Parliament is an unusual creature. It is a hundred different ecosystems living as an organism to achieve something unusual: a smoothly functional democratic government.
Judging by either history or international experience that is harder to pull off than it ought to be.
Our Parliament and government achieve every day what many countries never quite seem to manage. That doesn’t happen by accident and we shouldn’t take it for granted
Rachael White, Anna Heath, Anna-Grace Somerfield, and Meg Lamb at Parliament Photo: Phil Smith
Maintaining government and governance takes both effort and smarts. Consequently, Government and Parliament enjoy an unusual concentration of some of the finest minds in the country. And no, I’m not describing MPs (though they also include some proper clever people).
I’m thinking of the staff; the hot shots from the many government ministries and entities who act as seconded liaisons in ministers’ offices. The advisors and comms staff who include some of our best (former) journalists. The clerks and their kin who actually run Parliament; and the many staff who make MPs look good by doing a lot of their thinking for them.
You might expect a lot of aging civil servants (like in Yes Minister), but the opposite is more often the case. Running a country is a relentless and tiring occupation and many staff are relatively young. Some very much so.
For example this last week I met with four recent or current students from Victoria University of Wellington who have a lot in common: all of them are participants, past or current in an internship programme at Parliament that is run for top students from the University.
The internship is organised by a much admired local academic, Professor Stephen Levine (who coincidentally was the focus of a function this week to celebrate 50 years of teaching politics at VUW).
Rachael White, Anna Heath, Meg Lamb and Anna-Grace Somerfield all majored in politics, but that isn’t actually a prerequisite for the internship.
Two of them are now interning with MPs (Green’s Jan Logie and Labour’s MP Ginny Andersen) and two interned last year and are now staff; one with the Shadow Leader of the House, National’s Chris Bishop and one in the Labour Party Leader’s Office (and yes, that is different to the Prime Minister’s office).
The House talked to them about what that is like, how they came to be there and what they plan next. You can hear what they had to say in the audio above.
