Electorate Offices

Clare Curran blogs:

My post yesterday on Bill English and his mostly closed electorate offices in Balclutha and Gore has attracted some interest on Red Alert and on facebook.

A number of people commented that they were experiencing the same issues in other National-held electorates.

I’m wondering how many National Party electorate offices are actually staffed on a regular basis?

And how much direct constituency work they do and what options are open to constituents if they try to approach their local MP and are rebuffed, ignored or can’t make contact because it’s always closed.

Firstly I would note that the public are quite good at removing electorate MPs they don’t think do a good job. And suggesting that National MPs are neglecting their electorates is just silly, when Nationals holds 42 seats to 22 for Labour.

With Bill English, I note he got 21,375 votes and the Labour candidate 5,207 votes.

As for why, Bill’s offices may have been closed. Well it is all about size. Clutha-Southland is the largest general electorate in the country. It is 3.82 million hectares in size.

Urban seats, such as Dunedin North, have only one electorate office. They can use their staffing entitlement to have an office all the time.

Bill has three electorate offices, to enable people to see him or his staff. They are in Gore, Balclutha and Queenstown. Hence it is no surprise that all three offices are not open all the time.

The work required to service a rural electorate is often immensely greater than relatively small urban electorates, as you can spend much of your weekend driving from appointment to appointment. The hardest electorate of probably West Coast-Tasman as it can be 13 hours from one end to another.