Once a place where history was made, now it's a place where history is stored.
Barbara McPhee, manager of the Parliamentary Library. Photo: RNZ/ Amelia Langford
In the shadow of the Beehive and the stately grey Parliament sits a two-storey gothic building with grand turrets, arches, stained-glass windows and façade adorned with ornamental masonry.
“It’s like working inside a castle,” says Hannah O’Brien, one of more than 50 staff in the Parliamentary Library.
Constructed in the 1850s, it was the first Parliament in Wellington.
Varnished wood panelling and doors, elaborate plasterwork and sweeping staircases beneath chandeliers suspended from finely crafted vault ceilings add to the feeling that this is a place where big decisions used to be made.
On August 4, 1914, then-Prime Minister William Massey stood surrounded by other politicians beneath the grand archway at the building’s entrance to declare war on Germany — the start of New Zealand’s involvement in World War I.
Barbara McPhee, the library’s manager, works out of what used to be the office of Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon, New Zealand’s longest-serving Prime Minister. “It’s pretty amazing to know that you’re in the office where the Prime Minister was and he had the same aspect as I do now, so yeah, it’s an amazing building.”
But the peace and elegance of the place gives little clue of the hectic nature of the job that’s done here. “The pace is definitely high pressure; you certainly have to deal with stress well,” says McPhee. “For the reactionary stuff, we’re dealing with about 11,000 requests a year.”
The library is Parliament’s research arm, with thousands of books and a collection of documents related to policy and the workings of Parliament. Jill Taylor, the library’s Research Client Services Manager, says they have parliamentary publications dating back to the 1850s, as well as online databases and newspapers from around the country - “ even the small community newspapers because where the MPs are based and they want the information from them”.
MPs and their staffers gather use the library for upcoming speeches, debates and other day-to-day work. “For example, they could be doing a speech in the house, so they’ll want to know about legislation, maybe what’s been used overseas,” Taylor says. “It’s about finding material to essentially support their arguments, their views, and their policies.”
Having to satisfy the thirst for information of 120 MPs, other parts of the public service and requests from the general public makes for a demanding, high-stakes job.
“On a House Day (when Parliament sits), parties seem to have their morning meeting, and so there’s a flurry of emails at about 10am because they’ve all decided what they’re doing in the House,” says research librarian ClaudiaHolgatea. The house mostly sits at 2pm, giving them less than four hours to get the information.
“Sometimes they say ‘Whatever you can get in the next half-hour; the next 20 minutes.’ It’s a pretty fast turnaround,” says Holgate. “Maybe MPs want to know all the media that’s come up on their bill in the last six weeks, or they might want to know what someone else has said about what they’re going to talk about — they don’t want to get caught out, really.”
Hannah O’Brien and Claudia Holgate. Photo: RNZ/ Amelia Langford
McPhee says there’s a thrill when their work makes it into the media. “You could be working on something during the day not really knowing what it’s going to be used for and how, and then you go home and watch the television news and you go, ‘Wow, that’s my stuff!’ and that’s how they’ve wanted to use it.”
“That can sometimes be a downside, though,” adds Holgate. “Sometimes I’ll watch the news and be like ‘yeah, you know that because of something I did,’then on the other hand, sometimes you hear things that are brought up in the House and they’re kind of using something you found out against another person and you're like ‘Oh, I’m sorry’.”
“You’re just giving them information; you don’t know how it’s going to be used.” But the frenetic nature of the job is more than made up for by itsvariability and the ornate, beautiful surroundings.
“You sometimes forget to notice, and like any workplace, you start thinking of the things that possibly aren’t so great about it and then you get guests and tour groups come in and they say, ‘Oh, this is lovely’,” says Taylor. “And then you think, ‘Yeah, it is a lovely place to work.”
This content was made for The Wireless with funding from Parliament.