Jeanette Fitzsimons

1945-2020 Environmentalist and politician.

Former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons was not just a pioneer environmentalist, but an influential exemplar of our modern consensus politics.

For all that she scrupulously eschewed personality politics, it was her personality that helped the Greens transcend the roller coaster of popularity contests. Her calm, reasoned leadership was a huge factor in the party’s continued electability. She never shied away from advocating politically unpalatable reforms. But while steely and clearheaded about the facts, she was never confrontational, seeking to persuade New Zealanders to the Green cause rather than to browbeat them.

She helped grow the movement from its Values Party origins in the 1970s, both through her university teaching and by nurturing networks, rather than the more traditional political route of making oneself a figurehead. Yet figurehead she became, as both the first and still sole Green MP to win a constituency, and the co-leader who shepherded the Greens, barely scathed, out of the bitterly fractured Alliance coalition to a continued presence in Parliament under their own banner.

Without obviously distancing herself from the Alliance’s sometimes radical social policies, she protected and distinguished her party’s fidelity to environmental concerns so that voters still found it an electable entity after all the political skirmishing resulted in a National Party victory.

Perhaps her most controversial stance was to help dissuade her party from becoming part of the Government when the chance arose. They extracted reforms from Labour administrations, including support for solar power and home insulation, but drew some criticism that they might have achieved more had they sat around the Cabinet table.

However, unlike New Zealand First and the Māori Party, which voters expelled after they accepted “the baubles of office”, the Greens enjoyed continued re-election, remaining a constant environmental voice in the House.

Fitzsimons’ most ambitious advocacy, for climate-change mitigation, biodiversity and alternative energy, is now uncontestedly mainstream.

During her 14 years in Parliament, she engendered a universal respect for her courtesy, honesty and integrity, even among those resistant to the often inconvenient environmental truths she articulated.

Greens co-leader James Shaw has aptly observed that a bright green light has gone out.

But Fitzsimons has surely left an afterglow of what patient, reasoned, fact-based leadership can achieve over belligerence and rhetoric.