Rangitata MP Jo Goodhew said goodbye to Parliament this week. She caught up with Stu Oldham as she prepared for life outside government.

There are boxes of memories on the floor of the corner office and the walls are covered in faces. The boxes have been there a while, packed away in plain sight so they can be instantly recalled. The faces, they’ve been there since they were gathered ahead of Jo Goodhew’s farewell party.

The Rangitata MP’s face is among them, broadly smiling during engagements across her electorate. In one, she’s eating salt and vinegar chips — not her favourite, by any stretch — with former Prime Minister John Key. In others, she’s reading to children. There’s even the odd photo of her hugging a chubby-faced baby.

‘‘Now, forget the stereotypes, it’s not all about kissing babies,’’ the four-term National Party MP joked. ‘‘Don’t get me wrong, I love cuddling babies, but you might be surprised to know they’re not offered very much.’’

The photos provided a backdrop at her official party farewell last weekend. The faces brought back memories that helped – and hindered – as she wrote many different versions of her valedictory speech. She had 20 minutes to review 12 years in Parliament in her final speech to the House of Representatives on Thursday.

If the faces added too much material, the boxes crammed with newspaper reports made things worse. Even the odd policy document makes an appearance. Policy documents as memories – who’d have thought?

‘‘Yes, it’s all memorabilia to me, I haven’t gotten brave enough to throw anything out yet. I’m not sure I will – we’ll have to find room for it at home.’’

The carefully collected papers destined for her Timaru home span some remarkable, sometimes tumultuous, years in local politics.

There are pages from the leadup to the 2005 election campaign, in which Goodhew beat Labour MP and Trade Minister Jim Sutton. The result was stunning: the swing of 13,000 votes national news, buoying the numerically small National Party in opposition.

‘‘One of the things about being in opposition back then was that you could make headlines by looking at what the Government was doing and poking a stick at it.

‘‘Of course, then you have to be ready to deliver when you’re in government, and that was an exciting challenge.’’

That challenge initially came in the next election cycle, and over successive elections until January when, weeks after losing her ministerial warrants, she announced she would not stand for reelection. She was a minister for five of her years in Parliament but new leader Bill English wanted a new caucus.

As she considered her valedictory speech, Goodhew acknowledged she was disappointed she was overlooked.

She would have stayed were she a minister. There was electorate work to do but, now so used to a large workload, there was a danger she’d need more.

‘‘It was a hard decision to make and it was partly done for me, and I didn’t want to become bored with less work.’’

‘‘Unlike others I have never been ashamed to say it would be a lot easier to get a job at 56 than 59,’’ she said, laughing.

Goodhew started her job as a politician with a background that, to the uninitiated, provided mixed messages. She was from a politically aware family, with Parliament almost always on dad Bruce’s truck radio when they drove the farm to check the sheep.

Bruce was later National Party Timaru MP Maurice McTigue’s electorate agent. Goodhew was active in Young Farmers.

She was a registered nurse, then a Health Sciences tutor at Aoraki Polytechnic. She founded the Aorangi Nursing Agency, was a Victim Support volunteer, a South Canterbury DHB committee member and on two school boards of trustees. She was a Timaru Safer Community Council coordinator and a Plunket governor before the 2005 election.

All up, she there was enough in her past to make her the ideal candidate for the centre left, rather than for a party of many farmers and lawyers.

‘‘Some people might have thought so, but I was always on this path. As a practice nurse, I would do a lot of the recalls and I was always a little uncomfortable with the fact we were often providing people with prompts to after themselves, as opposed to leaving them to look after themselves.

‘‘Personal responsibility was something I believed in, strongly, and that’s very much part of the National Party way of thinking.’’

The ACT Party was also big on personal responsibility and she was approached to stand in the 1999 election. She laughed – politely – and was asked to consider National three years later.

It was what she wanted but came too soon. Having already turned down an approach to stand for the Timaru District Council, she waited until daughters Abi, Harriet and Emily were in their early teens before seeking the candidacy. Her daughters were horrified, but came around when they understood she’d be home more nights than she would be away.

It seemed motherhood was then, as now, something that bothered others more than it bothered the candidate.

Well-meaning party delegates asked what would happen if she got selected: ‘‘they asked ‘who’s going to cook for your husband and kids?’’’

As it turned out, she cooked and stocked the freezer as much as she could until it became clear her working hours would outstrip a 40-hour week. They were 80 hours from 2011, when she assumed ministerial roles.

Family time became deliberate: text messages and conversations were frequent, and it was a firm priority to be camp mother at Twizel during the rowing season.

‘‘Making time for family has to be a priority for anyone in Parliament. Their support is what gets you there, and it can be tough on them as much as it can be tough on you.’’ Goodhew had her share of politically tough times, and hindsight this week brought a couple to mind. The day of the Winz shootings in Ashburton in 2014, in a building she officially opened several years before, was still upsetting and difficult to comprehend.

