OPINION: Having an absolute Mayor | Auckland Opinion | Local Voices from Auckland, New Zealand

Mayoral elections are a time of great hilarity.

The mad scramble for attention reaches white-noise levels in newsrooms in the last few months before an election.

Auckland's mega-mayor race is already proving exceptional for this.

It appears as though these aspirants will stop at nothing to be remembered. Penny Bright reminds me of this every day during her daily calls to my news hotline.

Today, she's arranged for a YouTube clip to be posted of her with an angle-grinder, sparks flying as she's sawing off some water restriction device that Metrowater has installed on a defaulter's supply line. I am not making this up.

I tell her that illegal use of pipes has already been taken by Simon Prast as an election platform but there's no stopping Penny when she's onto an idea.

Behind the scenes of many candidates - Penny Bright excepted - there are squads of supporters negotiating hard for any coverage they can get in mainstream media. From this vantage point, newsrooms can and do barter hard to put candidates to the utmost indignities imaginable.

"Will your candidate bungee jump?" Of course, head-first plunge into the water? Clothes on or off?

"Is there some dreadful episode in your candidate's past that we can expose?" Yeah, okay, but only if you guarantee a front-page pointer to the story.

"Interview over breakfast?" Totally, in bed or at the breakfast bar?

"Hey, what about jogging? We could do the whole why-I'm-running-for-mayor schtick." Absolutely, how short should the shorts be?

All this is great fun for the dead-tree trade. And we take whatever we can get, for our readers' sakes, of course. There's no truth to any suggestion we take delight in this. No sirree, this is strictly business and nothing to do with enduring three long years of aloof dismissals from the office-holder who gets across the line.

Don't get me wrong, we keypunchers aren't sitting around waiting for the spin doctors to cook us up another peculiar picture opportunity. Nope, we've got some good ideas ourselves and some of what you see over the next couple of months has been entirely devised and executed by highly-strung journalists with eyes for opportunities. Sometimes entirely against the will of the candidate and crew.

At first glance it can be very hard to tell the difference between crafted content and unconnived comedy. There are some cues, however, to readily detect the difference and readers are savvy enough without needing to be insulted by obvious pointers here.

But does it really matter?

You do have to wonder if the position claimed by the eventual winner has been denigrated by this voracious knocking machine. Can the First City of the Pacific (or whatever we're calling our collective ambitions now) get behind a person who's best known for forgetting which credit card he uses to pay for his business dinner, or slapping himself upside the head, or going wee-wees all the way home, or taking illegal accelerants, or even angle-grinding a public utility stop-valve?

I guess we'll find out in the fullness of time. The deadline for nominations to join the chase for the robes is August 20, then we have 49 days of unfettered clamouring for attention.

Gotta go, my phone's ringing off the hook again. Who knows what the offer is this time?

What's in a name?

One wag near my desk (thanks Sean) has already pointed out the eerie alignment of some of the names.

We have John "Moneyman" Banks and there's Len "Pacific Island-styles" Brown. We have Penny "Watership Down" Bright, ah, eyes.

And, of course, Simon "P-for" Prast. Let's not leave out Andrew "Free Willy" Williams.

Sadly some of those with their hands up haven't really entered into the spirit of things. Most disappointingly, we have Colin "two-first names" Craig and Tenby "must be an anagram for something" Powell.

And Ewen Gilmour, strangely, defies a punchline.

- Edward Rooney is chief reporter at The Aucklander and is making no comment at this time about his election plans