Taieri Labour MP Ingrid Leary did not have to look far to find inspiration for her speech on Thursday: she was probably staring out of her electorate office window at the KiwiRail Hillside Workshops as she drafted it.
Even better, Ms Leary has actually visited the Hillside Rd construction site twice in the past three weeks, firstly escorting Finance Minister and local lad Grant Robertson around turf he would be well familiar with, and secondly showing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins around last Friday.
Hillside is somewhat of a hardy perennial on the itinerary of any political visitor to Dunedin ... "Southern Say" has done the rounds at least a dozen times, so goodness knows how many laps four-term Dunedin MP David Clark has done.
It was well worth seeing in its heyday though. Even with the workforce well down from the thousand-plus which used to throng its halls, the old facility was still an impressive sight — although alternately clammy if it was summer or freezing if it was winter.
Most of that cathedral to industry is gone now, part of a considerable and controversial revamp being carried out by KiwiRail and enthusiastically backed by Labour this term and earlier by it and New Zealand First.
The new facilities are no less stirring though, if you like building sites and heavy engineering.
The low-lying land is being built up for a whole new — hopefully flood-proof — rail yard to be built, so the carriages which will soon be assembled there can be shunted in and out.
Ms Leary, like her Dunedin South predecessor Clare Curran, is a huge fan of Hillside and Thursday was not the first time she has sung the facility’s praises in the House.
"We can see the visible difference on the skyscape in South Dunedin. We can see buildings going up," she trilled.
"There is just a great sense of excitement. There are men and women construction workers.
"There are about 200 construction jobs happening to make the workshops come into fruition, and the lead contractor, I’m very proud to say, is Calder Stewart, based in my electorate, in Milton."
Not everyone is delighted: National has questioned the $105 million of public money going into build a facility to work on locomotives which will begin their lives in Spain and wagons which will originate from Indonesia.
Ms Leary, however, has no doubts.
"When Hillside is up and running the locomotive mechanical workshop will be able to work on 21 locomotives at one time and it will be able to assemble 1500 wagons over three years.
"My dream for my electorate is to have an inland port, such as what we’ve seen in Hamilton ."
There is, of course, a perfectly serviceable port in Dunedin already, but it is one which generates a lot of trucking traffic, vehicles which Ms Leary argued would be taken off the state highways by an inland port and therefore aid in tackling another of her pet issues, climate change.
Later in Thursday’s debate National Invercargill MP Penny Simmonds — to the surprise of absolutely no-one — opted to opine on a subject very close to the former SIT chief executive’s heart, Te Pukenga.
Ms Simmonds was implacable before the mega polytech merger that it would not work, and nothing that she had seen since had changed her mind.
"We at SIT were about to build 33 apartments just when the change or the mega-merger occurred. SIT had the funding, the consents, the land, the plans, the specifications, all the money there to spend — $23 million — on building these apartments, and that was stopped by Te Pūkenga," she lamented.
"So they added to the shortage of rental accommodation in Southland."
Worse was to come.
"Our community has suffered: our Stags, our Steel, our Sharks were all sponsored by SIT; Te Pūkenga has not allowed that sponsorship to continue, again hurting our community."
Gut the polytech is one thing, but take on the rugby, netball and basketball teams? That’s definitely a local issue to get steamed up over.
Back in my day
Last week’s debate on the Health and Safety at Work (Health and Safety Representatives and Committees) Amendment Bill allowed Michael Woodhouse the chance to take a trip down Memory Lane, although it is quite possible it was not a fond visit.
In a 2015 iteration of similar legislation, when Mr Woodhouse was the relevant minister, he recalled "this was the section of the Bill that led to the lampooning of said minister in relation to worm farms and lavender growing".
Mr Woodhouse then claimed, as he did eight years previous, that he had tried to be helpful by issuing what was effectively an exposure draft on a regulation that had not been passed.
"Unfortunately, the unfortunate consequence of that was that probably no minister since has ever offered draft secondary legislation in advance of the passage of a Bill, lest there be that sort of ventilation, that thinking out loud may cause similar derision."
