JUDY BAILEY INTERVIEW:
When trouble looms, Dr Megan Woods is often called upon to sort it out. The cabinet minister talks about surviving crazy hours (but still finding time for cricket), how she’s learned to worry less about cruel comments, and why she believes Christchurch is
Megan Woods is Dr Fixit
She’s widely known as Labour’s Ms Fixit. A safe pair of hands. One to manage political hot potatoes with dexterity and aplomb. She’s also the woman running Labour’s re-election campaign.
I meet Megan Woods in her elegant Beehive office. It’s 6.30 in the evening. She’s been here since eight this morning and won’t leave the building until after 10pm.
“A lot of people don’t know that when the house is sitting we have to stay in the precinct till 10.” The house generally sits three days a week. The rest of the time you’ll find Megan in meetings in the Beehive or back home in Christchurch doing what she does best and enjoys the most – connecting with people.
She is a warm, genial woman with a razor-sharp intellect. She’s tight with the Labour government’s top echelon and counts Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson among her closest confidants. She and Grant, she tells me, are cricket fans and have been known to go to the odd game together. “We try not to talk politics,” she smiles. “Test cricket’s my favourite.”
Megan was born in Wigram, the constituency she now serves, in the closing days of 1973. She has a sister. They’re close. Her father, Gordon, was in real estate, her mother, Maureen, worked at a number of admin jobs before taking herself off to university in her 40s to complete a sociology degree. “When I started as a first-year [at uni] we shared a class together. She was up the front, I sat down the back,” Megan grins.
Politics was on her radar from an early age. “I can remember Muldoon was someone who was talked about at school.” The Muldoon government was in power from 1975 to 1984. She remembers it as a time of big issues, citing Muldoon’s announcement of a wage and price freeze broadcast across both TV channels as a vivid memory. And the pain of a country divided over the Springbok tour.
Her 11-year-old self, Megan says, felt a huge sense of pride when the subsequent Lange Labour government led the world with its nuclear-free legislation.
Was theirs a political household? “Not really, Dad was a swing voter.” In the 1984 election he’d signed up as a member of Kiwi millionaire property developer Bob Jones’ New Zealand Party. Megan’s first political job, aged 11, was to deliver pamphlets promoting the views of Mr Jones.
She attended Catholic schools in Christchurch, and while she says she’s not a religious person now, those Christian principles, passed down from her parents and her school days,
have stayed with her. “Justice, equality, the need to treat others with fairness.”
Her political awakening came gradually, but she singles out the 1990 closure of the Addington Railway Workshops with its subsequent loss of jobs and the hardships that brought as a key moment. “New Zealand had changed, it was a very different place from my childhood to my teens.”
She studied history at the University of Canterbury. Perhaps surprisingly she wasn’t active in student politics, preferring instead to concentrate on her studies and music. “I loved going to see the Flying Nun bands.” Flying Nun, the iconic Indie record label formed in Christchurch in the 1980s, was the home of such legendary musicians as The Clean, Chris Knox and Straitjacket Fits. Megan was a fan of The Bats.
The friends she made at university and school are still her closest buddies. Megan would eventually graduate with a PhD; her thesis was a study on the integration of Maori in mid-20th century New Zealand. She relished her university days. “My PhD supervisor told me, ‘You’ll never realise how lucky you are to have this time.’”
Time is something in short supply for Dr Woods as she juggles four hefty and high-profile portfolios – she is the Minister of Housing; Energy and Resources; Christchurch Regeneration; and Research, Science and Innovation.
The workload would make a lesser woman crumple. How does she sleep at night? “I have a great team alongside me,” she says simply, “and besides, there are good connections between the portfolios.”
There is one responsibility that may be short-lived. “I’m really positive about Christchurch. When I took on the job I made a vow that
I’d be the last Minister for Regeneration. It’s time for Christchurch to return to normality and resume its place as our second largest city.
I find Christchurch a really exciting place; it’s a positive place to be.”
Her PhD completed, Megan moved on to become a business manager for Crop and Food Research based at Lincoln, but was also hooked on politics. Particularly on Jim Anderton’s brand of politics. She was a member of the party for eight years working on several of Anderton’s successful re-election campaigns.
“Jim taught me that courage is required in politics.” She had her first tilt at Parliament under the Progressives banner in the 2005 election. She stood in Christchurch Central and came in fourth.
By then she was also a member of the Spreydon Heathcote Community Board. It was here she learnt about politics at grassroots level.
“I learnt how everyday decisions impact people. A simple thing like bus stop placement can mean the difference between social connection or not.”
She joined the Labour Party in 2007 and when Jim Anderton retired she won his seat for Labour in 2011.
She’s now in her third term for Labour and running this year’s party campaign. “I feel really positive about running the campaign… we have a wonderful story to share.”
Is she ambitious? “I’m ambitious in that I want to do the very best I can.” Of course I have to ask her if she eventually wants to lead the party. “No,” she tells me emphatically. Of course she would say that, but she genuinely seems to have huge admiration for Jacinda Ardern.
It’s no secret Labour’s had its troubles
“It’s time for Christchurch to return to normality... I find it a really exciting place.”
with leadership since Helen Clark’s defeat. “My first caucus was the one Phil Goff resigned at,” she tells me.
“Politics can be lonely and isolating for some people. It’s a hard place to make friends. It’s very hard to describe to your civilian friends the intensity of what goes on.” Her days are planned down to the last second. “It’s really hard to be spontaneous when you’re in Parliament.”
She says she is at her happiest “with the people I know well; it’s refreshing to spend time with friends outside
Parliament. Politics really dominates my life. It sounds cheesy but it is a privilege. It’s the most rewarding job I’ll ever have. I have the ability to bring about change.”
Despite the demands, she doesn’t resent the time spent and the loss of her private life. She is currently single, and has been for some time. She is close to her stepdaughter from a previous long-term relationship.
Megan hasn’t given a thought to life beyond politics. Going into it, “there was only a plan A, no plan B,” she grins. “It was tough in the beginning. The Beehive is a tricky place to negotiate on so many fronts. I’m forever grateful to Annette King [a former deputy PM and now New Zealand’s High Commissioner in Australia]. She took me under her wing, she knew what to do. She was a huge asset. I miss her. She was an amazing politician and an incredibly warm human being.”
Confidence, Megan says, is something that grows with experience. “You worry less about what people will think. People do say horrible things and it hurts. You have to have support systems around you.”
Her tips for the next generation to enter politics? To be yourself and don’t lose contact with people. “The most valuable time I spend is the time spent with my constituents in Wigram.”
It’s been a term in office packed with major crises. It began with the cattle disease Mycoplasma bovis, then the Christchurch mosque tragedy, followed by the Whakaari White Island explosion and now the Covid-19 pandemic.
The interview over, we shake hands. She promptly cleans hers with hand sanitiser, offering it to me too. “I’ve shaken a lot of hands today,” she says thoughtfully.
“People say horrible things and it hurts. You have to have support systems around you.”