My Account
Clarke Gayford might be making all the headlines as the stay-at-home Dad of the moment, but Mahurangi has quietly had its own parliamentary male parental role model for the past seven years.
Ben Dugdale was a full-time winemaker working in Northland before his wife, Tracey Martin, became a list MP for NZ First in the 2011 election. Almost overnight, their roles were reversed – instead of Tracey being based at their Warkworth home with their three children while he worked on the Karikari Peninsula, suddenly Ben was needed at home so she could go to Wellington every week.
“Tracey was the primary caregiver while she was on Rodney Local Board, so the minute it happened, we effectively just swapped roles and the way we do things. The first thing I did was to write out my resignation. I’d been spending four to five days a week away from home from 2004 to 2011, so it was great to give up my job and be a househusband for a few years,” he said.
Their children, Connor, Sean and Rose, were aged from 10 to 16 at the time, and were largely unfazed by Mum becoming an MP and Dad taking over at home.
“There wasn’t a huge amount of difference, maybe one or two niggles, but the kids haven’t had a lot of issues,” he said. “Tracey and I view what we do as parents as a team exercise, so even if we have slightly different goals, we work very hard to engage with the children. The important thing is not working against each other.”
While Ben has kept his winemaking hand in via various consultancy roles – or “mates I help out a bit” – his primary role has been shepherding his children through their teenage years and into adulthood.
“I think I was incredibly lucky, because I didn’t go through the baby pooey, vomity part,” he says. “Well, maybe I did occasionally go through the vomity part, but that was usually chemically-induced.”
He says the experience has given him a greater understanding of the relentlessness of some aspects of domesticity, and he fully comprehends why some parents struggle.
“I have more empathy for people who are going through especially those early years of child-rearing. I can see how that could be a challenge for a lot of people,” he says. “If you can just realise it’s a phase you’re going through, it’s not endless, you can get through it, it’s bearable.”
Of course, the domestic ante was upped somewhat at the last election, when Tracey was not only reelected for a third time, but found herself part of the new Government as Minister for Children,
Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister for Seniors, and Associate Minister of Education. Now, she spends from Sunday until Saturday in Wellington, and sometimes doesn’t get the chance to come home for two weeks. Ben admits that, and other aspects of public life, can be challenging.
“Whoever goes for public service, there is an impact on the family, and it’s how you handle that,” he says. “You’ve got to work a way out and be able to roll with the punches.
“Social media has made quite an impact. I’m admin on her Facebook accounts, so I get every notification. That can be hard if you read that people want to kill her or drag her behind a car, but you realise that these people are hurting, they have a problem, so we’re not going to close that off.”
