My Journey – Sandra Hazlehurst

Jim Newbigin: Tonight’s speaker is the Mayor of Hastings, Sandra Hazlehurst.

Joyce Barry: Thanks for coming. Hundred and twenty-five years ago, Lord Glasgow brought in a new electoral law that gave all women the first vote, and that happened, first in the world, and it was in little old New Zealand. Hundred and twenty-five years ago, 19th September 1893. It’s taken this long to have a female mayor. [Laughter] That’s it, Sandra; over to you. [Chuckles]

Sandra Hazlehurst: Tēnā koutou katoa, [Hello to you all] and it’s lovely to be with my friends this evening … wonderful to see my relations, my family here, and to see some of our wonderful Hastings friends from my past. And I’ve had lots of fun putting a few photos together and raiding Mum’s photo albums; Mum, who’s nearly ninety-two this month. And so it’s been lots of fun reflecting on my life and where I’ve come from, to share with you tonight. And not all of it’s here, but some of it’s here; it was quite a big job putting it all together.

So I’m very proud to be your mayor, and to be the first female mayor of Hastings. We’ve got a lot of women mayors now throughout New Zealand and just about equal numbers of women [female] and male mayors, which is really exciting.

So this week we celebrate Te Reo [Māori Language] Week, and next week we celebrate a hundred and twenty-five years of women having the vote; so there’s lots of celebrations going on in Hastings, and our wonderful parade this weekend.

So, my name is [was] Sandra Brannigan before I married Mark Hazlehurst. And my mother was a Warren and my father a Brannigan, and I’ve got Dad’s cousin, Clifford, here tonight, and my cousin, Malcolm, here tonight. So, I’m a Brannigan and a Warren. And because we’re at our history group tonight, some of you may’ve seen some of this story and some of this history, but I’ve got some old slides of the Warren side of our family, not the Brannigan side, because there’s a whole lot more recorded from the Warren side than [from] the Brannigan side. So, we couldn’t do them all otherwise we’d be here ’til late tonight, so we’re going to focus on our Warren side of the family.

[Shows slides throughout]

So Robert Warren; great grandfather, and his wife, Alice … she was a Bee. They had the first bakery in Napier Road in Havelock North, and you’ll see a little sign by Whittaker’s Pharmacy there, and that says ‘Warren’s Bakery’, and that’s where the first bakery was. And Mum talks about her home being in Napier Road and how she ran across the road to Havelock North Primary School growing up as a young girl. So the Warrens had Arthur, the youngest brother of the Warren’s Bakery founder, Robert Warren; had the first bread delivery in Havelock North, and this is great grandfather, Robert, with his pet monkey [chuckles] – I know it’s quite difficult to see, but Robyn [Warren] was just telling me that they used to tie the monkey to the fence. And this is the old family homestead, which is on the corner of Warren Street, and Queen Street, and the house was there right up until the eighties and now that’s the house of Legal Aid, and Budget Advice, and the Food Bank. So that’s that green building on the corner, Warren Street and Queen Street. So there’s the old house; it was shifted off, and … where did they move the old house to, Robyn? Do we know? No. But it was a lovely old homestead, and that was the family home.

So here’s the Warren’s Bakery, and Robert here and his team of bakers in the early 1900s … Robert, second from the left. And they were the first caterers, and they did all the catering for the races and big occasions and celebrations and they certainly had a lot of catering roles in the early 1900s. Great grandfather only lived ’til forty, so he didn’t live to a great age but while he did live he was a very busy businessman in Hastings and in Havelock.

There was a big celebration in Havelock North – a Shakespearean pageant in 1912 – and that there is their homestead in Napier Road, alongside the bakehouse just up the back there; so that was the celebrations in those days, in the early 1900s. The Warren’s had pioneered the first motorised bread delivery service in the district and it was a Ford, Model T, 1922; and Dudley Warren, the second son of Robert Warren, is in the driver’s seat. And so they had the motorised bread delivery. And here is the cake shop in Russell Street. And those are the days that Granddad and Auntie Pearl and my mum … they used to get ready for Blossom Day, and they would make gingerbread men and sell them on Blossom Day. And my cousin Malcolm and his wife, Robyn, who are here this evening … they carried on that tradition, and all the gingerbread were made as part of, you know, celebrating who we are in Hastings.

This is the old Poppelwell building in Russell Street in Hastings; and my father and mother bought the business when I was ten. We lived in Gascoigne Street; that was our first home in Gascoigne Street, and it was a pretty major ordeal really, for us to go into business. My father was a carpenter, and he was approached by Auntie Pearl, Mum’s aunt, to say, “Would you like to take over the family business?” Mum was quite reluctant because she had left school; wasn’t allowed to attend high school and had to go and work in the bakery, you know, at the time of the Depression. So she felt going back to the bakery was a pretty big thing for her, and she wasn’t quite sure that that’s what she wanted Dad to do. But Dad saw a great opportunity of owning his own business, and he got stuck in and learned to be a baker; so changed from being a carpenter to a baker.

