Do we like them?

Do we like Tory Whanau?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with a rocky term and a thin harm record keeping her out of the nines.

Tory Whanau shot to national attention in October 2022, when she won the Wellington mayoralty as the city's first Māori mayor. She came from Green Party staff work, not from council, and beat a sitting mayor in the race. She later told a reporter she should have done a term as a councillor first.

Her first term was rough. She admitted it was tough, and the council table was marked by what she called long-running mistrust and a lack of tools to deal with councillor behaviour. By April 2025 she was saying the city was turning a corner, pointing to cycleways, water spending and homes enabled through the district plan.

In late April 2025 she pulled out of the mayoral race she'd been expected to contest, and said she'd run for the Māori ward seat instead. She told RNZ that politics had become far more toxic, especially for wāhine Māori. Where you land on that probably depends on whether you read the council's dysfunction as her doing or as the system's.

The October 2025 election didn't go her way. Andrew Little won the mayoralty and Labour's Matthew Reweti took the Māori ward seat that she contested. Little later said she had faced toxic behaviour in the job.

On the harm check, the searches turned up nothing harmful from her, whether about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. The record is thin rather than spotless, because the coverage is mostly local politics and not her stance on big culture-war questions. She also has no run of dodgy co-stars or platforms to report.