Edendale farmer and Southland councillor Paul Duffy has been awarded a Queens Service Medal for services to community and local government in the New Year’s Honours list for 2020.

Cr Duffy has served the Waihopai Toetoe ward of the Southland District Council since 2001, including two terms as deputy mayor.

He also has broad experience in governance, including 18 years on school boards, eight years as a Community Trust of Southland trustee and seven as a Southland Conservation Board member.

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He’s held several roles with arts organisations and is presently the chairman of Arts Murihiku, the Southland Regional Heritage Committee and the South Catlins Charitable Trust.

But when he came home just before Christmas to be greeted by his wife Alison holding a letter from the Office of the Cabinet, he felt surprised.

“I felt disbelief, actually, but the proof was there. I once tried to get an award for someone else and didn’t succeed. I reckon I should give that another go,” Cr Duffy said.

“You can’t help but feel pleased about it but at the same time, I am pretty aware that I haven’t done any of it on my own,” he said.

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One of the people who had inspired him was the late Southland mayor Frana Cardno, the longest serving female mayor in New Zealand. 

During her lifetime she was awarded the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and Companion of the Queens Service Order.

“I immediately thought of Frana. I never thought I would have some letters after my name.

“She was the first person who asked me about standing for council in the year 2000. I have her to blame for all of it,” he joked.

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Cr Duffy said the two most important reflections he had when he received news of his award were that nothing much gets done in Southland without its network of volunteers, “a huge group of people” who all deserved recognition.

His second reflection was that he felt his biggest achievement was to work with the team that successfully achieved the goal of building a visitor centre at Curio Bay in the Catlins. It took 15 years.

“I wasn’t directly involved for the whole 15 years. I was involved for about 10 of them. I am still involved now. It was not just me. There were other key people involved in that,” he said.

Looking forward to 2021, Cr Duffy felt the biggest challenge would be to build on what the region had achieved and learned through the year of the Covid.

“We can’t be certain Covid is gone but we have learned a lot. We have to build on that, what we learned about Covid and what we learned about ourselves . . . Overall, our communities came through pretty well. That’s not the last challenge we will have, with vaccines coming in, if we get it under control. Then there is climate change. There are other storms coming along that we have to find sensible and pragmatic responses to,” he said. 

There would be opportunities with the challenges, Cr Duffy said.

“Southland has a pretty good climate for the production we do. We are away from extremes, of all kinds of things, natural and social – despite the floods [in February]. Other people have had floods too,” he said.

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Cr Duffy intended to spend his New Year holiday in the district with his wife Alison and extended family.

“We are not going far. On the second of January we will be at the Big Dig at Curio Bay, which is a major fundraiser, a community day out,” he said.

Cr Duffy credited his wife of 47 years, Alison, and their family for making his career in local government and governance possible.

“In those early days of dairy farming, we had a young family of six. She did a lot of milking and other things while I was away at meetings etc. The children also did a lot to help out,” he said.

These days, his son Brendan runs the farm and the rest of the family live not too far away, in Otago and Southland.