The benefits of having a regional lobbyist as a minister

Sunday, 16 February 2025

It’s been a busy start for the minister for the South Island, criss-crossing his new territory, coming to grasp with all that concerns mainlanders.

“There's just so much you could do with this role that you’ve got to pick some areas where you spend the most of your energy,” James Meager tells the Sunday Star-Times as he drives to Queenstown Airport for another meeting.

In recent weeks he’s met with the mayors of Otago-Southland, Nelson-Tasman, and Canterbury. Within seven days he’s been from Nelson to Queenstown to Christchurch, then back to Nelson. After that he’ll be talking to advocates for retailers, farmers and others, sponging up the priorities of each.

Already there’s common themes in what he’s hearing: “transport infrastructure, delivery of public services, connectivity across the island; freight, travel, logistics”.

All of this will be fed up to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, for the priorities of the new minister for the South Island to be distilled.

It’s not a straightforward ministerial gig for the first-term Rangitata MP. There’s no direct ministry to steer. No long-established area of government policy to wrangle, such as health, or education, or the labour workforce. And what really does the minister for a region achieve that various electorate MPs do not?

There is of course an example for what minister for a region can be: the minister for Auckland.

Meager says there are similarities between his and Simeon Brown’s jobs; both are advocates for their regions, someone other ministers will consult about relevant issues, and both have staff from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Meager says he will also act as a proxy for the likes of Education Minister Erica Stanford, who can’t visit every school in the south.

There are also differences.

“It's a slightly different brief … Auckland is a significantly-sized city, but, you know, it's concentrated in a relatively constrained geographic area,” Meager says.

“Whereas my role, in the South Island, because it's such a large disparate land mass with different issues of different areas… There are some common themes, but I have to do probably more of an outreach and more of a ‘journey across the island’ kind of job.”

Those who have dealt with the minister for Auckland generally agree it is a valuable position - indicating the South Island may also find Meager useful.

The minister for Auckland was first created by then PM Helen Clark in 1999, but went out of fashion in 2007. Then, after Chris Hipkins became PM in early 2023, he reinstated the post to signal the Government’s focus on the country’s largest city.

Former Labour MP Michael Wood, first appointed minister for Auckland by Hipkins, says the job meant being “a cheerleader for your region”.

“That does have some value, just in terms of making sure that people see this place as a good place to live, to invest, to do business, all of that stuff. There is some inherent value in that.

“But it's got to be more than that and, at its core, I saw the ministerial role as a co-ordination role. You have this enormous ability as a minister to say to people, you need to be in my office at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, and we're going to talk it out and bang heads together to resolve an issue.”

An example of this came when Auckland was having “massive problems” with reliability of its public transport. Wood says he was able to get the council, public transport organisations and unions in the same room to produce a fix.

“There was a major problem with ferries in Auckland, and a part of the problem was there was a worker shortage, but they couldn't train up new workers because the ferry is running all the time.

“So we, effectively, in the room, brokered that Fullers would get a break from the ordinary expectations of service to give them some time to train up new people, so they could get back to full staffing.

“So that's just a small example of a kind of practical nuts and bolts thing. You didn't have a special legislative power to do that as a minister, but because you're the minister, you get the people in there … and sort something out like that.”

Whether having a minister convinces Auckland or the South Island that the Government is attentive depends, Wood says.

“Proof is in the pudding. After a year of a role being set up like that, if people actually see some things that have happened, then it'll be seen as worthwhile. The risk is that if tangible things don't happen, it's just seen as a throwing a bone, and people have got a pretty good bullshit radar for that kind of thing, frankly.

“Key institutional players, like the local government in these areas, will see the value of this if it's done well, and they'll latch on to it. But they'll work out pretty quickly if it's just a talk shop.”

Asked to rate the worthiness of an Auckland minister, the supercity’s mayor Wayne Brown says it is “potentially” useful.

“I'm not saying it's not not useful. But … Simeon was the minister of everything that was really important to my programme in Auckland,” Mayor Brown says.

“He was the minister for Auckland, but he was also the minister of local government and transport. I dunno, which hat was he wearing at the time? I’m buggered if I know really.”

Nonetheless, Mayor Brown says Minister Brown had been “good to deal with”.

Heart of the City chief executive Viv Beck says the minister for Auckland is like the “glue” between the city, its needs, and different ministers.

Examples of where this has helped included a cross-agency response to safety issues in the Auckland CBD which her organisation lobbied for, she says.

“The concept of having a minister who can actually try and align the needs of our region with the ministers and their various portfolios is, in my view, useful.

“There's more to do, but it's a mechanism we've been keen to see. And it is delivering.”

She says the minister of the South Island looks to be similar: “Bringing a voice … having that strong sense of what the local needs are and how those get brought into the government decision-making process.

“So I think we still got a way to go with it. But as a concept, I do support it.”

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