Not the Prime Minister, you understand ... he is in the much warmer climes of Niue and Fiji this week. While Southern Say does not keep a forensic record of Christopher Luxon’s itineraries, we think that he has not been in either of the Dunedin electorates since a blink-and-you-would-have-missed-it stop in at Invermay last September.
Nor was it Finance Minister Nicola Willis. She chose to spend her Wednesday in Queenstown, which at least has the virtue of being in the South.
Southern Say is being just a little bit mean spirited here: Mr Bishop is actually a very big wheel in his party.
Close enough to Mr Luxon to have borrowed a shirt off him the day after the election, Mr Bishop ranks third in caucus, has the critical job of Leader of the House, and was chairman of the Nats’ 2023 election campaign.
He’s got some game ... but he’s not the PM, and nor is he the deputy leader.
Of course, in a sea of South Island blue seats, Dunedin is a red enclave with green fringing, so it is not like the leader of the National party would normally be rushing here.
Like it or not though, Mr Luxon is prime minister of all of New Zealand, and it would be nice to see him here one of these days.
But back to Mr Bishop, whose presence in Dunedin was twofold.
Firstly, he got to perform the first of what may well be many plaque unveilings as he officially opened the new social housing complex in what once was the Loan and Merc building.
Mr Bishop was deeply impressed at what he saw, and so he should have been: Russell Lund and his team have done a remarkable job of converting a grade 2-listed building into housing while staying true to the original design of the building.
Whether it works as a complex we will gave to wait and see, but the commitment of the Salvation Army to the project should give it every chance.
And succeed it will have to do if this government is going to make any headway in solving the housing crisis. Mr Bishop will have had a visual reminder of that challenge as he drove in on the motorway and past the village of the homeless camped on the Oval.
After making the acquaintance of some of Dunedin’s veteran protesters, Mr Bishop was off to his key engagement of the day, the Business South post-Budget briefing.
Among his many roles, Mr Bishop is also an associate finance minister, and what finance ministers and their associates do after the Budget is get out and sell it.
While this year’s iteration was not quite as packed as previous years — as noted, a Finance Minister and a PM, both of whom have played this gig in recent years, have more pulling power — it was still attentively watched.
Even if this city is what former National Cabinet minister Chris Finlayson once called it, "a socialist hellhole", this was as much of a hometown crowd as Mr Bishop is likely to see in Dunedin.
As befits a former top notch competitive debater, he knows how to make a speech and he knows how to handle a question. While the answers might not always have been to the satisfaction of the questioner, they could not have quibbled with the length of the response.
This was an audience buying what Mr Bishop was selling — unlike the small but vociferous crowd of hecklers outside — and he will have been pleased with his day’s work.
Afterwards he reassured Southern Say that National really, really did care about Dunedin.
"We want to see an MP based in Dunedin in the future. We won’t have one for the next three years obviously, but Joseph Mooney is going to be down here and you will see lots of ministers and MPs come through Dunedin to make sure that we are aware of the issues ... I will be back again and no doubt so will Christopher, but we want to see a local representative down here."
There was, of course, already a very local National representative here already in the form of Michael Woodhouse, but as noted recently, that ship has sailed to Christchurch.
The task now before the local electorate committees is to find another person willing to be their party’s sacrificial lamb on the electorate vote altar.
"I reject the idea that seats are red or blue: I represent a seat that National had never won until I won it in 2017 and won it back again in 2023," Mr Bishop said.
"We fight hard for every vote in every electorate in the country ... and at the end of the day, it is the party vote that counts."
Plain speaking
Labour dragged the debate on post-Budget Bills out for hours, nay, days on end, so the House did not get even close to concluding all the business set down for completion under urgency.
Unsurprisingly, some ministers were getting a bit fed up with all the filibustering/fit and proper scrutiny (delete as appropriate), and Minister for ACC Matt Doocey was not inclined to wax lyrical after Taieri Labour MP Ingrid Leary’s tortuous and elongated questions on the Accident Compensation (Interest on Instalment Plans) Amendment Bill.
"In response to Ingrid Leary, her first question, whether I'd considered that change of the title of the Bill, the answer is no," he said.
"And the second question is why is this Bill being brought to the House now is because I said ‘yes’."
