Given the number of elections running across the country, sending out personal invites to every candidate in every local election and processing the responses is impractical. We have done personal candidate invites for by-elections. However,  each of those by-elections were running in only one part of the country, with a small number of candidates to contact at any one time.

[If you are not a candidate and can volunteer to coordinate some more comprehensive coverage of elections in your area, email contact@citywatchnz.org and put “volunteer” + your region in the email subject line]

If you are a local election candidate and interested in volunteering an opinion piece for CityWatch NZ,  email content@citywatchnz.org with your opinion piece and clearly state which election/ward/location you are running in. Use your email that is publicly-available on your council’s election website.

We will try to publish each opinion piece within a week it being emailed to us, though we recommend getting the opinion piece to us before mid-September to ensure that it is published before voting closes on the 11th of October 2025.

We will post opinion pieces regardless of political alignment or whether we agree with them. We reserve the right to return opinion pieces to authors with suggested changes and reject opinion pieces if they are deemed to be defamatory, breaching election rules, promoting criminal activity, or too vulgar.

Before writing and sending in an opinion piece, please read the guide below:

 

CityWatch NZ Opinion Piece Guide (August 2025 version)

The opinion pieces article will be published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence on CityWatch NZ and re-publishing on other websites (include your own) with attribution will is encouraged.

Recommended length of articles is 500-2000 words, though we are flexible with word count.

We do encourage you to link to your own website, blog, or social media.

Any supplied photographs must be original and donated with permission to freely publish them with CC BY-ND 4.0 Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International as the copyright. We are not keen on publishing AI artwork. Screenshots of council documents are acceptable, though provide a link to the source.

CityWatch NZ expects opinion pieces to be considered, accurate, and reasonable. CityWatch NZ is not the forum for ‘off-the-cuff’ social media comments or blog rants (there are other forums and sites for that type of content). It is advised that potential authors read existing opinion pieces to get an idea of the tone, formatting, and styles of writing which are typical of the opinion pieces posted to the CityWatch NZ website.

When an opinion piece is referring to documents and factual information, links to sources are generally expected. We prefer archive.org (The Wayback Machine) links,  though understand they do not work for some media websites. Supplying page numbers when referring to information in large documents is helpful as it allows our editorial team and our readers to check those claims in the source documents.

Although Editors at CityWatchNZ will do some checking of content, the accuracy of an opinion piece is the responsibility of the author. All opinion pieces will feature this note at the bottom of the article.

“[The content of any Opinion pieces represents the views of the author and the accuracy of any content in a post labelled Opinion is the responsibility of the author. Posting of this Opinion content on the CityWatch NZ website does not necessarily constitute endorsement of those views by CityWatch NZ or its editors. CityWatch NZ functions to provide information and a range of different perspectives on New Zealand’s cities and local councils. If you disagree with or dispute the content, CityWatch NZ can pass that feedback on to the author. Send an email to feedback@citywatchnz.org and clearly identify the content and the issue.]”