far right” groups who in your opinion are not taking care of all the people in the community. You talk about Ratepayers groups and The Taxpayers Union spreading misinformation and disinformation. We do hope you are not referring to the New Plymouth Ratepayers Alliance with these types of comments (and also we don’t agree that the Taxpayers Union are "hard right" or spreading misinformation).

What became very apparent to us as a Ratepayers group for local people – which has a very strong and loyal following – was that while your form of politics is desperate to protect a few groups in the community above all others, a large portion of the community is really struggling to make ends meet. Politicians who are thinking “middle” New Zealander’s are very rich and are a bottomless pool of money, are learning the general population can no longer afford to vote for this view you support.

The reality is that people in New Plymouth are actually starting to lose their homes through your political way of thinking.

You are talking about this years “far right” candidates wanting to close libraries and parks and social housing. None of the new people who were voted in this term are proposing any of that, and none of them campaigned on that. They are proposing mothballing, or changing, things like the gold plated version of the Waitara Walkway and the $50M building that is being called a Sports Hub.

In your post you have written:

“Local democracy should see skilled, passionate, committed people reflecting the communities they serve, and being encouraged to step up and contribute. That’s already too hard for women, for mana whenua, for younger leaders, for all of us outside big men’s power circles. These shadowy lies and disinformation make participation ever more costly for honest people.”

We think this needs to be called out here – because the community did vote for Women, Maori, and a non binary person. The majority of voters did pick a group who is NOT just a “big men’s power circle”.

New Plymouth did a great job from the majority vote.  There are 9 men, there are 5 women, there is one non binary person, there are 4 people of Maori descent. As a mark of history in New Plymouth we have our first ever elected female Maori representative from a general ward. Gina was voted in as she had a message people support, stopping wasteful spending and managing budgets, and she is also a younger representative.

You campaigned that you would continue with lots of ideological initiatives and you would just “make the budget work”, but the people who are already losing their homes no longer believe the budget can be made to work from politicians who want to continually spend on new ideas. The majority of voters in New Plymouth want to go back to basics and for the city to live within its means. 

Yes only 45% of people voted, but the other 55% didn’t turn up by the 11^th October, so the majority who did, have had their say.

Your passion for what you believe was very obvious through your campaign. The thing is the majority of people who voted in New Plymouth didn’t agree with your views. There’s no special reasons about it being women, or some special type of bias. It really is as simple as the majority of people who voted did not agree with what you proposed to do.