So here’s our three generations of bakers. This is my Granddad, Nigel, and he was a very long-time baker; and he taught my cousin, Malcolm … here this evening … the trade, the skill. And he would spend all day, and then he’d often come back at night if there was a special occasion that he needed to make a wedding cake or something for; and he worked really, really hard. This is my cousin, Malcolm, outside Warren’s Cake Kitchen; and here’s my Mum here with Granddad and Malcolm as a young apprentice about probably fifteen years of age.

And here’s me; now this is a celebration in the town with my niece, who’s now forty, and so that shows how young I was. [Chuckles] And we had centennial celebrations of Pioneer days, Hastings having celebrated its centenary, and we had dressed up as pioneers; and there I am as a young girl, sent down town with all my goods, my doughnuts and my buns and things with my niece. So that was a photo that was in the paper that I found in Mum’s collection the other day. Lots and lots of fun.

So … growing up in Hastings I went to Ebbett Park School; we were one [some] of the first pupils. Ebbett Park was a very new school, and we were pretty proud of that. Dad helped build the swimming pool, so it’s incredible – we think, in those days, you know, how your parents got stuck in and you know, would help build a school pool. So that was Ebbett Park and we were one [some] of the first pupils in the sixties, going to school. Heretaunga Intermediate and Hastings Girls’ High School; so those are my great school days, all growing up and living in Hastings.

Joyce: Were you Dux? [Chuckles]

Sandra: No. No, I didn’t get any awards, Joyce. [Chuckles]

So my childhood memories really were around Ebbett Park, so that was our home area. And George Ebbett, who was the Mayor in … I meant to go down and look at his thing; it was about 1920 … he had an absolute love of Māori culture, Māori carvings, meeting houses. And he lived on the corner of Southland Road and Gordon Road, and there’s a little house there that is there today, but his original home was burnt down. And so we grew up with these carvings as the entrance to Ebbett Park; and here’s the little whare and these beautiful carvings which now sit in our foyer of our Council for everyone to enjoy. They’re absolutely outstanding; they stayed there until the seventies, and then in the seventies they were getting sort of pretty unkempt and pretty sad, so a carver from Porangahau restored them all. And the Council bought them and took them back into the Council Chamber, where we take tours of schools around them now and show, and very, very proud of our carvings.

But the story goes … because my good friend, Ian Rosenberg, talks about his great grandfather … he talks about him going up to [the] Ureweras [Te Urewera] and staying for months on end in dirt floor huts, watching the carvers that he commissioned to get his carvings. So for them to be gifted to the city was absolutely fantastic, so yes, we’re very proud of our pou.

George Ebbett’s wife was a Neill, and apparently she had the money, and she bought him Ebbett Park, the land, for his birthday. And I’ve got a little bit more about the future and where we’re going to with Ebbett Park a bit later on in the slides. As you can see, we’ve just done a plan of Ebbett Park and met the community to see what they would like to keep there; what they’d like to change; what they love about the park. And it has been a really neat process to be down in my old park, because our grandmother lived in Gordon Road, and so on a Sunday afternoon we’d all gather and meet at our Nana and Granddad’s house; and we’d all jump the fence and go and play in the park. So we grew up at Ebbett Park and we loved it a lot; and lots and lots of fun times there. And it is a park that has been quite a difficult park because it’s got Gordon Road entrance, Southland Road entrance, Oliphant Road entrance twice; sort of, kind of enclosed and shut in, and so we’ve been having these great conversations with the community to say, “What would you like to see at Ebbett Park?” And you know, where we could take this park and what we could do with it to, for the community to enjoy.

So growing up in Hastings, obviously Blossom [Day] is a very, very special time for us. And I just said to Mum yesterday, “Mum, we’ve got Blossom Day this Saturday.” She’s going to be ninety-two, and I said, “You’ve got to be there”; I don’t think she’s missed a Blossom Day all of her life. This is sort of some of the floats, [in the Blossom Parade] and this is one of Malcolm. But these are the floats that, you know, we had very special memories of. See the Fantasyland … Fantasyland float there. And we’re very excited about now, with us as a Council – we’ve got our outstanding float that our team have made for this Saturday; so Blossom is a hugely exciting time; celebrates who we are in Hastings. The blossoms are out, celebrates our economy, our people and it’s something that is very, very dear to us.