She learned a valuable lesson about being a local MP when she did not negotiate when the government whip called her to Wellington during the 2006 big snow. The still-green Goodhew was roasted on talkback radio for abandoning the snowbound elderly in Timaru. The Timaru Herald’s editorial asked where she was.

‘‘Things settled down but it did not matter, people wanted to see your face. I learned from that, and I made sure I told my colleagues to stay at home if it happened to them.’’ The demise of Hubbard Management Funds and Aorangi Securities, and later of South Canterbury Finance (SCF), are remembered as a period of high emotion.

That’s an understatement, of course. Goodhew and her party were accused of ‘‘sticking it to the people of Timaru’’ as the collapses became complete. She was the local face of a party that said the people of South Canterbury should be grateful for the bailout of SCF.

Security kept an eye on her office; investors confronted her at meetings – she remembered the tense feel of a meeting in the Theatre Royal, in which an observer said ‘‘I thought they were going to string you up’’.

She was lobbied to advocate for the affected but said she could not have stopped the process. All she could do was try and engage and listen. ‘‘You have to do it, you just have to. They’re your people, you have to hear their hurt. You might not agree with some of their views but you have to hear them.

‘‘People will think I took the right or the wrong approach. Some people might grudgingly see I didn’t run and hide.’’ Goodhew knows the hidden parts of her job will always affect others’ perceptions. For example, Rangitata was a closed-door feature of many caucus discussions.

On unpopular decisions, people may say ‘‘oh, she’s just toed the party line’’ but she believed she had ‘‘the absolute responsibility’’ to let caucus know when an idea would not wash in her electorate. Battle lost – if it was – the convention of collective responsibility meant there was only so much she could say.

That didn’t happen often, she quickly added, and she was confident many decisions affecting her constituents were made with the key players hearing a Rangitata perspective.

Naturally, the days before a valedictory speech are necessarily spent remembering the positive. On her desk is a policy document that grew from conversations she had with aged care providers in Timaru. It was the only policy developed by a backbencher and laid the foundations for a suite of changes, including money for respite caregivers, spot audits on resthomes and a 25 per cent bump in dementia beds. Ironically, she noted, the South Canterbury District Health Board did not get any of those beds.

Goodhew had seven ministerial or associate ministerial roles over her time in Parliament. She was Community and Voluntary Sector Minister, Food Safety Minister, Associate Health Minister, Associate Primary Industries Minister, Senior Citizens Minister, Asociate Social Development Minister and Women’s Affairs Minister.

She was in those roles at a time when her Government was careful to develop policy it believed would not stretch the economy as it recovered from the global financial crisis. It wasn’t austerity; it was ‘‘careful management’’. It meant some of what Goodhew oversaw emphasised the need for government to direct rather than intervene.

She developed the Government’s position on social enterprise. In the right environment, businesses could help communities without the Government getting in the way, she said: ‘‘And now, there are enterprises across the country lending a hand, and that has to be good.’’ Some portfolios required much more proscriptive government intervention. As Minister for Food Safety, she was a public face of the response to the threat to contaminate baby formula with 1080 in 2014, and the Hepatitis A-contaminated imported berry recall in 2015.

Both were alarming and threw a spotlight on policy and practice in an area most would take for granted. Goodhew believed the identification and investigation processes were robust, but it was nonetheless ‘‘scary’’ being the one assuring consumers they’d be safe.

Parliament was scary too, on her first day but she said she left knowing it was a ‘‘rough-and-tumble’’ place of big ideas and personalities.

The only time she could recall losing her cool in the House was when she was challenged for her position on paid parental leave entitlements. She supported being ‘‘at a level the post-GFC economy could sustain’’.

‘‘A member of the opposition called out to me ‘as a mother, you ought to be ashamed’, and I really took offence. I just roared back, I surprised myself.’’

The history and importance of the job of an MP was never lost on her.

‘‘Oh no, and I do now worry what it will be like going cold turkey from something that has been such a big part of my life, such a privilege, for all these years.

‘‘I will miss the huge amount of interaction I have had with people, so the challenge is to find something that lets me keep engaging and promoting, I absolutely love it.’’ Goodhew is Rangitata’s MP until she is replaced at the election. She will continue campaigning for the man who replaced her, Andrew Falloon, until then.

Just the other day, she met a lovely woman who was surprised to see her delivering election pamphlets in her neighbourhood. She called ‘‘hey, I thought you were going’’ before telling her she didn’t always agree with her, but she liked her nonetheless.

‘‘She said ‘I like you, you’re one of us’ and I don’t think I could have been paid a bigger compliment.

‘‘Because that’s what I hope people will have thought, that I am one of the people, representing the people and Rangitata in Wellington.’’

The woman also said ‘‘good on you – you’re getting out while they still like you’’. Goodhew laughed: that would be nice, too.