The caucus ‘expert’ on Christchurch affairs

Press, 7 January 1983, Page 11

The caucus ‘expert’ on Christchurch affairs

The National member for Fendalton, Philip Burdon, completed his first year in Parliament when the House rose on December 17. As the only South Island National M.P. representing an exclusively urban area, he has felt at times that his electorate was far larger than Fendalton. At the end of his first year he looks back at what it has meant to him. BRIAR WHITEHEAD completes her series of articles on the three new M.P.s in the circulation area of “The Press.”

The 43-year-old member of Parliament for Fendalton, Philip Burdon, has an urban electorate far bigger than Fendalton. As the only National member of Parliament who represents a totally urban seat, and a successful businessman at that, he has become the focal point for South Island urban interests, and particularly its commercial sector. This has swelled his workload enormously. Mr Burdon was raised on a high country sheep farm near Geraldine. He is now the millionaire owner of a Christchurch mushroom farm, Meadow Mushrooms, of which he remains a joint managing director. He has resigned his other commercial directorships to devote his time to politics. His high country upbringing, Christ's College education. legal training and commercial success have made him subject to assumptions that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has never had to work hard for anything. He has the money ’ and the ability to dabble in politics, and throw it away if it tires him. But Philip Burdon strongly defends himself against the charge. He says his parents were not. wealthy, and he was one of a family of five. His parents were determined that he should have a good education, and they sent him to Christ’s College’ But from there he was on his own, he says, except for a £lO,OOO loan on which he paid interest until he inherited the

money on the death of his father.

He put himself through university — a five-year course in law — working at the Whakatu Freezing Works in the Christmas vacation.

“My parents insisted I rely on my own initiative,” he says. “I had no family farm or family business to go into.”

He took his £lO.OOO and went to England for five years, and used the money to finance a mushroom farm in Cyprus. It was “torn to shreds” when the Turks invaded the island in 1974.

With proceeds gained in the interim, however, he set up the Christchurch firm, which now employs more than 300, and has a turnover of about SIOM a year. His colleagues say he is tenacious — probably his strongest feature.

“If he has a difference with the P.M. in the caucus, he simply keeps hanging in there until he knows that caucus recognises his case is demolished,” said one of the 1978 intake. The tenacity has shown itself in representations for Christchurch and the South Island. “He. more than others, has pressed home to caucus that rural members can't adequately convey to the caucus what the South Island is like,” he says. "He is always wanting to make sure that the South Island is getting a fair deal, and he's a solid researcher.” The chairman of the Public Expenditure Committee, Mr I. McLean, says the M.P.

made a “good solid fist” of the demanding agenda of that bi-partisan watchdog of Government spending.

He has served on the Foreign Affairs Select. Committee, and also Lands and Agriculture. Caucus committees — the policy-making committees of the Government — give a better indication of his interests and fields of contribution. (Members can select the caucus committees in which they feel they can make the greatest contributions, or pick up the expertise they want in any field.)

Mr Burdon has been active in the commerce and economic committees which thrashed through the convoluted tax-avoidance legislation, and the communications committee — which decided to lease unused morning hours on television to private enterprise. On the transport committee he strongly lobbied for freed-up road licensing, and increasing competition between road and rail. He was less active in producing the Aviation White Paper that exposed Air New Zealand to competition on all routes, but strongly supported it nevertheless. He describes himself as an economic moderate, but a social liberal. If he were economically far to the right he would not have fought for •elimination of the tax shelters that protected the wealthy, he says. A group to the right in the caucus opposed the two bills that reduced opportunities for tax evasion by legal means.

But he fought the Competition Bill that caucus finally rejected in the last week of the session on grounds that it knocked too hard an already bruised urban sector which was feeling very vulnerable to C.E.R. The competition bill would have made competitiveness in commerce the over-riding criterion by which acceptability of monopolies, mergers, takeovers and trade practices were judged.

• He admits that he is naturally further to the economic “free market” right than the “realities” permit him to be. Demands for protection of urban industries and manufacturers feeling the potential bite of C.E.R. have obviously played no small part in this.

He sees C.E.R. as a fair deal for both the consumer and the manufacturer, and as a member of the Parliamentary select committee and the caucus committee which studied the bill, he claims to know a lot about it.

He says he is humane, and that where his ideology conflicts with the need for social compassion, he will "always insist on the humane decision superseding the doctrinaire one.”

To be humane means to see the need for the welfare state — “as a safety net to help the poor and improvident” — but to make the country . economically stronger; to see the need for S.M.P. support for farmers while export prices are so low — but to eliminate them when an upturn will no longer mean extreme financial hardship for the country; to support the integrity of the judicial process — but to support special legislation to secure the Government's water right (if the Courts will not grant it) in the interest of “the greatest good for the greatest number of people." Socially he says he is liberal. He would support homosexual law reform, oppose capital punishment, and

support the electorate’s stand in his conscience vote on the Adult Adoption Information Bill. Publicly he defers to the party line, but he declares he is riot a “party-liner.” “I work within the system to bring changes,” he says. “You don’t sort your mates out in public.” He is Christchurch’s best advocate in the caucus. “I have an automatic mandate,” he says. “No-one can speak with more authority than I can, there.” He has lobbied pretty evenly and consistently for Christchurch and South Island interests, his colleagues say.

For Christchurch he has been particularly active in the retention of the old Boys' High School building, and in arguing for the re-building of Christchurch Girls’ High School. He lobbied for extensions to the Christchurch airport runway. He has been responsible 'for the appointment of more University of Canterbury staff to national commissions than any other M.P. has achieved in a university town. He is working to bring energy advantages to the South Island, but will not say what they are. Part of the

success of lobbying is not to be public about it, he says. He is conscious of the few urban seats that now belong to the National Party, and of the need to press home the special case of the urban sector. As a private enterpriser who claims a social conscience, what does urban unemployment mean to him? He says that the caucus knows his concern for the unemployed through his strong lobbying for the student job search programme to help student unemployed get vacation work, and subsidies to encourage employment.

He says he has spoken in the House on Social Welfare issues more than any other new member, and that his membership of the caucus committee on health and social welfare shows his concern for “adequate social services” and “maintenance of vital health standards." In the electorate, to reflect people’s “changing' expectations of M.P.s” he has opened an electorate office. None of the three Cabinet ministers who preceeded him had this facility. He staffs it with a part-time secretary. He claims to have served the electorate in a totally non-partisan way, but to have had representations from people all over Christchurch who feel uncertain of a favourable reception from Labour members in their own electorates.

Although his wife is “right behind him” he prefers to keep politics “out of the house and away from the kids.” He has three girls, aged 12, 10 and seven. As a successful company executive who felt something of a cipher in the system in his first months in Parliament, Philip Burdon has come to terms with his place at the bottom of the ladder. “Of course that’s where I start,” he says. “There's only one way' to go, and that’s up.” If 1 don't get into Cabinet in the course of my Parliamentary career 11l consider I’ve wasted my time. I came into politics with the intention of getting intc Cabinet as soon as possible.”

At the end of his first year he says he has enjoyed the stimulation of being at the centre of things, and has been agreeably surprised ai his degree of involvement as a back-bencher.

His colleagues say he has found his feet, done his job - and gained respect. As a man who has been notably successful in business, the economic theoreticians in the caucus have a healthy respect for experience he has gained in the real world.