The number of elected officials under 30 doubled in city and district elections. Here a selection of them speak about their priorities

They took gap years to stay at home and run for office. They list as their political heroes progressive leaders such as Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And they plan to juggle their new roles as elected officials with university exams and shifts at McDonald’s.

The record number of young New Zealanders, some still in their teens, who surged to victory in the country’s local government elections on Saturday – in what was dubbed a “youthquake” by commentators – were not lured by dreams of high-profile posts in national politics.

Instead, they ran for roles on New Zealand’s city and district councils or community boards – where elected officials have always tended to be older, white and male, and where elections have been treated with apathy by voters of all ages.

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“It’s about representing our planet and representing a whole group of people who aren’t currently strongly being heard around the council table,” says Sophie Handford, 18, who was the youngest to be elected on Saturday, winning a seat on the lower North Island’s Kāpiti coast district council.

“Obviously our planet doesn’t have a physical voice,” she says. “I see the extreme importance of raising issues related to the planet and our climate at all levels.”

Inspired by the climate change activism of the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, Handford took a gap year after she finished high school in 2018 to lead New Zealand’s school student strikes over inaction on global heating. Her progressive agenda included boosting mental health support and tackling youth homelessness.

The so-called “youthquake” in Saturday’s election did not reflect a large boost in overall voter turnout. Preliminary figures showed 44% of New Zealanders cast ballots – just two percentage points higher than at the 2016 local government elections.

Youth voting figures were not available on Wednesday. But the number of elected officials under 30 doubled according to preliminary figures, from 14 to 30 after the ballot, and the cohort under 40 increased by a half, to 91 from 59 last election. In previous local government elections, more than 90% of those elected were over 40.

The number of women elected also grew – from 19% of the country’s mayors in 2016 to 25% in Saturday’s poll.

On Monday, Ardern, New Zealand’s Labour prime minister, noted the increase. “It certainly seems a bent of environmentalism across the country,” she said. “It seems to me that there was actually quite a bit of change in these elections.”

‘Put your hand up and get into it’

On Saturday afternoon in Rotorua, a lakeside town in the North Island, Fisher Wang, 19, has just finished his shift at McDonald’s when he learned that taking a gap year to run for office had also paid off for him.

A few weeks before he was due to leave home for university this year, he says “this thought came into my head”.

“It was like, Fisher, is that really what you want to do? Do you really want to go and study law and do all that for the rest of your life?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fisher Wang was ‘starstruck’ when Jacinda Ardern called him. Photograph: Supplied

Meeting Ardern during her 2017 election campaign “really fuelled the fire” to get involved in politics, says Wang, who hopes to champion environmental and youth issues as a Rotorua Lakes councillor. He was “starstruck” when the prime minister rang to congratulate him after Saturday’s result.

“She talked about her journey into politics,” he says. “The advice she gave me was to enjoy it, put your hand up and get into it.”

Wang says he will continue to work at McDonald’s on his days off, adding that it was a good opportunity to hear from his constituents.

Feedback while hitchhiking

Another successful candidate who said victory would not change his habits was the new mayor of the South Island city of Dunedin, Aaron Hawkins – one of the country’s youngest elected mayors. Hawkins, 35, is already a familiar sight on the city’s roadsides because he hitchhiked to work as city councillor – a practise he would continue despite the offer of a mayoral car.

“You’ve got 15 minutes and you get unfiltered feedback from people who probably aren’t ever going to turn up to a council annual plan process or a bylaw review hearing,” says Hawkins, who travelled to work on Wednesday with a beekeeper. “Getting those perspectives from people about what they think’s going well or not well in the city is great.”

A two-term councillor, Hawkins was in 2014 one of only two local representatives in New Zealand aged under 30, and has worked to support other young candidates entering politics.

“There’s a willingness in the wider community, not just among fellow young people, to see those perspectives represented in local decision-making,” he says. “The climate strike movement has been incredibly helpful in that, with thousands of young people marching in the streets, demanding that we do better and demonstrating leadership.”

For the youthful newcomers, raising their profiles and convincing sceptical voters had at times been a challenge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tamatha Paul, 22, was elected to the city council in Wellington. Photograph: Supplied

Tamatha Paul, 22, who was elected to the city council in the capital Wellington, says she and 60 volunteers had run her campaign with military precision. Over six months, they had visited each home in her ward multiple times and texted voters with personalised updates on issues they cared about.

“With political parties, often they have access to pre-existing data that will tell them who in the ward already supports them and they’ll just revisit those homes,” says Paul, a former student leader who has worked on prison and marijuana law reform campaigns. “I wanted a mandate and I didn’t just want it to be progressive residents, I wanted every resident I could sway while retaining my own values.”

On the campaign trail, Handford, 18, says she was often asked about her life experience and credentials.

“My response was, well, don’t I bring a different perspective? And maybe that perspective is what we need,” she says. “If you look at what life experience and credentials have done for us so far, maybe it’s time to reconsider the way we look at governance.”