So, we asked some ques­tions. And we hoped that can­di­dates would get in touch with us. In pre­vi­ous years, we’d obtained a spread­sheet of every sin­gle can­di­date and emailed them, and frankly, work­ing as a group, it was a bloody lot of work get­ting their answers back, try­ing to hunt them down, try­ing to make sure we did­n’t miss out any­one. Last elec­tion we decid­ed that we’d just adver­tise our ques­tions through our chan­nels and let those who were clued in to the Welling­ton­ista have an advan­tage, so we did that again this year. Maybe we could have done bet­ter, but we did­n’t.

There was also talk with­in the ‘ista about our 25 word lim­it on can­di­dates’ answers and whether or not we should still have that rule. Unhelp­ful­ly, that came after we’d asked the ques­tions. So, as we did noto­ri­ous­ly did to Ker­ry in 2010, we have upheld the lim­it that we spec­i­fied (dis­claimer — there may have been slight mis­count­ing due to cats try­ing to climb on laps etc).

We also do not have any cov­er­age of any­thing relat­ed to Dis­trict Health Boards, because hon­est­ly, we don’t know much about it. If you do, we’d love to hear from you — maybe a guest post?

All that aside, we got three sets of answers, and they are all use­ful for the upcom­ing deci­sion-mak­ing we need to do. We may edi­to­ri­alise, prob­a­bly most­ly over on Twit­ter, but for now, these answers are pub­lished straight up in alpha­bet­i­cal order.

Please vote. It’s impor­tant.