It’s local election season, and that means Richard Osmaston is busy.
The St Arnaud-based leader of the Money Free Party is running for mayor in five districts: Nelson, Tasman, and the three on the West Coast — Buller, Grey, and Westland.
However, it is one district less than in 2022 when he also stood in Marlborough, where Shaun Brown is now representing the party in the contest for the mayoralty.
“It’s a funny balance between looking like a headline-grabbing nutter and being taken seriously,” Osmaston said.
He had considered running for the top job in all 78 of New Zealand’s local authorities, but that came with practical challenges.
Chiefly, it costs $200 to be nominated to run in local elections — or $15,600 to run in all 78 areas.
He acknowledged that he was “unlikely” to be elected mayor anywhere — across all six districts in 2022, Osmaston collected a total of 1079 votes.
If all his voters had moved to Westland — the district of the six where the winning mayoral candidates received the fewest votes — he still would have been more than 100 votes behind mayor Helen Lash’s 1188.
But regardless, Osmaston said he was “deadly serious” about being elected.
“We certainly have a plan if one of us does get elected to one or more of these positions.”
He said he would not be a “normal mayor” and intended to use the position, if elected, to advocate for the Money Free Party’s policy position.
Osmaston believed that money was the root cause of society’s problems — from climate change and suicide to homelessness and geopolitical crises.
Instead of using money, he envisioned goods and services being exchanged, and people working voluntarily rather than being driven by profit.
“Thriving beyond money is absolutely possible, and we could all be living in utopia sustainably, whereas at the moment, we’re living in a sort of ever-increasingly fast train wreck that everybody knows is going off a cliff.”
28 candidate meetings in a month
To demonstrate his commitment to his campaigns, Osmaston said he strived to attend as many public candidate events as he could.
“In 2022, I was on stage in Tapawera at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night and on stage again at 10 o’clock the following morning in Fox Glacier. I took the bus — it took me all night,” he said.
That’s about 440km away by road, or an almost 6-hour drive.
“I wouldn’t miss them for anything… I remember going to 28 ‘Meet the Candidate’ events in a month. It was just flat out, it was fantastic.”
The public scrutiny and debate of regular, repeated campaigns allowed him to refine the Money Free Party’s messaging, he added.
“The responses we get in public are the most valuable feedback, it feels like sort of a litmus test… What better way could you have to test a concept?”
Osmaston’s regular election campaigns began back in 2013 when he ran for mayor of Nelson.
At the time, he had been researching and advocating for a moneyless, resource-based economy for several years and had felt “duty-bound” to put the concept to a larger audience.
“No one’s really got time to talk about politics or alternative economic systems in the meantime because they’re too busy, but around election time, the topic is open, and people have got time to discuss it,” he said.
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Osmaston thought the 2013 mayoral campaign “went well”.
“I was expecting humiliation and disaster,” he said.
“We just got affirmation that we were on the right track. It was just amazing; I’ll never forget it.”
The feedback he got from that race encouraged him to run in the general election in 2014 to contest the Nelson electorate.
Then in 2016, Osmaston ran for Nelson mayor again, and for a councillor position representing the Moutere-Waimea Ward in Tasman — the beginning of his multi-district campaigns — before eventually reaching his current approach of contesting several mayoralties throughout the upper half of the South Island.
A new contender for Marlborough’s mayoralty
However, he has received a slight respite this time around as Shaun Brown has run for mayor in Marlborough instead of Osmaston.
The two have known each other for “a very very long time”, and Brown has nominated Osmaston for mayor in Marlborough in the past.
Brown is no fan of politicians — “I kind of put them up with car dealers and parking wardens” — and doesn’t often vote because he doesn’t believe they follow through on their promises, but this election he felt like he needed to stand to try and change the system.
“It’s more around just trying to make a difference… but you can’t make a difference unless you get into those positions,” he said.
“You don’t have to look far to see that the cost-of-living crisis and things like that, it always stems around money, and that’s the problem.”
Brown acknowledged that he had “zero” chance of being elected and said he wasn’t actively campaigning.
“I’ve put my name down to help the cause and start bringing about more conversations around this space… being selected, that’s actually not my goal.”
Both men were hopeful that the tide was turning and that their money-free ideology would be seriously considered and enacted in the future.
“It’s very, very exciting. I just hope we can get there in time before we literally destroy everything,” Osmaston said.
Local Democracy Reporting is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air
