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Hawke’s Bay has had six MPs looking after our interests in the past three years — or hadn’t you realised?

Four of them are Government MPs, half of them hold ministerial portfolios and one is Deputy Prime Minister. We’ve even got the Minister for Maori Affairs on the East Coast. Remember National’s Chris Tremain and Craig Foss, who beat Labour’s Russell Fairbrother and Rick Barker three years ago? Happily for everyone, all four ended up in the House.

I had forgotten just how weighty our political representation was, with the possible exception of Parekura Horomia, until one morning the three-year election Spring arrived in the form of red, blue and the odd greenie election billboards. If the billboards are any indication, we’re in for a bland few weeks. No originality allowed, just the same party billboards dotted throughout the country.

Labour has gone for the Warehouse sale-poster approach, while National has simply reproduced a bright blue bit of ballot paper with their names on it and even ticked the boxes for us. No Tui-style billboards this time to lift the spirits of weary Waimarama commuters. Just John Key, looking like a teetotaling Mormon minister, propped in the front paddock having a happy day. Labour’s Helen Clark impersonator is back to her airbrushed best, while Rick Barker’s bold red billboards send an ambiguous message that he’s “working for you, Labour”.

Curiously enough, half of our East Coast representation comes from the Labour Party list — Michael Cullen, Russell Fairbrother, Rick Barker and Moana Mackey. But then National’s Chris Tremain and Craig Foss probably owe their seats more to National’s 2005 revival under Don Brash than any personal popularity.

So despite plenty of politicians, Bay voters don’t have much to judge their representatives on in the past three years.

Admittedly Rick Barker has done something about crime in the Bay by building us a bigger Hastings courthouse. Russell Fairbrother burst briefly into national view during the Privileges Committee inquiry into the Winston Peters/ New Zealand First loan affair, when he raised the possibility that wealthy businessman Owen Glen might have been talking on the phone to Winston’s brother Wayne by mistake.

National’s Chris Tremain and Craig Foss have spent their formative parliamentary years breathing heavily through their noses. Chris Tremain, shouldering the mysterious duties of Junior Opposition Whip, has been carefully positioned behind John Key, shaking his head when Clarke speaks and nodding earnestly at Key’s every utterance.

While Tremain and Foss have busied themselves on Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee, personal appearances seem to rate higher than political pontificating. But no Hawke’s Bay event is complete unless at least one of the dynamic duo are present.

Even the annual Hastings Blossom Parade isn’t safe. A recent Foss blogsite entry offers a breathless description of appearing in this year’s parade dressed as Austin Powers and spraying people with his foam cannon. Yeah Baby! Yeah, right.
They have opted to work as a team, a Bay double act like the Evers-Swindell twins, reluctant to paddle their own waka. Our very own double skulls.

And despite being a regular Hawke’s Bay Airport user, Michael Cullen seems to have spent a lot of energy resisting any attempt to free up the Government’s stake in the airport. That hasn’t stopped Russell Fairbrother claiming credit for its pending corporatisation. Tremain and Foss have also weighed into the airport ownership and development debate, one of their few public forays into a truly regional issue in the past three years.

But then they are just following Hawke’s Bay tradition. Rarely has the region produced a truly independent political voice. Most of our past MPs have long been forgotten, even the long-stayers. We’ve had one-hit wonders like National’s Bob Fenton and ex-Havelock North mayor Jeff Whittaker, to whom we should all raise a glass for getting the law changed to allow wineries to open on Sundays.

Hawke’s Bay’s profile spiked dramatically from l990 to l996 during the two-term tenure of maverick National MP Michael Laws, now staring down the Mob as Wanganui’s mayor. Laws left one legacy when he and an unlikely Labour stalwart joined forces to con his National Government colleagues into giving Flaxmere a high school by suggesting Asian backers were about to beat them to it.

But now it’s party vote first, personalities second. In fact no personality is even better.
We’re down to surnames and ticks on billboards to decide what sort of person we want to push for the Bay. By next election we’ll be down to 0800 numbers and a website.

But do we really think any of our candidates are going to make the slightest bit of difference in the next three years, even if we have half a dozen representing us?
Probably not but we’ll still turn out on polling day because that’s what you do in the Bay.

My father, a first-day pupil at Wellington’s Scots College, spent his lifetime voting Labour. My mother, whose family had working-class Irish origins, voted National.
With five kids, she was grateful for the Family Benefit yet, she determinedly voted against the party that provided it. We explained to our parents that they were simply cancelling each other out on polling day but it made no difference.

On election day, my father’s greatest pleasure was to ring the National Party’s Hastings office, a converted weatherboard house in Eastbourne Street, and ask for a ride to the polling booth. He would wait until he was dropped off outside our house before telling the Nats driver that he had voted Labour.

When Labour narrowly won the l957 election, my father erected a pole and a red “flag” on the chookhouse fence so our elderly Scottish neighbour, a staunch National supporter, could see it from her kitchen window. A year later when Arnold Nordmeyer’s Black Budget increased the tax on tobacco, my father protested by promptly quitting smoking, but still voted for the party. Labour’s electoral success was short-lived and the Nats swept back into power a year later.

The day after the election, a pole with a blue cloth flag appeared on our Scottish neighbour’s fence, right in line with our kitchen window.

brendan@webbz.net.nz