Courage under fire

When trouble looms, Dr Megan Woods is often called upon to sort it out. The cabinet minister talks about surviving crazy hours (but still finding time for cricket), how she’s learned to worry less about cruel comments, and why she believes Christchurch is finally on the mend.

- JUDY BAILEY

She’s widely known as Labour’s Ms Fixit. A safe pair of hands. One to manage political hot potatoes with dexterity and aplomb. She’s also the woman running Labour’s re-election campaign.

I meet Megan Woods in her elegant Beehive office. It’s 6.30 in the evening. She’s been here since eight this morning and won’t leave the building until after 10pm.

“A lot of people don’t know that when the house is sitting we have to stay in the precinct till 10.” The house generally sits three days a week. The rest of the time you’ll find Megan in meetings in the Beehive or back home in Christchurch doing what she does best and enjoys the most – connecting with people.

She is a warm, genial woman with a razor-sharp intellect. She’s tight with the Labour government’s top echelon and counts Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson among her closest confidants.

She and Grant, she tells me, are cricket fans and have been known to go to the odd game together. “We try not to talk politics,” she smiles. “Test cricket’s my favourite.”

Megan was born in Wigram, the constituency she now serves, in the closing days of 1973. She has a sister. They’re close. Her father, Gordon, was in real estate, her mother, Maureen, worked at a number of admin jobs before taking herself off to university in her 40s to complete a sociology degree. “When I started as a first-year [at uni] we shared a class together. She was up the front, I sat down the back,” Megan grins.