But for a few, including Southland National MP Joseph Mooney, their working year began earlier than that, with the first meeting of the Social Services and Community select committee, which Mr Mooney chairs.
Several select committees are in for busy years — spare a thought for the justice committee, on which Mr Mooney’s Act New Zealand Queenstown neighbour Todd Stephenson sits, which is about to wade through 300,000 and counting submissions on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill for a start.
But the main issue that Mr Mooney and his colleagues will be considering this year is the government’s Responding to Abuse in Care Legislation Amendment Bill, and it was to that troubling piece of legislation which it turned much of its attention at its first, virtual, meeting.
The weight of number of submitters is not the issue with this Bill, it is the weighty subject matter.
On November 12 last year, all parties in Parliament, fully and rightfully, apologised for decades of torment inflicted upon society’s most vulnerable while they were in the supposedly safe care of the state.
Tens of thousands of people were affected by this, and Mr Mooney’s committee is charged with consideration of the first of what will likely be several legislative responses from the government to the commission’s comprehensive and damning report.
This first salvo is an omnibus Bill which amends several existing laws to bring them into line with recommendations from the Royal Commission.
These include the amending rules covering searching both within youth facilities and of people trying to enter them, adding to the list of specified offences which can bar someone from working with children and including any equivalent overseas offences, explicitly including disability in the definition of a vulnerable adult and tightening the Public Records Act to make sure organisations covered by information preservation requirements comply with them.
As the response to the government’s official apology to those harmed while in the care of the state showed, words really do matter. This was a theme which many submitters spoke on, notably former MP Mojo Mathers, chief executive of the Disabled Persons Assembly. She and several others took issue with the intention of terming disabled people as "vulnerable".
Their objection might seem semantic, but it is important: while disabled people are indeed at higher risk of being abused, they are not inherently vulnerable.
"It is the lack of structural support and resourcing that creates the circumstances where harm can occur."
The DPA preferred the phrasing "adult at risk"; while their argument is a reasonable one, if accepted, it will pose a not insurmountable issue for the Parliamentary Counsel Office as "vulnerable adult" is already a defined class of people in the Crimes Act, so a little rewriting will be required.
While many of these changes could be termed purely administrative, those who have walked in this shadow tend to view the state with understandable jaundice and suspicion.
They are watching the progress of this first Bill particularly closely as it will set the tone for the future.
Mr Mooney, a trained lawyer and former mental health advocate, has empathy with and understanding of those scheduled to present to the select committee: he has met and worked with them, or with people who have similar life stories.
While this makes him a sensitive and sensible chairman, on day one he was also not distracted from the fact that he had a job to do. Time limits are tight for in-person appearances before a select committee — between 5 and 10 minutes usually — and many people want those precious slots.
Mr Mooney, while ever conscious of the clock, allowed people to have their say, opting at times to let people use their full time for their speech and curtail questions if he felt that having their say was what they really wanted.
This is always much harder when being done on Zoom, but the thanks of that day’s submitters were genuine.
Mr Mooney can consider day one of what will be an arduous process to have been a success.