I guess this is a young me and a young Mum and Dad, and this is Lady Blundell. So Sir Denis Blundell was the Governor-General of the day; and in 1977 I got my Queen’s Guide Award, which I think was probably the time of my life that I realised that leadership was something that was probably pretty special really, but I didn’t know that one day I’d be mayor, so you know, you never know where your life’s going to take you. But we flew to Wellington; it was the first time in an aircraft, and Mum and Dad … we all went down in the plane to Wellington and had this incredible weekend with the Governor-General and all the Queen’s Guides and Queen’s Scouts from around New Zealand. Just like the Duke of Edinburgh Award, it’s a pretty big deal, and they make a huge fuss of you. But what I didn’t know when I went down there for that very special weekend, was that Sir Denis Blundell and his wife Lady Blundell, instead of congratulating me they said to me, “So what are you going to do to give back?” And I thought that I was going down there to be … you know, “Well done! Congratulations! Fantastic!” You know, ‘cause it’s a huge thing, it takes five years to complete; total commitment, dedication, and motivation, and everything else. And, you know, for someone to tell you, “Now, what are you going to do to give back?” I thought it’d be quite nice to be congratulated for a little bit; but no, I had to get busy. And I was already a Brownie leader at the time, and the Girl Guides was a huge part of my life; and it was until I gave up when I had our first daughter at the age of thirty-one. I was a Guide leader at Frimley Park in the old barn for twenty years, and I was Assistant Commissioner for Hastings West. So my Guiding days kind of set me in good stead to give back to the community actually, and so I was asked, you know, what I was going to do to give back. So I guess that I’ve been a community leader for a long time, and I still think that Guiding, Scouting and the Duke of Edinburgh movements are incredible. In fact our daughter didn’t get an option; she was told she was doing her Duke of Edinburgh and had to get on with it; and it’s certainly stood her in good stead for her life.

Some of the highlights: this is our shop in Heretaunga Street, and our shop in Havelock North. And I came back from overseas in 1983, met my husband and got married in 1984. And in 1986 this shop of George Wong’s in Heretaunga Street, which was next to Ian Kerr’s Pharmacy one side and the State Theatre on the other side – now our Focal Point Cinema – came up on the market. And George decided that he wanted to retire; and we’d grown up with George because Mum and Dad had bought their fruit and vegetables for the shop all of their lives, from George. And so George said, “Oh, you girls – you can buy my shop.” [Chuckles] And we were pretty naive. My sister … she’s a couple of years older than me; I was twenty-six. And we hadn’t been to university; we had [been] told to go down town and get a job, and I worked in an accountant’s office and she worked in Social Welfare. You know, going to university in those days wasn’t probably a consideration really, it just wasn’t something that Mum and Dad thought that we needed to do. We needed to get a good, solid job, and get on with work.

So this is 1986; and GST came in that year, so little did we know that we were also facing having to put twelve and a half percent on every purchase. So it was pretty much a business degree by stealth. We borrowed $15,000 from the bank – we didn’t have any money of our own – and we set up business. So, crazy? Yes; dumb? Probably, and we worked damn hard to make the businesses go. On the first day we took $150, and we looked at each other and thought, ‘Oh my goodness! This is not going to pay back the bank loan.’ [Chuckles] ‘What are we going to do?’ And George had told us that he had a very successful business, and that he went to Hong Kong every year, and, you know, “There’s plenty of money to be made in fruit and vegetables.”

But in those days we had the Apple and Pear Marketing Board, so if you wanted to sell apples in your shop you had to pay something like $2.20 a kilo from the Board. So everybody else could sell the apples on the side of the road for 50c a kilo, but if we were retailers we had to buy them from the Board, so there was that incredible Apple [and Pear] Marketing Board. So apples was [were] very difficult, and so we looked at other and thought, ‘We might have to do something a bit more than fruit and vegetables.’ So in the town there was [were] a lot of pies and doughnuts around the corner at Mum and Dad’s shop, but there weren’t a lot of healthy options to eat. So we got stuck in, and we thought, ‘Well, we could do some healthy vegetarian lunches’, so we made pumpkin soup, hot potatoes, all sorts of salads, fruit salads, all sorts of vegetable salads; and before long we had a lot of customers coming in for lunches. So Peaches Fruit Shop was probably the beginning of my learning how to be in business, and there’s my staff in our Havelock shop. So we started in Hastings 1986, and 1988 … one of our friends at the market. And you can imagine, at Turners and Growers – or Slater’s as it was called in those days – there weren’t any women on the floor. There was a whole lot of boys, and they were quite, like, bully boys; and if you missed out on something you didn’t have anything to sell in your shop. So on a Monday and a Thursday morning you needed to get down there, very early in the morning, and buy your product to sell in your shop. So it was really interesting days; hard, hard days, but, you know, we did it. [Coughing]

I have to say that it was my sort of first encounter with Council, because as you’ll remember, the Council in the eighties put a mall in in the 100 East block; so where the cinema was they put a mall in, and all the retailers in the block said “We’re not having a bar of this mall. You killed our custom.” And we all had a big march down to Council and said, “You better take the mall out.” So within a year we had a mall in and we had a mall out – all within a year. [Chuckles] So you can imagine … there wasn’t a lot of trade going on with everything being dug up. So that was my first learning with some pretty dumb thinking, and you know, now you don’t do anything without asking the people; and just consultation, consultation, consultation, because you just have to get it right. So that was really hard on the businesses in the block in the eighties.

So this is a bit of my family life – I have two beautiful daughters. One is in Toronto; she’s a television producer … Alex; and Beatrice, she’s a writer in New York; she’s twenty-three and Alex is twenty-eight. So this is when they were little, on their favourite beach. We had some wonderful family holidays with our relations and our friends, and wonderful times growing up in Hastings. Couldn’t have a better life really; there’s nothing I would want to change, and hope that Mark and I’ve given our girls the life that we have had, that our parents gave us.

