for the Waitakere City Council in 2004 and joins former mayor Tim Shadbolt as stereotypical westies who entered local body politics. The biography of Bob Harvey, former mayor of Waitakere City, was titled Wild Westie. The successful television series Outrageous Fortune is set in west Auckland with the main characters being the West family, a play on the word "Westie". The persona of the standard Auckland "Westie" continues to evolve. In November 2008 Paula Bennett defeated Lynne Pillay, the long-standing Labour Member of Parliament for Waitakere under the banner "Proud to be a Westy". Bennett is a solo mother and a former social service beneficiary who became Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand in the former National-led Government. Simon Bridges (an ex-Westie) served as leader of the Opposition from 2018 to 2020, during this time National was led by two "Westies". As of the 2010 amalgamation of Auckland's council boundaries into one regional greater council, Waitakere City no longer exists as a distinct entity. Yet, those living within the former boundaries remain claiming themselves as Westies essentially within the former boundaries. Sydney, Australia The term "Westie" was a creation of the 1960s and 1970s as young, working families were encouraged westward into the newly built, rather austere public and private housing subdivisions on Sydney's urban fringe. It was a term of division and derision, and became shorthand for a population considered lowbrow, coarse and lacking education and cultural refinement. Immortalised in the 1977 social realist film, The FJ Holden, by Michael Thornhill, the classic Westie was a male of Anglo-Celtic origin who lived in the vast, homogenous flatlands west of the Sydney CBD. The checked flannelette shirt symbolised his attire and vandalism, cheap drink and hotted-up cars his behaviour. Westie became a rhetorical device to designate the other Sydney: spatially, culturally and economically different from the more prosperous and privileged Sydneysiders of the North, East and South Some in the eastern suburbs might consider residents of Epping as Westies, others may restrict the term to areas such as Blacktown, Granville, Burwood and Berala. Westies were also a common sight in the 1980s in the south-western suburbs such as Minto and Campbelltown. The term may also be used to describe someone who acts or uses the same mannerisms as a person from the western suburbs but lives somewhere else. Coastal suburbs It could be noted in this context that in Sydney,