The two occasions I took a break last year coincided with one of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s two visits to Dunedin, and the other with Health Minister Simeon Brown’s trip to town.
So naturally as soon as I headed out the door last week Mr Brown was back in Dunedin again for another hospital announcement — one slightly more palatable than the last one.
So having missed all the fun, let’s go back in time to Parliament’s last sitting week, and Wednesday’s Question Time, which may have set a record.
Of the 12 questions, a quarter were asked by southern MPs ... although maybe only a third of those elicited anything which might have been of any interest to their constituents.
First up was Act New Zealand Southland list MP Todd Stephenson, who got to ask the acting Prime Minister — who, coincidentally, just happened to be his party leader David Seymour — the hardy perennial of whether he stood by all his government’s statements and actions?
Spoiler alert: yes, he did ... particularly the NZ Infrastructure Commission’s freshly announced National Infrastructure Plan.
Mr Stephenson followed up by asking about access to new medicines — which the man who is also an associate health minister with responsibility for drug-buying agency Pharmac was more than happy to talk about — and then GPs (ditto).
It was going so well, but Mr Stephenson then incurred the Speaker’s wrath by asking his leader to comment on comments made once upon a time by the little-remembered Labour MP Charles Chauvel about the Regulatory Standards Bill.
"No, that’s not something you [Mr Seymour] can make any comment on whatsoever. So sit down and have another go at the question," the Speaker harumphed.
Fair play to Mr Stephenson; he found a cunning way around the Speaker’s edict by asking if the acting PM agreed with any statements that he had recently seen in relation to the Regulatory Standards Bill.
"Well, I do, as a matter of fact," Mr Seymour replied with glee, before embarking on the sort of answer which makes Gerry Brownlee turn puce.
Q10, from National Waitaki MP Miles Anderson, was much more benign, as he asked Agriculture Minister Todd McClay about the government’s plan to ban full farm-to-forestry conversions — as covered in last week’s Southern Say.
No alarms and no surprises here, as Mr McClay gave a suitably apocalyptic answer to Mr Anderson’s question: "What is the impact on rural communities of whole farm-to-forest conversions?"
Q11, from Labour Taieri MP Ingrid Leary to Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka on proposed changes to the Retirement Villages Act, was when things got really interesting. She wanted to know if the draft legislation would include "provisions for repayments but not mandate them".
This is a topic close to Ms Leary’s heart (she has a member’s Bill in the ballot on just this subject), not to mention thousands of retirement village residents and their families affected by the issue.
Most villages operate under an occupation rights (ORA) agreement system, whereby residents buy the right to live in what might well be their final home, but not ownership of it. That sum is then held until the ORA ends.
An ORA does not come cheap — in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is high, true, but which may also be fair enough in some circumstances: villages are expensive to build and costly to run.
But an ORA comes with associated bonds and fees, and gruesome tales abound of residents, or their families, being obliged to pay fees after moving to a higher-care unit or dying.
Also problematic is the process of getting out of an ORA. The village will usually claim a portion of the ORA as an "exit fee" and then resell the ORA.
However, that right may well have accumulated a considerable capital gain in the intervening period — something that the former ORA owner cannot benefit from.
Many, and Ms Leary is one, think this effectively means villages are enjoying an interest-free loan from their residents — albeit that they receive a secure and comfortable lifestyle and residence for their golden years.
Consumer has been running a campaign for years on the issue of what it sees as unfair retirement village contracts; Mosgiel’s Brian Peat, president of the Retirement Village Residents’ Association, has also been hot on the topic for a number of years.
Mr Potaka has bad news for Ms Leary, saying that the Northern Advocate article on which she has based her question had been incorrect Undeterred, she then asked if Mr Potaka would commit now to mandating fair repayment times and terms.
"There are a number of matters that we are considering as part of a broader reform of this matter, including dispute resolution protections, and a wide range of consumer protections and various matters, including those that the member referred to, will be considered and are still under active consideration," Mr Potaka replied reassuringly ... but not reassuringly enough for Ms Leary, who pointedly followed up with: "What other sectors are there where people have no control over when someone pays them back their own money?"
That was quite a broad and open question, Mr Potaka replied, but he could say that the government was "responsibly reviewing" a wide variety of matters, including consumer protections for elderly folks living in retirement villages.
Would that include, perhaps supporting a law change which would require operators to give residents their money back within three months, Ms Leary wondered, knowing full well that such a Bill existed.
"If the member is asking me to jump in front of Cabinet and make decisions by way of a question and answer session, I will not be doing that," Mr Potaka said.
"What I will be doing is diligently and professionally undertaking my responsibility as associate minister of housing to explore these issues and bring these matters through the policy decisions and, ultimately, to this fine chamber."
But whether that exploration makes anyone happy is a question for another day.
