Kids and kittens on Bill’s big day
ELECTION
Hate politicians all you like, but you have to admire their stamina. Prime Minister Bill English was up before dawn yesterday, ready for a flight from Wellington down to Kaikoura, but some 80kmh gusts put that plan to bed – but not him.
Instead, English headed out for a jam-packed day across Wellington and the Hutt Valley that included a $72 million roading promise, a photo op with some kittens, as well as the requisite mall, school and cafe visits.
Hutt South candidate Chris Bishop has the best chance of any National MP in picking up a Wellington seat, so giving him a helping hand (and boosting the party vote in a more blue part of the region) made plenty of sense.
They started the day in Spruce Goose, a 360-seat brunch mega-cafe just down the road from Wellington Airport – where English was joined by his wife Mary. The trio met the cafe’s diners, took photos, and finally found a table with a single undecided voter.
‘‘What can I do to convince you?’’ asked Bishop immediately.
Next up was the $72m roading promise just off the Melling Link, which many media representatives had difficulty finding, making the need for an upgrade seem more apparent.
‘‘The Hutt Valley is growing, and until pretty recently they didn’t expect to grow,’’ English said of the policy.
The same could easily be said of the Labour Party, which had signs lining many of the streets he drove through.
English moved on from the announcement to Abode Cafe in Lower Hutt, where as is his wont, he had a proper five-minute conversation with every table in the place, while his wife and campaign staff had a feed.
At one of the tables sat undecided voter Josephine van Baarle with 15-month-old son, Willem. Despite his minutes-long attempt, English left the table without a promised vote.
Why? Van Baarle has another kid on the way, and Labour’s Working For Families boost would give her family almost $10,000 a year more than National’s would.
‘‘It’s pretty significant,’’ she said, though she was still a bit worried about all of the instability on the Labour Party’s side.
Then it was to the most shameless photo-op of the day: a visit to the Kitten Inn in Kelson, a kind of cat midwifery/orphanage establishment that can accommodate up to 200 kittens, but usually holds far fewer. After a brief dalliance with a black cat – it wouldn’t photograph well against his black suit – English got his hands on a light-coloured kitten called Sweet Chilli. ‘‘I’m usually a dog man but I’m undergoing a conversion,’’ he said.
The cats might have seemed like the highlight, but English’s favourite event of the day would likely have been Kelson School, which he visited next – even if he walked in to a karakia sung by a teacher in a bright red Labour T-shirt. (There were no hard feelings: the two had a chat about mutual friends soon after.)
English has to, at least, appear to enjoy every interaction with the public he has but you can tell he isn’t faking anything with kids.
‘‘The prime minister is the leader of the country. It’s a bit like a president but not like Mr Trump,’’ he explained to the assembly of kids who weren’t quite interested yet, but got on board when he explained that an election was kind of ‘‘like the class deciding who the teacher is’’.
A group of school counsellors led the prime minister around classrooms, where English shook a prize box, took plenty of selfies, and even signed a photo of himself.
Autographs, in fact, replaced selfies for many of the children – who were too young to have smartphones. English signed T-shirts, book bags and a basketball, while the kids milled around him and yelled at the TV cameras.
School was finished but English wasn’t. No day of his is complete without a trip to a mall.
At Queensgate, where he moved about a metre a minute thanks to his long conversations with everyone he met, English got a few ‘‘Vote Labour’’ yells, but mostly met fans. One of them was refugee Dalal Alshaib, 20, who moved to New Zealand a few years ago from Syria.
‘‘Everyone in New Zealand wants the best for you,’’ he told her.
‘‘It’s nice to meet you. Thank you.’’