So here’s Mark and I in 1984.

And these are my Guides from Frimley, from the meeting in the barn every week on a Saturday; some wonderful friends actually, and they’re all my friends, these young women … outstanding young women. Pretty proud of my days, as I said, in the Guiding movement. That’s our Hastings Cathedral – that was a wonderful time there in the cathedral at St Matthews.

From there the Poppelwell building came on the market in 2003. And I had been working for Richmond’s in sales and marketing, and PBCS [now Silver Fern Farms] took over. I worked for Gourmet Direct, so we used to sell our prime cuts of meat to places like Air New Zealand; top, top restaurants across New Zealand, and my job was to get out there and market and sell this product. A couple of years later PBCS bought Richmond’s and we were made redundant, and so it was, like, ‘What are we going to do now?’ And it was really a difficult time because Richmond’s had been part of Hastings for a very long time; and it was very, very hard on our employees and our staff because a South Island company had taken over and bought out our operation in Hastings.

Harry Poppelwell died, and he’d owned the Poppelwell building in Hastings for forty years, and he and Mum and Dad had traded there for twenty years. And so we saw that the old family business and the building came on the market, and we looked at each other, as you do, and said, “Well, we could buy this building and mortgage our house, and take over the family building.” And I’d just like to say that if you drive past the building today, you’ll see that there’s massive earthquake strengthening going on, so we’re looking after it for the next hundred years; and it needs to be strengthened for earthquake. Malc and Robyn changed the shop and the building, and combined Simon’s business and the cake shop and made one big Warren’s Bakery [back] in the day.

We took over the building in 2003, and that was me learning how to be a landlord and running five shops and ten offices. So, the business has Hair to Go at one end and Orphans’ Aid at the other end, and about five or six tenants upstairs.

So Cynthia [Bowers] can’t be here tonight, but she’s my dear friend who was our deputy-mayor in Hastings for a very long time. She said to me, “You need to be the president of the Hastings City Business Association”, and I said, “I don’t think so.” And she said, “Yes, you do.” [Chuckles] So as I do as I’m told, I became the president for six years of the Hastings City Business Association.

From that we had the situation with Nelson Park; and, as you’ll recall, it was the opportunity for the Council of the day … and it was a very visionary opportunity … to sell Nelson Park. And it wasn’t an easy thing to do to get that through our ratepayers and move to the Hawke’s Bay Regional Sports Park. So it was a vision of Lawrence [Yule] and the Council of the day – and Richard’s here – to look at other opportunities to create a regional sports park because old Nelson Park really didn’t meet the needs of the community any more. At the same time we had The Warehouse knocking on our door saying that they wanted a massive ten-thousand square metre building; and so where were we going to put them in the city? And that was going to be really, really challenging. [A] couple of developers had a site for them between Hastings and Napier, and we knew that would be devastating for Hastings to move a Big Box [store] half-way between Hastings and Napier. So that was a massive challenge for the Council of the day, to say, “Where can we find a home for a Warehouse?” So the park has been a great success story, the Regional Sports Park has been a great success story, and will continue to grow and develop. And we had the opportunity to help the Council as the [Business] Association, so on the weekends we’d run around putting leaflets on the cars, and helping the Council to get the community behind selling Nelson Park for a large format centre.

And I reflected today, and I think about what has happened to Hamilton with Te Rapa way out from their city; it’s dragged a whole lot of their businesses out. I look at Whakatane – seven kilometres out for their large format centre; it’s been devastating for their CBD. [Central business district] Tauranga – all their large format is at least four kilometres away from the city – absolutely devastating for Tauranga; if anyone’s been up there, looks pretty damned sick at the moment, they’ve got their CBD split in two parts. Napier, with what’s going on [at] Ahuriri, and what they’re trying to do with Big Box on Prebensen [Drive]. You know, what you have to do with a city is keep everything close, and re-model and re-build within the same footprint because once you start dividing and spreading, you start having major issues for a town centre. So I said to the Council of the day – I was like, you know, rocking into Lawrence’s office and saying, “Hey! What are you going to do about the city?” Because the big box was going down there; the Council achieved $19-million purchase price, which was amazing; but actually, how were you going to look after Heretaunga Street and the small businesses in town? So they gave me a bit of money, and they said, “You get busy and you can go and bring some new tenants to town.” So that was my first start of working with the Council, and I had to go and – it doesn’t happen like this today, I might add – but in those days I got $20,000 for the year, and I had to report back just about every month on my success. So I had some very strict KPIs [key performance indicators] and had to deliver this outcome for Hastings. And we got businesses in like Rock Shop, who’s [which is] still there today; we had the Pumpkin Patch Outlet shop; whole lot of businesses like that. Danske Møbler … all of them came in out of direct marketing to businesses across New Zealand, to say, ‘Hey, look at Hastings; we’re the best in New Zealand.’ So that’s the sort of thing that we did. So that was my time as the chair of the Business Association. We worked damn hard, you know … we’re pretty much a volunteer [organisation] … for quite a long time.

