Goudie retires

Sandra Goudie has just announced that she retire at the next election.

We all owe Sandra a huge debt of gratitude for winning Coromandel off Jeanette Fitzsimons in 2002. Otherwise that may have become their permament lifeline.

Sandra has been a very effective MP for her electorate. One issue I have first hand experience of was a scam operator posing as a eco-tourism operator. Sandra helped get Fair Go to expose how many young well-meaning people from overseas had got scammed, and she also wanted to get the Fair Go story up the Google pagerank, so asked if I and others could blog on it. This isn’t the stuff that makes headlines, but often fills up the day of a constituent MP.

Sandra’s local popularity shows with the fact she got 63% of the electorate vote – a massive 14,560 majority. The party vote majority was around 9,500 so whomever wins the National nomination is likely to have a pretty good tenure as MP for Coromandel.

As I commented with the announcement of Wayne Mapp’s retirement at the election, it is good to see National rejuvenating itself early on. rejuvenation is not something you do at the last minute to stave off defeat. A sucessful party needs to be doing it constantly – rejuvenating both Caucus and Cabinet.