Far North’s Moko Tepania named NZ’s most popular mayor

The bilingual mayor leads a council whose annual meetings schedule is arranged around the Māori lunar calendar.

80% of his council’s September Māori ward council meeting last year was conducted in te reo Māori, likely a new Zealand record.

He is actively involved in local government at a national level and has a Master of Education with first class honours in Māori medium education.

In 2023 Tepania was acknowledged internationally as a young global leader.

But he is not the only top-of-the-pops Northland mayor.

Kaipara Mayor Craig Jepson has been voted New Zealand’s third most popular mayor.

Tepania got a 39% approval rating, with a 4.7% margin of error and Jepson a 35% approval rating with 9.6% margin of error.

Jepson said the poll results were encouraging. He wrote to his councillors thanking them for their efforts since the last elections, which were part of his accolade, he said.

He acknowledged his views were often controversial.

Jepson is a self-described “Trump of the North” who admires the US President.

“The polling outcome shows people like to know where their Mayor stands on different matters and isn’t afraid to voice his opinion,” Jepson said.

The Northern duo’s achievement is in extreme contrast to the popularity rankings of Northland Mayoral Forum chairman and Whangārei Mayor Vince Cocurullo, however.

Cocurullo polled at No 50 for mayors’ popularity, out of the 51 polled councils, with a minus 26% approval rating, with a margin of error of 3.8%.

The Taxpayers' Union is a right-leaning lobby group pushing for lower taxes and smaller government.

The poll results were based on 24,000 responses from monthly surveys across a roughly randomly selected 1000 different people each time after the 2022 elections - between January and November 2023 plus February 2024 to February 2025. Only cities and districts with 100 or more accumulated responses over that time were reported in polling results.

Taxpayers Union policy and public affairs manager James Ross said Northland’s “stark disparity” between mayoral popularity was the biggest he had seen in the survey’s four years and it showed clear linkage with councils’ rates.

Far North District Council had New Zealand’s lowest 2024/2025 rates increase with a 4.5% lift. Kaipara District Council (KDC) had the third lowest increase with 8.2%.

Meanwhile, Whangārei District Council (WDC) had a 17.2% increase – New Zealand’s 44th-ranked rates increase size. The national average was about 14%.

FNDC’s small increase came after adding $5 million from its council controlled trading organisation Far North Holdings into its rating coffers.

With the local election looming later this year, Ross said bottom-ranked mayors needed to be mindful of their incoming 2025/2026 rates.

Cocurullo said he wanted to look again at WDC’s proposed 2025/2026 rates increase.

He accepted Whangārei ratepayers would not have been happy with this year’s 17.2% rates increase, but the council wanted to stabilise its financial position and keep its Standard & Poors’ AA stable outlook credit rating.

It had chosen to move away from increasing debt, instead moving towards balancing its books.

The council wanted to be in a position where it could fund major new incoming Three Waters (now called Local Waters Done Well) costs rather than having to borrow large amounts of money to meet these requirements.

Cocurullo said he was aware that some people were not happy with some aspects of what WDC was doing but it needed to be in a stable financial position, particularly when cyclones or other weather events were increasingly possible.

Tepania, in contrast, said borrowing to pay for incoming Three Waters requirements was not a bad thing.

His council had significant capacity to increase its debt over the next decade without going outside debt limits.

Tepania said it was better for those who used new infrastructure into the future to pay for it over the next 30 years as they used it. This was in line with the Government’s approach.

■ LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.