Climate Change Minister James Shaw spoke to On The Tiles this week. Photo / Mark Mitchell
James Shaw is “really enjoying” his nationwide tour to win his old job back.
Last month, Shaw was ejected from his role as co-leader of the Green Party when party delegates at the Greens AGM managed to amass enough votes to reopen nominations for his job, triggering an election
Shaw still managed to win the support of 75 delegates – a strong majority – but 32 votes were cast against him, enough to cross the 25 per cent threshold needed to reopen nominations in his job.
He spoke with the Herald’s politics podcast On The Tiles to discuss the month since he lost his job and his fight to win it back. Shaw is, once again, the only candidate but the party could still decide to “reopen nominations” triggering another contest.
“I’m really enjoying it,” he said of his nationwide tour to get back in touch with party members and make the case for his re-election.
He said it’s been great to get out and meet the party grassroots after two years of being stuck in Wellington.
“Partially because of my ministerial responsibilities but also because of Covid I’ve sort of been trapped in Wellington for the last two years,” Shaw said.
He’s been processing the loss and has done quite a bit of thinking about it – and what it represents. It was both an unhappy accident of circumstance but also a very real expression of dissatisfaction.
On the circumstantial side, delegate turnout was low, as some people opted not to attend the AGM after it was shifted from an in-person event to an online one. Some delegates wielded proxy votes from delegates who could not attend, increasing their voting power.
There’s also a belief that some delegates voted against the will of their branches and party members. The ballot was secret – so no one will ever know for sure. The rules for the next vote have been changed, however, so that six other people see delegates’ votes before they are cast, ensuring it is cast in line with the will of its members.
Shaw said he recognised that part of the loss was an expression of dissatisfaction with the trade-offs required for government.
“There is discomfort amongst some members about the level of frustration about the compromises that are involved with being in government,” Shaw said.
“There have been a number of members that have put questions to me that are ‘would we be better if we were to sit in opposition and much more loudly critique the government?’,” he said.
While much commentary has focused on an alleged division within the party between conservationists and the party’s social justice wing, Shaw thinks this is a mischaracterisation.
“It is actually a theory of change question,” he said.
“Other people have characterised it as the lefty social justice people versus the environmentalists – it’s not. There are people who are your dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists who have that question about strategy and then there are people who are more of the social justice bent who have the same question,” he said.
While the positive side of losing his job has been reconnecting with the party grassroots, the vote had the negative consequence of staff losing their jobs under Parliament’s infamous events-based contract system, whereby staff lose their job at the triggering of an “event” like their boss being sacked.
“That came as a real shock to staff, obviously,” Shaw said.
“Every time that a co-leader either resigns or leaves post that does trigger an event because the co-leaders are the employing agents of our Parliamentary team,” Shaw said.
“There is a period of uncertainty there until there is a new co-leader.
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“This is not something we’ve never handled before. We try to be good employers and navigate through that uncertainty,” he said.
Many or even most of these staff are likely to retain their jobs, however.
Shaw keeps in touch with former Green MPs. The one he keeps in closest touch with is Kevin Hague, who fought a leadership race with Shaw in 2015.
“I always regarded Kevin as a close friend and confidante,” Shaw said.
Shaw only recently met former MP Nándor Tánczos for the first time. Tánczos is running to be mayor of Whakatāne and Shaw went up to do a bit of campaigning.
One person Shaw speaks less to is former co-leader Metiria Turei.
Shaw and Turei went to the 2017 election as fellow co-leaders but Turei resigned after admitting she lied to claim benefits for herself and her child. That admission initially saw a massive spike in support for the Greens but further revelations and a change of Labour leader saw the party’s fortunes slump.
Shaw said he does not speak to Turei “a lot”.
“I wanted to respect the fact that she had been through a very traumatic end to her Parliamentary career,” he said.
He wanted to “give her all the space that she wanted and needed and she had a similar assessment that she had done her time here and wanted to focus on other things”.
Shaw said Turei does give him advice.
“Interestingly, Metiria, I thought, was extremely clear-sighted about the need to be in government because in her view the people who are most disadvantaged by the current economic setup are so urgently in need of our support that it would be irresponsible not to.
“She was quite hard arse about that,” Shaw said.
“They do not have the luxury of us being kind of purist and sitting outside the system. They need that support right now.”
One of the events that sealed Turei’s fate was Labour leader Jacinda Ardern’s decision to rule Turei out of any Cabinet post following the 2017 election.
Shaw said he has never spoken to Ardern about that decision – it’s off the table.
The wider Green Party still feels bruised by the Turei scandal. It’s a feeling Shaw shares.
“She went through a horrendous time,” Shaw said, “and she went through it because she was telling the truth about the experience of poor brown women in their late teens and early 20s through the world that had been created through the 80s and 90s reforms.
“She was essentially hounded out of Parliament for that.
“I don’t come anywhere close to the experience she had, but it was incredibly tough and I was very proud we came back over 5 per cent and got into government with ministers and so on, but for a very long time there that was trauma.”
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