Makes the dream work

Just as beating Covid-19 requires a team of 5 million, at 1 per cent of our national population everyone in Marlborough is needed to help our precious region out of the economic impacts of this pandemic.

I believe Marlborough will be all right if we all stick together. Every dollar spent locally recycles several times through our business community and those it employs.

That’s why the Marlborough District Council has made a list of ‘‘shovel ready’’ infrastructure projects – including some from the private sector – to feed into the Government’s efforts to pump cash into the economy. The Marlborough total is more than a third of a billion dollars.

The council has the statutory responsibility to be our region’s lead during emergencies and as deputy mayor I have been tasked to chair that response.

For 2020-21 the council will finance more than $60 million of capital expenditure, with similar amounts over each of the next three years.

There are also some big projects and several smaller ones budgeted in 2019-20 going out to tender in the next few months, totalling close to $40m.

So that’s about $100m that the council alone will be pumping into the Marlborough economy in a little over a year.

That said, businesses will be the biggest determinant of our region’s recovery. The council has brought together an action group of key industry sectors – small and medium enterprises, wine, iwi, tourism, aquaculture, farming, forestry and transport, along with the council, business agencies and government department representatives.

This Team group – The Economic Action Marlborough group – has already commissioned an economic impact study, set up industry and professional advisory groups and started work on a first phase recovery plan to be ready by the middle of this month.

The group is a collaborative approach to finding the best projects and solutions to keep Marlborough people in jobs – and to create new jobs.

We will align where able with our friends in Nelson–tasman and pick up on the Te Tau Ihu Intergenerational strategy, which the council helped fund.

The Team group sees four likely phases to the recovery.

We are now in the Respond phase dealing with the immediate lockdown issues.

Next, we move to Resilience where maintaining cashflow and jobs is the focus.

Then we see a Return phase where capacity and scale are rebuilt – hopefully this will start late this year. Finally, Reimagination is where we integrate learnings in a new normal, including environmental benefits.

We are blessed with a strong, mixed economy and a single council that has good assets and a better balance sheet than most.

As well as leading the economic response, the council is also at the helm of the region’s Covid-19 Welfare Response and Recovery programme looking after people and communities.

This recovery is likely to stretch into years, with those who work in or own businesses in sectors such as hospitality bearing much of its first effects.

That’s why I was particularly thrilled to see the new ferries for the future leaflet out from Port

Marlborough, Kiwirail, the New Zealand Transport Agency and the council, outlining the huge potential that project has for future tourism, the economy and the environment.

We will be ready for the new, bigger ferries from 2024 with all the extra passengers and benefits these will bring to Picton and wider Marlborough.

In the interim, I am buoyed by the responses I am seeing and hearing about as businesses responded to the challenge of moving into level 3. People like Tamzin Henderson and her sister Lana Wilson who run the family marine, leisure and pool supplies outlet on Grove Rd.

They and other Marlborough businesses are offering to allow customers to see and choose stock by showing it to them using the Facetime app.

I applaud Whitehaven Wines for using its travel budget to buy vouchers from local restaurants and cafes to reward local workers on the frontline.

I echo Whitehaven’s call for other wineries, businesses and individuals to do similar things.

We need every one of us in Marlborough – our team of

50,000 – to look out for each other, to buy local, support our businesses, back the recovery efforts and recognise there are few better places to come through this storm as we will.

We are all in this together – He waka eke noa.

Marlborough District deputy mayor Nadine Taylor is the chairwoman of the Team group.