And then I got sick of presenting to the Council, and decided that I needed to stand for Council, so here’s my first project … look a little bit younger there. So what happened was, as the president of the Business Association, we used to have young people, particularly young men, on skateboards – and skateboards had just come in, they were the latest thing – and they used to rock up and down Heretaunga Street. And people would get really upset about these boys on skateboards, and they didn’t have anywhere to go and skate. So the first thing that I did was … William Nelson Park, and we raised $400,000 for William Nelson Park, and that has been a major success story. You’ll see the guardians in there, mentoring and helping young people, and just keeping eyes and ears to make sure that William Nelson Park is safe. So here’s me with some of my young men from St John’s College and we’re planting the trees there. Everyone got behind it. Here we are – this is Angus McMillan laying the first bit of concrete down for the skate park.

Here is our wonderful old Albert Hotel, and at that stage we had some major issues with it because we had all sorts of folks living upstairs, and they were pretty much homeless folk. And Ray Durney, the owner, the landlord of the day, was trying to sell the building, and it was a very difficult situation. So there’s me kind of looking pretty cross there, to say, you know, “What are we going to do?” And in the end it was purchased by Mr Whittaker … Michael Whittaker … and Council leases that land. Council did try and buy it from Mr Durney before he died, and it didn’t happen. Mr Whittaker bought it in [at] auction, and we lease it back. But our plan is that we will own more and more green spaces in the city; as buildings come along and become available, like Albert Square, because that’s what people love; they love the green spaces. And some people aren’t going to be able to strengthen their buildings, and there will be buildings that are coming along.

As you’ll see, we’re doing a laneway in the 300 West [block] at the moment, and people’ll be able to park behind and walk through the laneway into the 300 West block. So if an opportunity comes along like that that we can have a laneway, a linkway, a green space, we’ve got some $5-million set aside to look at opportunities like that, to work with developers to make our city absolutely fabulous.

Here’s my friend, our ambassador and councillor [Simon] Nixon; and here we’re biking into town to go buy breakfast – we have lots of fun. There’s one of the events I’m all dressed up for; so you know, it’s all about celebrating Hastings and our wonderful lives here.

This is some photos that have been sort of special times; this was part of getting the Hawke’s Bay Marathon to the region. Mayor Bill [Dalton] and I worked really hard with Tourism Hawke’s Bay to bring the marathon. Seventy percent of the people come from out of the region, and it’s a wonderful event; five thousand people compete in the marathon, and here’s Henare [O’Keefe] and I presenting their medals earlier this year. So those sorts of events are really fantastic for our region. And you know, I must say we’ve got a very good group of regional leaders now; and we’ve got a balance, you see, two men and two women. So two women mayors, and two men, and it makes a difference.

This is Melissa Sage with Bill [Dalton] and I; we run the landfill together with both Councils, and she’s absolutely blown away with the work that Hawke’s Bay’s doing with our waste. We’ve just accepted a waste plan – how to reduce waste to landfill, and she thinks that we’re leading the country, so the waste plan is really exciting. It’s going to be up for consultation; it’s providing a much smaller collection of rubbish, and it’s an exciting plan going forward.

I’ve put this portrait in because Freeman White did my portrait, and we’re the only Council in New Zealand whose mayors have their portraits painted. Everyone else has a photograph, but in Hastings there’s a tradition that mayors have this portrait done. So that’s me; and Freeman’s an outstanding portrait artist in our region. We’re so blessed to have him here. He’s a young man from Havelock High School, and it was an amazing journey going through the sitting to get that portrait done. He took lots and lots of photos of me, and then I went over to his studio. I’d only just been elected, and we went up these rickety stairs up the top to his little studio in Napier. It was about thirty-five degrees up there, and I had this Scottish woollen [chuckles] thing on; gown … my gown; and so I wore that over there, up the stairs … climbed up with all this big wool on; thirty-five degrees, and sat there with a fan, melting, as he did my sketch. So it’s a very memorable experience, and as I say, he’s done the Lord Mayor of London and he’s done me, so I’m pretty proud of that. [Chuckles]

I’ve just got a couple of other things in here. Pitsch Leiser came to us and said to me in about 2013, “Sandra, we’d like to have a Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival here.” And so I said to him, “Well, we haven’t got an opera house” – and I’ll come to that a little bit later on. And he said, “Doesn’t matter, we’re going to have it in a spiegeltent”. I said, “A what tent?” [Chuckles] And he said, “A spiegeltent.” And being Swiss, he knew about these tents to have an arts festival in. Because we didn’t have an Opera House, we thought, ‘We’ve got to do something; we have to have arts for our community.’ And so as you will all know, the Hawke’s Bay Arts Festival is one of the most successful things that we’ve done, and we’re incredibly proud of Arts Inc. Heretaunga and the work that they do, bringing international and national artists to us; we don’t have to travel to the cities to see some of these incredible, outstanding performances. So here’s me cutting the ribbon [at] last year’s Arts Festival, they’ve just been amazing. And hopefully we’ll get the Arts Festival back in the Opera House either next year or the year after – we’ll come to that.

