Whanganui Chronicle Person of the Year runner-up: Helen Craig

Helen Craig won re-election to the council with a tally of 9308 votes. Photo / Bevan Conley

Today we continue our Whanganui Chronicle Person of the Year 2022 series.

Earlier in the month we put out the call to our readers for nominations. This week we are profiling our runners-up with the winner revealed in Saturday’s Chronicle.

Our next runner-up has a passion for arts and heritage. Mike Tweed reports.

It’s been a busy few months for Helen Craig.

She won re-election to the Whanganui District Council in October with 500 more votes than anyone else and has hit the ground running as the new deputy mayor.

Craig said while she wasn’t complaining about the vote count, it wasn’t the most important thing about being around the council table.

While her main passions hadn’t changed heading into her fourth term, there were more issues to contend with than ever before.

“I got a fine arts degree at UCOL so I brought quite a deep knowledge of the local arts community with me when I first got on to council,” Craig said.

“At one point they wanted to get rid of our arts facilitator but I was able to really fight for that position and, by talking to the senior managers, they understood why we needed that role.

“It’s just gone from strength to strength, and now Whanganui & Partners have [strategic lead of creative industries] Emma Bugden. The arts is really embedded.”

Whanganui’s heritage portfolio remains another area of interest.

She is chair of the council’s town centre rejuvenation advisory group.

“When I first became a councillor I was given the inner city portfolio. We had portfolios back in those days,” Craig said.

“I looked up and saw all these amazing heritage buildings, and that’s when I thought ‘Oh my God, this city really has a point of difference’.

“If we could hold that, we would start to stand out more and more, and that’s what’s happening.”

She became a councillor because she wanted to make sure Whanganui grew, Craig said.

“We have to grow or we start locking stuff up, like the [Whanganui Regional] Museum, like the Sarjeant Gallery.

“Your focus does change as things change though. We didn’t have a housing crisis and now we do. We didn’t have a growing population and now we do.”

Craig said being a good councillor required getting “out and about” and meeting people.

It amazed her how many serious issues affecting the community weren’t commonly known about.

“For some reason, they don’t come up to council’s purview and yet they are critical,” Craig said.

“If you’re out there, you’re are able to appreciate how strong your community is but also what their issues are. To me, that’s incredibly valuable.”

One of her strengths was being able to figure out how to help the rest of the council figure out why it needed to go in a particular direction.

There was no point standing there and yelling “we need to build the Eiffel Tower”, she said.

“No one is going to get it. The skill of a really good councillor is to show why we need to build the Eiffel Tower.”

She said the current council was a good team, led by a great chief executive in David Langford.

“Every issue needs to stand on its own and there are no alliances in terms of ‘I’ll support you if you support me’.

“Our decision-making needs to be very balanced and not influenced by people being best buddies.

“We have to vote on the facts, not on emotion. Sometimes you’re arguing with somebody one day and the next you’re totally agreeing with them.”