[2] "Westie" is often stereotyped as people from the outer suburbs who are unintelligent, undereducated, unmotivated, unrefined, lacking in fashion sense, working-class or unemployed.
Clothing such as flannelette shirts, Ugg boots, leopard-print fabric, Adidas outfits with stripes, and blue singlets are associated with the stereotype, as are the "uniform" of black T-shirt and ripped jeans.
The shift from a pejorative to a societal identifier has been abrupt and in no small part due to the 1993 single Westy Gals by Auckland singer Jan Hellriegel and local comedian Ewen Gilmour's stand-up comedy act as Ewen "Westie" Gilmour between 1995 and 2000 in the premier television programme Pulp Comedy.
[5] He was elected as councillor for the Waitakere City Council in 2004 and joins former mayor Tim Shadbolt[6] as stereotypical westies who entered local body politics.
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".
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.
[9] 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.