Workers Party Contests Dunedin Mayoralty

The Trotskyist/Maoist fusion Workers Party of New Zealand is contesting the mayoralties of Wellington, Christchurch, Waitakere and Dunedin.

The Party hopes to use local body elections as a springboard to gaining the 500 members necessary to contest the 2008 General Elections as a registered party.


Supermarket supervisor and part-time student Tim Bowron (27) will contest the Dunedin mayoralty this year. Mr Bowron, representing the Workers Party and the International Socialist Organisation, is originally from Christchurch and moved to Dunedin to study about 10 years ago.

His campaign would concentrate on issues such as free and frequent public transport, the need for insulation in homes, and fixing the sewerage before building a stadium. He will campaign hard in the student area, where high rents and shabby flats were a longstanding grievance, and in South Dunedin, where working families were struggling , he said. ‘‘We need a council that is run in the interests of the workers, pen sioners and students who make up the majority of this city — not business and the wealthy elite.’’

Bowron was member of the International Socialists, but left around 2002 to join the even tinier Trotskyist outfit, Socialist Alternative.

He has been active in the Dunedin Coalition Against War;

"...a new war with Iraq, if it comes, will represent not just the work of one crazed individual - George W. Bush - but rather the logical outcome of a system that puts the needs of the wealthy few before the lives of millions of ordinary people...

As long as this system remains in place we will never be rid of war, poverty and oppression...we must begin to build a socialist alternative."

By 2004, Bowron was linked to Dunedin's miniscule Workers Party branch.

He played an active role last year, agitating amongst supermarket workers during the protracted Progressive Enterprises lockout/strike.