Young Wellington pair on first week
One of Wellington City’s youngest councillors says the hardest thing she’s adjusting to is how she is being treated – like an important person.
Teri O’Neill spent her first week meeting the mayor and different stakeholders, having an induction day and doing a lot of reading.
O’Neill said the largest adjustment was the culture shock but she found comfort in knowing people she had worked with on a Living Wage campaign were in the same building as her.
Elected to the Matukairangi/ Eastern ward of Wellington City Council, O’Neill is working alongside 22-year-old Tamatha Paul, who won a seat for the Lambton ward.
Across the region, six people in their 20s or younger secured seats on councils and knocked out some incumbents twice their age.
O’Neill is not unfamiliar with council meetings or the ‘‘fancy’’ building she is now working in. Over the past five years, she has worked with Wellington Youth Council, Generation Zero and has made submissions around the council table.
During her campaign, O’Neill was vocal about climate change and housing in Wellington.
The 21-year-old, who has left her job as a policy and business analyst to be a fulltime councillor, said she was keen to see how different perspectives and representation could shape the way council looked at these issues.
When it came to tackling problems like the shuttered Wellington Central Library and the controversial Shelly Bay development, O’Neill supported new mayor Andy Foster’s focus on saving the library.
To get a better understanding of the Shelly Bay development, O’Neill said she spent the last year of the campaign meeting iwi, hapu¯ and mana whenua to try to understand the issues and respect Ma¯ ori development in the area.
‘‘One of the first steps for me will be engaging with the community and going back, hopefully with a little more backing this time, to understand the issues and bring those to the table,’’ she said.
‘‘I’ve got a lot of reading to do but, at the same time, when you’re this in love with government, it’s not too much of an adjustment.’’
Finishing up as the 2019 president of the Victoria University of Wellington’s Students’ Association (VUWSA), Tamatha Paul has spent her first week as a councillor having lots of coffee and in meetings.
The first week had been ‘‘very strategic – obviously, everyone is trying to negotiate different portfolios and different committee memberships’’, she said.
Her councillor role was a ‘‘bigger version’’ of what she had been doing as VUWSA president and she was confident about making big decisions on Wellington’s controversial topics.