Club Zoom Meeting Features Local MP Simeon Brown as Guest Speaker. On Tuesday evening the club held its first Zoom Club meeting attended by 23 members. Our guest speaker for the evening was Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown.
 
After thanking the club for their recent efforts in supporting needy families in the area with food parcels Simeon gave us an insight of how an MP operates under lockdown with lots of Zoom meetings, telephone conferences and group organized phone calls to ensure that his local constituents were engaged and keeping well.
 
He congratulated us and all NZer’s for buckling down and adhering to the guidelines worked out by the health professionals and ably delivered by Prime Minister Jacinda Adern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
 
He also covered the replacement of Simon Bridges and Paula Bennet as National Party leaders after Simon failed in his attempt to get caucus support with the consequential appointment of BOP MP Todd Muller to the top job supported by Nikki Kaye MP for Auckland Central. In the new line up Simeon himself takes on new roles of National spokesperson for Corrections and Youth and retains his position as Associate spokesperson for Education and a member of the Select Committee for Justice. He did wonder why he had not been given the Youth spokesperson job previously as he is the youngest of all the National Party MP’s!
 
With the election coming up rapidly on 19th September the parties focus will be on having the best plan for lifting NZ’s economic performance to pay for the huge debts that country has had to take on to get through the Covid 19 crisis. He expressed concern that the current government may end up throwing money at the myriad of $120 billion “shovel ready” infrastructure projects that MP’s and mayors were putting forward without considering the impact they will have NZ’s economic recovery. Locally Simeon will be following up the need to get infrastructure projects in our area like AMETI going at a faster rate.
 
He ended by answering a range of questions before wishing as good night and moving on to the next meeting in his busy local schedule.