‘We are owed out here’
The east is another country. Christchurch East MP Poto Williams tells Philip Matthews that while there is still resentment, locals are looking beyond the earthquakes.
Not much changes in New Brighton. The mall looks like it did last year, or the year before. Empty shops, empty spaces, the occasional roaring trade. On a quiet Monday morning when New Brighton is, unusually, warmer than central Christchurch, the local MP stands in the middle of the main street for a photo and only has to move for traffic about once every 60 seconds.
Poto Williams became MP for Christchurch East in 2013 when she won the seat in a by-election prompted by Lianne Dalziel’s mayoral run.
It was a trouncing. Turn-out was low but Williams picked up 61 per cent of the vote. National’s Matt Doocey ran a very distant second. Pundits praised veteran campaign manager Jim Anderton.
Williams won decisively again in 2014, against a second National challenger, list MP Joanne Hayes. She even managed to claw back a little of the lost Labour party vote that had sunk to a low of 31.6 per cent in Christchurch East in 2011.
In short, Williams is firmly ensconced out here. Her electorate office is the red shopfront on the main drag, next to the Tory blue of a real estate agent. There are framed photos of Labour greats from the distant past – Norman Kirk, Mabel Howard, David Lange – on the walls.
‘‘It’s interesting, that sense of when election fever happens,’’ Williams says, as we take our seats in the meeting room. ‘‘We’re four months out and people are only just starting to have that general sense that there’s something going on.’’
Door knocking started three or four months ago. The mood of the electorate? Williams believes that people in the east are looking outwards more than they did in 2011 and 2014.
‘‘A lot of people have gone through the process of having their claims resolved and having their [repair] work done. A lot of people had a bad experience so while they are in their homes and are warm and dry, there is still that sense of ‘God, we had to go through quite a bit’.
‘‘Some folk are going through that whole re-repair thing which is really distressing. And then we have a cohort of people who have had nothing happen.’’
How many are there? Williams estimates that her office has had around 70 calls or walk-ins along those lines in the past six months and double that number in the six months before that. And then there are ‘‘serious cases where people are in dispute. No negotiation, people are just fed up.’’
Look, there has been some progress. There is nice new asphalt on Pages Rd. And there is still ‘‘a sense of hope’’ that New Brighton will get the hot salt water pools it has been promised. But the negatives pile up too.
There is that ‘‘big green hole in the middle of the electorate’’, the cleared residential red zone. There are still people with ‘‘unresolved hurt’’ about that process. If east Christchurch was a world apart before, in socio-economic and demographic terms, it now feels like a world apart geographically as well.
There is local resentment at the two-speed recovery. Every time Williams goes to town, she sees something new. Then she heads back east where there is ‘‘that sense of over heightened anticipation that something is going to happen’’, as she politely puts it.
‘‘One of the kicks to the head’’ was when the Government removed specific wording about New Brighton from the legislation that created Regenerate Christchurch. It was suddenly not a priority anymore.
But anyway, the wider mood is turning more external than internal. Housing, the health system, mental health. These are national issues that are of concern at a local level.
‘‘There is a sense that we are owed something out here that other parts of the city have achieved. On top of that, there is a sense that some major issues in our nation aren’t being addressed.’’
Williams came from a background as a community worker and there is still much of that in her ground-level view of politics. She moved to Christchurch from Auckland in the summer of 2012-13 with her partner, Ken Anderson, and one of her three adult children to work as regional manager for the St John of God Hauora Trust on Pages Rd. A year later, she was a Labour MP.
Yes, some people assumed she was parachuted in as Dalziel’s replacement. She says she came south without any sense of an electorate becoming available although she had been a party member for some time and worked on a campaign for Labour MP Carmel Sepuloni in Auckland in 2011. That was a nail-biting one when Sepuloni lost to Paula Bennett, then won, then lost again on a recount.
