A close friend’s suicide was what pushed Yani Johanson to run for local government.
“He was waiting to get help for a drug addiction and he just took his own life. This made me realise the services for young people with mental health and addiction issues weren’t there and more needed to be done,” says Johanson.
“I got involved with groups like the New Zealand Association of Adolescent Health and Development and just supporting youth in the city.
“The more I got involved, the more I thought about getting elected to the community board or council, and how it would be a good thing having young people as decision-makers.”
He became a Labour Party member in 1996 and volunteered for Tim Barnett during his campaign to be the Christchurch Central MP.
He said the suicide of his close friend in 1997 was what pushed him to run for the Shirley-Papanui Community Board in 1998. After missing out on a seat, he was successful in his second attempt during the 2001 elections, in which he was elected to the Hagley-Ferrymead Community Board aged 26.
He then became a city councillor at the age of 32 in 2007, and now the 44-year-old is running for his fifth term. He has seen a lot in his 12 years on the city council.
On his way to a city council meeting, he even witnessed the alleged gunman behind the March 15 attack being apprehended by police.
“I was coming down Colombo St and then the police came past quite quickly. The traffic was a little bit backed up. I turned left onto Brougham St and I got a little bit further down and suddenly there was like six or seven cops flying past at full speed. I’ve looked at the timing of it and they must have just run him off the road at that stage.
“So what I saw was cops going past at huge pace with the lights on with cars parked up trying to let cops through with cops running towards me with their guns drawn telling me to turn into Montreal St where I was going anyway.
“I could just see him [the alleged gunman] in the near distance where the police must have had him on the ground,” he said.
He was unaware of the mosque shootings at this stage.
“All I knew at this point was there was something serious going on with that many police racing past my car with guns.”
He also watched from the sixth floor of the city council building as the eastern part of the city crumbled during the 2011 earthquake.
“The experience of February 22. I was in the council building that day, having already been through the September earthquakes. I was knocked down on the ground and everything was just smashing down around us. I can remember standing up looking to the east and seeing the city collapse into dust.
“There were journalists from the CTV building I had received messages from earlier in the day I was just about to ring back but their building had collapsed.”
Born in Christchurch to a New Zealand mother and American father, he spent a lot of his childhood moving around. By the time he was 13 he had lived in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Mexico.
He spent his third, fourth and fifth forms at Hagley College and finished high school in the US, graduating from Washington-Lee High School in 1993.
Before entering local government he worked as a co-presenter and co-producer for Canterbury on Air radio show K!CK youth talk back and as a feature presenter on the Brat Radio Show.
In 2009 he met his wife Katya over Facebook.
“I don’t think I had met her at that stage, but I added her and then I invited her out and it just developed from there.”
Three years later they got married.
Katya said her husband’s dedication to his role sometimes made it feel like he was married to politics first and her second.
“I often joke and say that politics isn’t going to bring him a cup of tea in bed when he is old,” she said.
In 2015, their first child Milania was born.
Katya says she is looking forward to the end of the election season.
“Right now, Yani tends to be away from home a lot working and campaigning, early in the morning, late at night and on the weekends. He tries his hardest to squeeze some quality time with our little girl amongst his busy schedule, but it’s definitely a challenge.”
Johanson said becoming a parent has given him a greater appreciation for the small things.
“For me, when I became a parent, I began to see a number of things from a new perspective. For example, pushing a pram along a broken footpath, you may not have previously seen it as very important but realise the smaller things like that are actually very important.”
He said when he is not spending time with his daughter he enjoys playing and watching football and walking his two dogs Piccolo, a chinese crested, and Luka, a shih tzu terrier cross.
In the October elections, he is facing only one competitor – Linwood-Central-Heathcote Community Board member Alexandra Davids.
This is Davids third time running against Johanson.
She says Johanson has done a good job on council but feels she can do better.
“I’m not sure if he has the solutions for Linwood because we have seen the same issues in the Linwood area for so many years now,” she said.
However, Davids said she could not question Johanson’s passion for the role. It is a sentiment city councillor James Gough agrees with, in spite of describing himself and Johanson as being polar opposites on the political spectrum.
Said Gough: “We don’t see eye-to-eye on a number of issues. It would probably be more accurate to say 99 per cent of issues. However, I still respect his passion.
“I admire his tenacity. With issues he believes in, he can be like a dog with a bone and although I see most of my professional life disagreeing with Yani, I do find his uncanny recall for resolutions that passed many years ago super-human.”
Johanson has also never been afraid to stand by his values.
Before he entered politics he played a key role in fighting the police campaign ‘Catch a Car Thief – Under 25 Scheme’, which saw yellow stickers placed on the windscreens of cars to alert police that no one aged under 25 should be driving it.
He was The Yellow Triangle Prevention Project co-ordinator, and the group pointed out the campaign was in breach of the Human Rights Act. This led to police dropping it.
“It was a generalisation against a group of people. It did not have a lot of evidential basis to it. It was pretty discriminatory.”
More recently, he was the only councillor out of seven from left-leaning political group The People’s Choice to vote against new city council chief executive Dawn Baxendale’s $495,000 salary.
He also attended protests with thousands of Christchurch residents in 2012 over the $68,000 pay rise for former chief executive Tony Marryatt.
Johanson said he would do the same if people protested over the appointment of Baxendale.
When asked if he would ever consider running for the mayoralty or even central Government, he responded: “I’m just focusing on what needs to be done in the city and the Linwood Ward at the moment.”