This is our current Governor-General unveiling the very controversial [chuckles] sculpture in Havelock North. So while it was the Hawke’s Bay Foundation’s commissioning of the sculpture, it’s on Council land as we know; and nice to see Rose [audience member] here – it was a little bit controversial, wasn’t it, my dear? But anyway, the Governor General wanted to come and unveil it; she thinks it was absolutely outstanding. And you know, people come to terms with things, and now they love it. But we had a little bit of grief at the time, and you just have to realise that that’s probably going to happen; not everyone’s going to be happy all the time. I think that’s the motto that I’ve learned after nearly a year of being the mayor: not everyone’s going to be happy all the time. This is our wonderful Havelock Festival last year, and that’s, you know, just some of the great stuff that we do across the region.

As I said about Ebbett Park – our plan for Ebbett Park is to upgrade the lighting, put in a new playground that actually you can see from both Gordon Road and Oliphant Road, put in a car park, and petanque court, all these things; just tell the story, because Raureka is quite a vulnerable community and there’s some of our people there [for whom] life isn’t easy. And so we want to, you know, create beautiful spaces for them to enjoy, to have lovely playgrounds, and just, you know, have our green spaces that people can use rather than just having a green space. So we’ll put toilets in there. My Dad helped build the Guide Hall in Ebbett Park; and so they’ll have a toilet, drinking fountain, and lots of signage to tell the history, and lots of landscape planting, and you know, just make it a park that people want to use.

The Hawke’s Bay Opera House – and tomorrow tonight if anyone’s available to come to the Gallery, the city Gallery, we’ll have some ideas from the architects. But most importantly we have been working with a working party for the last year, made up of a whole group of the arts community, about the vision for the Municipal buildings. So as we know, the beautiful Hutchinson’s [Furniture] was down below, and an amazing Assembly [Room] up the top. We used to have wonderful balls and parties etcetera, and the idea is that the Assembly will just remain as a wonderful space for people to use for events and functions and balls and business awards, and all those things, like it used to be. To strengthen it, it’s about $8.75-million, and that’s just to strengthen it; so that’s not to put the stuff inside it. But down below the working party has come up with some great ideas to create a whole performing arts precinct. And so we won’t be just talking about the Opera House, we’ll be talking about the whole street being an arts precinct. Some people, like in Rotorua and Hamilton, have great big buildings for performing arts; well we have these beautiful heritage buildings.

The Opera House will remain. The Council has had a tour today to see how things are going, and we’ve basically built a shell around the building. It’s been an $11-million project and it will be there for the next hundred years, so it’s a building within a building. They’ve built a shell all around it and it’ll protect anybody through any earthquake. And you know, we’ve all got wonderful stories growing up with the Opera House in our city. It was the home of the first cinema; it used to have boxing in there; when the earthquake struck in ‘31 it was used to care for people as a meeting place; and it’s just been used for so many things. The Council in 2005 restored it and did all this beautiful work in there; Christchurch earthquake came along, and we had to make a major decision. It wasn’t easy for anyone to say, “What are we going to do now?” ‘Cause it didn’t meet earthquake code after that Christchurch ‘quake, and … what were we going to do?

So as you know we had three thousand submissions from our community, to decide what we wanted to do with the building, and overwhelmingly they told us that they wanted us to protect it for the next hundred years. So next September-October it’s planned to be completed. But as you’ll see between the two buildings, the Opera House and the Municipal, there’s a wall … that south wall there … the Municipal, that is brick on brick on brick. So when you come out if there’s a fire or something in the Opera House on that second floor … on the circle floor … you come out onto that gap between the Opera House and the Municipal; and so the idea is that, you know, we would have to strengthen that south wall of the Municipal to enable people to be able to come out of the Opera House. So we’ve got the plans drawn up; now we’ve going to consult with the community to say, you know, “How do you like all this working?” There’s the opportunity to do a laneway between two buildings, which is down there – if they put a little roof on it and create a hospitality space between the two buildings. So we’ve got some great plans, and now we’re taking them out to the community. The first consultation will start tomorrow night in the Gallery, and we’ll just take it to our community and say, “Do you like the ideas of the working party?” Though I have to say, the working party are [is] made up with [of] a dynamic bunch of people from, as I say, a cross-section of the arts community, from performing arts to visual arts – you name it; and they’re dynamic, they’re passionate, they’re young, they’re energetic, and they just want to see these beautiful municipal buildings come alive for the future.

So you know, when you think Hamilton’s performing arts centre was an eighty-million dollar project, if we can get our performing arts … well, you know, close to thirty million … well we’ve got something absolutely unique, and very, very special. And we’ll be able to get conferences; we’ll get a hotel hopefully; and you know, the whole city will come alive.

So this year we’ve also been working, as I said, with the city. And this is the cinema here, just so you can get your bearings; and this is what we’ve taken out to the community, to look at like, a hospitality precinct. So people can come out and mill around, and still take their cars down the street, but also be able to sit out on the street and enjoy our beautiful climate and hospitality. So that’s some plans that we’ve got for the city, but we’re going out to consult with the community on those.

