What am I doing here?

As Venus commenced her transit across the sun in June there was a flurry of terrestrial excitement at the Copthorne Hotel in Waitangi. Several men each with squiggly plastic tubes running from an ear to somewhere inside a jacket were hovering around the hotel's entrance as a not-too-subtle clue there's a VIP in the vicinity.

 

They are Diplomatic Protection Squad members, some of whom are locals on secondment from Northland's police, and at the end of the day their large feet will be tired from standing around. It's de rigeur for Ministers of the Crown to be accompanied by security and not all of them are men. There'sa woman sitting in a beige Holden

watching over proceedings as well.

 

They are protecting the Minister of Finance, The Hon Bill English, who arrived in a grey BMW as principal guest speaker at an economic conference. He was also Acting Prime Minister this particular week because The Hon John Key was in England for the Queen's 60th anniversary celebrations.

 

Mr English has beenaMinister on and off for thirteen years and takes all of this security stuff in his experienced stride. He's laid back enough to simply stroll into the venue and start chatting to strangers and as a Southlander from Dipton he's a relatively long way from home too.

 

The former farmer has a degree in commerce (as might be expected foraMinister of Finance) but, somewhat unusually, a degree in English Literature as well. He became a policy analyst for Treasury in 1987 and one can't help but ask if his fiscal assessments were written with Shakespearean flair? He bursts out laughing.

 

''No, no, I'm not an elegant writer,'' he declaims and then intellectually submits there's a lot to be learned from literature.

 

''There is power in stories about your community, your economy, because they shape the way people think and that sits alongside the numbers, which is a different way of telling the story,'' he says before suggesting many previous Ministers of Finance were neither economists nor accountants. That aside, Mr English has always been interested in politics and the first politician he met was Sir Brian Talboys.

 

''My parents were volunteers for him and when I was relatively young I thought I'd like to have his job which was as local member and Deputy Prime Minister.''

 

A dream come true then and two days later he was heading back to Southland for Sir Brian Talboys' funeral.

 

Discounting the weather, there areanumber of parallels between two regions at either ends of the country. In the nineties a similar assessment of Southland's economic potential precipitated the rise of the huge dairy industry there. Moreover and more recently, Bathurst Mining has reopened the lignite mine at tiny Nightcaps and

now employs 25 people (with more expected) to rekindle the town's economy fromanear zero base. These are

portents for Northland and Mr English says he is impressed by the confidence and realism from the Paihia summit's 200-plus attendees. ''This is a group that's come together because it has more aspiration than just

survival and I thought they were realistic about the need to take these opportunities themselves, no-one is going

to hand it to them, they're saying here are some barriers we have to get over.''

 

He's used to gatherings and speech-making and being a focal point and when all is said and done the patient English finds himselfaquiet corner to check his phone in a rare moment of respite. He might have been texting Hekia Parata because the next morning she announced a back-down onaplatform previously forecast in this man's budget. ''. . . Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May . . .''

 

Yet Bill English gives few signs of being rattled. He is remarkably unpretentious and visitors to the lobby walk past him without realising he is one of the most important men in the country. It's only the attentive who see tall blokes with weary feet observing everyone else.

 

Before he dissolves into the night and a protective ring of National Party faithful encircle him we discover, in a

Shakespearean aside kind of way, that the Deputy Prime Minister loves limoncello. Why, an award-winning brand is made in Skudders Beach and this the perfect segue (to use an appropriately Italian word) on which he can farewell Northland at the end of a long day replete with both stellar and down-toearth activity.