In her maiden speech to Parliament, Williams talked of how her parents came to New Zealand from the Cook Islands in the 1950s in search of a better life. As the first Cook Island woman MP, she paid tribute to National’s Alfred Ngaro, the first Cook Island MP.
That link seemed ironic this week when it fell to Williams, as community and voluntary sector spokeswoman, to question Ngaro in Parliament about his controversial comments that social organisations who depend on the Government should be careful about ‘‘playing politics’’.
Ngaro kept dodging Williams’ questions by repeating his apology. She then quoted a state of the sector report by ComVoices, saying that ‘‘this is a difficult time for the entire sector, partly due to providers not wanting to rock the boat’’. Ngaro replied that he had not read the report.
This is politics. Sometimes it is well-meant and sometimes it is farcical. You saw both sides when Williams made national headlines in February after criticising broadcaster Willie Jackson. Labour had just made a big deal of securing Jackson as a candidate but Williams remembered that, as far as she was concerned, Jackson was not sufficiently apologetic about his part in the ‘‘Roast Busters’’ scandal.
It goes back to 2013. Jackson and talkback co-host John Tamihere took a call from a teenager named Amy and asked a series of highly inappropriate questions about her sex life. Some thought it bordered on victimblaming. The radio station took both men off air.
So when Jackson was handed a winnable list place by Labour, it was never going to be uncontroversial. And Williams happens to be the party’s family and sexual violence spokeswoman.
‘‘Willie and I have had several conversations and I take every opportunity to remind him about his role as a public figure and ensuring that he is saying the right things about that culture,’’ she says.
Things were more heated behind the scenes than that carefully-worded statement suggests. Is she satisfied with where Jackson is at now?
‘‘He’s given me some assurances and I take every opportunity to make sure that he understands his responsibilities as well.’’
Williams also copped some flak for using a PR company to communicate as the story blew up. Not a big deal, she claims.
‘‘I’ve had a PR company for a year, to do my newsletters and a lot of the communications. A lot of people do. You either have a staff member do it or you buy in the resource.’’
Did she feel hounded by the media at that time?
‘‘Look, I tell you what. I learnt a lot. I learnt how important the media is to get messages out. We got talking about family violence, which is good because we do need to talk about it.’’
The bigger picture of the Williams-Jackson stoush is that it revealed dissent within Labour, which had tried so hard to present a united, ready-for-government front.
‘‘Hmm, yeah,’’ she replies. ‘‘Would you say that’s a problem now? It wasn’t then either. It was an opportunity for people to raise that as an issue but it’s certainly not an issue now.’’
Christchurch East has been in Labour hands since 1922. Williams is at number 24 on the party list, three places behind Willie Jackson. She is safe either way.
Joanne Hayes is having another crack at Christchurch East for National. Williams is conciliatory towards her: ‘‘She’s alright. A decent enough person. We have played on the Parliamentary netball team together.’’
Hayes has polite things to say about Williams in response: ‘‘I get on well with Poto, more so in Wellington than in Christchurch.’’
Speaking of National MPs, the sense of a two-speed recovery must have struck Williams when Greater Christchurch Regeneration Minister Nicky Wagner made her wacky claim that Christchurch is better now than it was in 2010.
‘‘Oh gosh,’’ Williams says. ‘‘Nicky’s got the ability to turn everything into a bright sunny day, hasn’t she?
‘‘There are some lovely new buildings in town but there is real devastation that still hits you in the face. The Margaret Mahy Playground is beautiful but look at where it is.’’
But despite everything, National gained ground in Christchurch after the earthquakes and it had traditionally been a Labour town. The party vote dropped. What does Williams think happened?
‘‘This is my own personal view. When you’re going through a natural disaster, you put your trust and faith in your Government to see you through that. People were just so concerned with getting through each and every day. Our region said we just have to get through the next little bit and the next little bit and the next little bit.
‘‘There isn’t an appetite to look at national politics, when you’re worried about whether you have sewage on your lawn. It was all about here. Now we’re in a different space.’’