And our Civic Square – well there was [were] great plans to add on to that, but actually, people just want it to be usable space. So round our Gallery we’ve just been able to create spaces that people can use. We’ve got a lot going on in there – we’ve got our wonderful war memorial area, and we’ve got the library, and we’ve got the Gallery; and so how can we just make it more inviting for people to come in and just enjoy the space.

And we’ve got our pou, which are incredibly special; and people come here just to see our pou, because what we’ve got is twenty-two, twenty-three hapu in Heretaunga. And to be able to tell our story – we haven’t done that very well in Hastings – so there is an opportunity to be able to celebrate our heritage, our culture, and do it in Civic Square without [it] costing too many millions.

Always the situation is to make sure that we’re balancing the budget. Since I’ve been there the debt is going up quite a lot, because we’ve got $50-million to spend on water. [Chuckles] So that’s been a big challenge, but … and I have to say it hasn’t been an easy two years for anybody after the water contamination … but we are in a great place. And well – we can’t move around the district very easily at the moment, with all the water works and road works and things, but one day we’re going to have infrastructure. And it’s not until you have a week [like] last week with that incredible storm, that you realise how important it is that, as a Council, you invest in infrastructure and make sure that it’s all up-to-date and you’re looking after it very well. And we’re going to get more and more of these storms with global warming and climate change, and our climate is changing. We’ve had three storms this year already, major storms.

So that’s pretty much me; but I’m happy to answer questions from anybody. But that’s a part of my story that I thought would be most interesting about growing up in Hastings, and having, as I said, an incredible life. [Applause]

And the other motto is, you can never do anything on your own; you have to have the right people and good people around you, and that is what I’ve learnt all my life; and so I’m really, really blessed that we’ve got such an amazing Council – people that are there to make a difference. That’s what it’s all about; it’s very, very heart warming. You know, we all have our little disagreements and our challenges when we’re debating, but we all have a cup of tea afterwards, and have a laugh and slap each other on the back, and tell them they’ve talked a whole lot of rubbish and that sort of thing. So we have a lot of fun, and we get some good stuff done.

As I say, you know, there’s some massive projects in my first year as mayor; one is the Opera House precinct and the other is water, so as I’ve done all my life, throw yourself into something and learn as you go along, because, you know, nothing is prescriptive; you can’t read it out of a book often, you just have to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. So … pretty excited about where we are; where we’re going to from here.

Joyce: I‘m sure Sandra will answer questions, or try to. Don’t make them personal, make them a bit general. [Chuckles] Would you like to hear about the status of the water? Would it appeal? They seem very happy, Sandra. [Laughter]

I’d like to add how people don’t realise this Council has seen that the statistics, I think, Sandra, world-wide isn’t it? That large format [stores] being within a block or two from town does work and that you ban small shops; and you keep getting challenged on that, is that right?

Sandra: Yes. Nothing under a thousand square metres can go down into the park; so that’s the rules in the district plan. And even just recently we had a store that wanted to come in with five hundred square metres and we said, no, they had to be in the city. So that is now protecting the footprint of the CBD, and only allowing Big Box [in the park]. You know, cities change dramatically, and what we’ve got now in New Zealand is sixty percent of people buying online. You know, sixty percent is a lot. That’s what our children do, and so it’s, “What are you going to do with the spaces in your city? And how are you going to make your cities stay alive and be current.” And so at the moment – I didn’t get any photos of this – but we’re looking at getting more people living in town; so more people; eyes and ears; accommodation; and some of our heritage buildings on the first floor. And it’s just interesting going to the Business Awards recently – turning first floors into apartments, and us making it easier for people to do that. So that is not having to have parking for them and things like that.

Oh, I didn’t say that we are addressing the parking situation for when the Opera House reopens, because, you know, we never had any parking there. So there will be parking there. And I think it’s still being working [worked] through with the land owner, so I probably won’t say where it is at the moment, but you’ll hear about it soon. It’s just in negotiations for some land there for a car park for the Opera House.

And people living in town is the way of the future, making sure that some of the heritage buildings are turned into accommodation. We’ve been talking to various providers of accommodation to have them set up in the city; hospitality … food is the new fashion; so different foods … that is where people are coming to spaces. And you see the way Havelock North works with that little square, with people walking between hospo [hospitality venues], and that’s what we hope to create in our city, so we’ll have more hospo. And you know, the cinema’s going very well; and we also had lots of submissions on … people telling us to open up that little mall by the banks, when we went out for consultation. So we’ve got some urban designers – they’ve come down to meet with a whole lot of people. They’ll bring back their ideas in October. Some of the people that [who] submitted said they’d like to see a slow road through to where the fountain is, through that middle block to connect both east and west of the city. Whether that happens or not, it’ll be our community who decides, so it was quite interesting to hear, sort of, people … we went out to consult on each street and they came out with all sorts of other ideas that they want to see go in the city, which is what we love to hear, is people engaging in how they’d like to see their city work. But there is another store that we’ve bought in the 200 West block, and that we’re also looking at connecting from Queen Street back into Heretaunga [Street] with parking and that sort of thing. So as opportunities come along we’ll make sure that we keep revitalising our city with green space and lovely places to be; make it beautiful.

