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.