Their deputies, with much less fanfare, do the same thing, although they suffer the handicap that they are usually required to be in the House on a Thursday covering for their jetsetting leader rather than being out and about pressing the flesh.
Recess weeks are their friend, hence with Parliament not sitting this week National deputy leader Nicola Willis jaunted to Nelson on Monday and down to Dunedin yesterday.
Despite logistical challenges - not the least of which being making sure her four children all get to school or dance class - Ms Willis has not been a stranger to the South either.
Her first visit after being elected deputy leader was to Invercargill, she was in Wanaka with Waitaki MP Jacqui Dean in April, attended the party’s regional conference in Dunedin and has also popped up in Queenstown a time or two.
Being the leader of the Opposition is proverbially the worst job in politics, so being the deputy must be somewhere down there ... as must be being a finance spokeswoman trying to outpoint South Dunedin’s favourite son Grant Robertson, indisputably one of the strongest Labour ministers.
Ms Willis has got off to a good start though: her constant repetition of the phrase "cost-of-living crisis" forced the Government to shift from trying to swat the phrase away to having to actively address the premise, and while Ms Willis’ other pet catchphrase, "the squeezed middle", has not resonated quite as much, it is not for a lack of trying.
More recently she made former Otago MP David Parker lose his poise over the cost-of-living payout, but she has also looked and sounded awkward herself trying to explain why her party’s economic policies would save New Zealand, whereas in the United Kingdom, when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng unrolled its philosophical cousin, they were both out of a job within weeks.
It is not easy to explain why you would do it differently when Mr Robertson in the House, with his colleagues roaring behind him, argues that it failed for the British so why would it not fail for the Kiwis too?
A Business South lunch in Dunedin is a much easier sell, Ms Willis setting out a four-point economic plan that National proposes taking to the electorate next year: "bust inflation", reduce regulation, address the labour shortage and review tax rates.
These all look good on a billboard but, as Ms Willis well knows, are much more difficult to nail down in economic reality: for example, traditional approaches to inflation tend to boost unemployment and National has pledged to maintain the historic low unemployment rates Labour has achieved.
Reducing regulation is a hardy perennial for National, as is tax, although Ms Willis was careful to stress that she was considering tweaks to brackets rather than rates and that no extra borrowing would be involved.
Addressing the labour shortage is somewhat harder: saying that New Zealand needs to be more competitive in the international marketplace is all very well, as is saying immigration rules need to be eased, but that rhetoric needs to be matched by practical steps to actually convince those sought-after skilled migrants to pick Dunedin over Dubbo or Toronto.
There will be trickier audiences ahead for Ms Willis, but with a number of prominent Dunedin National party members in the audience this was one engagement where she was guaranteed a warm welcome.
It certainly did her no harm to share "far too much information" when, to much laughter, she told the audience that she and her now husband shared their first kiss while at a university debating tournament in Dunedin.
Just another reason for the region to be close to the potential finance minister’s heart.
Work and play
As mentioned earlier, Parliament was in recess this week, so Dunedin National list MP Michael Woodhouse went off on holiday ... but there was plenty of work involved.
A loyal member of the parliamentary rugby team, he and his friends popped off to the Cook Islands, where they played that country’s parliamentary team in a hard-fought but good-spirited 15-15 draw.
There was more on the agenda than the game though, the MP and his team-mates visiting schools with donations of books and equipment, taking part in a beach and street clean-up, and then lending a hand on various blasting and painting projects.
Milestones
As you may have heard tell the other week, 50% of the MPs in the New Zealand Parliament are now women.
The acceleration towards equity has been astonishing: when former prime minister Helen Clark was first elected in 1981 she was just the 17th female MP and when she became PM in 1999 there had only been 65 - Soraya Peke-Mason was the 177th when she tipped the House to the halfway mark.
The South was relatively quick off the mark to elect its first female MP: Ethel McMillan, the first woman elected to the Dunedin City Council, was the eighth female MP when she won Dunedin North in 1953 and she held the seat until her retirement in 1975.
