Southern MPs put in the hard yards
ALMOST the whole of New Zealand, including our MPs, have been holed up at home through the Covid19 Level 4 lockdown.
However, being at home has not equated to being idle for southern electorate MPs; in fact, quite the opposite.
As Dunedin South MP Clare Curran says, people’s lives weren’t all neat and tidy when the country closed its doors, borders and almost every business for a minimum of four weeks.
Oftentimes, those loose ends have fetched up at the door of an electorate MP . . . even if those doors are physically closed for the duration.
Office phones have been diverted to staff mobiles and social media feeds have been working overtime as constituents have deluged their representatives with cries for help or pleas for information.
Those calls have come from far and surprisingly wide places; Clutha Southland MP Hamish Walker has chalked up a couple of 4am finishes trying to help constituents stranded in Uruguay find their way home.
For some, Covid19 has come a little bit too close to home for comfort; Waitaki MP Jacqui Dean was, along with 20,000 or so others, at the Wanaka A&P show, an event visited by people in the World Hereford Conference cluster of cases.
In the first week of Level 4 all MPs were flat out, their offices besieged with queries from both employers and employees about the wage subsidy scheme, what counted as essential work, and just what activities precisely were permissible under Level 4.
That surge of questions has now eased, but MPs are bracing for another rush when people need to figure out what Level 3 will entail, when we get there.
Visa and work permit issues, a hardy perennial for all MPs, have remained a staple, especially given thousands of migrant agricultural workers and tourism employees are wondering if they or their firms are now compliant with the terms of their employment.
However, every dark cloud — and these clouds are dark indeed in the South, which has more Covid19 cases than anywhere else in New Zealand — has a silver lining.
MPs of every stripe will tell you they got into politics to help people; almost every constituent MP, no matter how high they rise in the ranks, say they derived most enjoyment from helping those they represent.
With very few select committees sitting right now and travel to and from Wellington nonessential, MPs who might otherwise spend 45 days a week getting to the capital, making speeches and then getting home again have more hours than ever available to get stuck into constituency issues
While many concerns are common, each electorate has had its own particular issues for MPs to deal with.
Invercargill MP Sarah Dowie has been busy clarifying just which contractors hired at the (lockdown exempted) Tiwai Point smelter qualified for an essential designation, and has also had to see her electorate’s
Bluff Wedding cluster overtake Mr Walker’s Hereford cluster as the South’s Covid19 hot spot.
Ms Dowie, like many regional MPs, is also deeply concerned about what impact Airways Corporation’s scaling back in operations will have on the province’s ability for people and produce to arrive where they formerly travelled to once air companies returns to work.
Mrs Dean and Mr Walker represent two of the largest electorates in New Zealand, so for them electorate work is a challenge at the best of times, let alone when they can’t get out and about.
For Mrs Dean, getting a sense of what is happening at all points between Wanaka, Geraldine and Oamaru has taken a lot of telephone calls, a lot of Zoom meetings, and a lot of work by electorate staff.
Mr Walker has relied on a network of contacts across his vast electorate, as he has handled everything from mooring issues for tourism boat operators in Milford Sound to provision of Meals On Wheels services in Kaitangata.
Ms Curran, long an advocate of new technology, has got around the issues of contacting people in the more farflung places in her electorate by creating a fully digital electorate office.
As well as maintaining a busy social media feed of vital public service information, Ms Curran has also burned the midnight oil dealing with constituent queries via private message.
Her Dunedin North counterpart David Clark could be forgiven for having let his electorate duties slide just a little . . . the Minister of Health is just a touch busy in the forefront of the fight against Covid19 at the moment.
However, the many thousands of emails he has received since lockdown went into place have overwhelmingly been about Covid19, providing an unofficial canary in the coalmine as to what issues are likely to cross his desk.
Issues handled by Dr Clark and his staff have ranged from firewood availability to obtaining consular assistance.
Many constituent concerns have been passed on to the Otago Covid19 hotline, which has helped hundreds of people with services such as grocery deliveries and accessing foodbanks.
And the rest
This is not to say, of course, that the South’s list MPs are sunning themselves in the meantime.
National Dunedin MP Michael Woodhouse is playing a role in the closest thing we have to Parliament right now — the epidemic response select committee — while
Invercargill MP Liz Craig is passing on official information to people in her region and Gareth Hughes is advancing portfolio issues such as animal welfare.
CluthaSouthland New Zealand First MP Mark Patterson is focusing on the agriculture sector’s needs in the recovery phase, as well as helping out the transport needs of his less agile constituents.