Joyce: I need a big round of applause for Sandra.

[Applause]

Sandra, we are blessed to have you, I really mean it. Just to have a young, modern woman as mayor is fantastic. When you were just elected the government called all the mayors together in Wellington for a full day – I just wondered if it’s possible to tell us a wee bit about that day?

Sandra: So we have two mayoral forums a year, and all the mayors in New Zealand get together with our Chief Executive and we’re in the process at the moment of appointing a new Chief Executive, which is really exciting. Our last Chief Executive was here for ten years. Was there anything in particular about the day that I told you about?

Joyce: No – obviously it was just wonderful …

Sandra: Well, the ministers called me ‘the go go mayor’. [Chuckles] ‘The go go mayor’; so that’s quite funny really, because you just have to be, you know, telling your story, and selling your city. And so I sort of rocked up there, and basically flying our flag for Hastings really and just telling them that we needed some of their money for us; and you know, challenging them. And you know, we’ve got a new government, a coalition government; we’ve got massive opportunity for the region, and if we don’t step up and say, “Actually, we want a whole lot of stuff done here”, we won’t get it. So you know, $150-million’s just gone to Gisborne and similar sums to Northland.

Hawke’s Bay is on the top five for areas to invest in, so we’re saying that Hawke’s Bay’s going to be next. And ours will be largely around growth, and making sure that we are providing employment, ‘cause we’ve got a lot of people who want to come and live here, and we’ve got a lot of young people that need work. We’ve got seventeen hundred young people that are not in education, employment and training, and that for me is too many.

I believe if you give someone a good life and give them opportunity, then they will be great people and then our prisons won’t be full. We’ve got people going to prison here just because they have been caught three times without a driver’s licence. I met a young man the other day who said he likes to go back into prison. I said, “Why’s that?” And he said, “Because I can go to the gym, and I’ve got a bed, and I’ve got three meals a day.” And as a society, for me that’s not good enough – I will not accept that that is the best life for that young man.

So we’re working at the moment to get a Vocational school … a trade training school … in Hastings; and these are the opportunities that we have got. It’s all very well to send the people away to university, but after three years they’ve got to come back and they’ve got to learn their trade, whereas if you get someone into a trade and they learn as they’re working … We are so short of skilled labour, skilled workforce here; we’ve got two at [of] our big firms, Gemco and Mackersey, and they cannot get enough people to work. And we’ve got to upgrade our emergency management building over there in Lyndon Road; we can’t get any contractors; it’s absolutely chronic, and that’s because we haven’t been training any people. You all know that you can’t get trades people, and if you can, you’re going to be paying a lot for them. So it’s about us getting some more people into trades and learning new skills, and we’ve got a massive opportunity to do that. So I want to see a trade training school in Hastings, but we’ve just got so many things that … you know, we’ve just got a hundred and fifty hectares of rezoned land for industrial growth: Omahu and Irongate [Roads]. So we’ve got these areas that have poor soils – at Irongate – that we can bring in big business, big packhouses. We’re talking to multi-million dollar businesses from around New Zealand to invest in Hastings, and that’s our focus.

So more business, more jobs, and more houses; we’re a hundred and seventy five houses short. We’ve got sixty-five whanau living in emergency accommodation. Did we think we’d see that in our lifetime? No. Our motels [are] full, with a family of six in a two-bedroomed motel down Karamu Road. That’s the sort of stuff that is going on here. A lot of the duplexes, the multi-storey buildings, have come down in our communities, and no rebuilding has taken place. So Housing New Zealand – they know me very well! [Chuckles] They promised us a hundred houses by end of next year, but I’m saying to them, “We want good urban design.” Because we saw what they did in Camberley in the sixties, with poor urban design … cul-de-sacs that go nowhere. You need to have a connection; connectivity bringing people through … not have dead ends. You have to have good urban design; you have to have good quality green space; trees; make it a beautiful community for people to live.

I said to the Minister of Housing the other day when he came through – I said, “Minister Twyford, we don’t want any more slums; we want beautiful, beautiful suburbs and communities.” He said, “You know, you’re the only mayor in New Zealand talking like that.” I said, “Well that’s what Hastings is going to have.” ‘Cause it’s too easy to dump houses on [the] back of sections, ‘cause that’s what they’ve done. Maraenui – if you go through there you’ll see the state houses have been dumped with a house on the back. You know, what sort of quality of life? Who wants to live like that? “And it’s going to cost a little bit more money”, I said, “but we need to find that money.”  You know?  It’s all just … got to do it smarter;  got to do things better;  could take some notice of some of our Scandinavian cousins and see how they’ve done their housing, instead of the way that we just think that house is the end. It’s actually through their home and a community … is what’s going to change people’s lives.

Joyce: Thank you, Sandra. Fantastic …

[Applause]

We’re just so grateful … it’s been a joy having you. We’re just absolutely delighted, and very grateful, Sandra. Thank you.