Minister of Trees

Words: Anthony Hubbard Photo: Robert Kitchin

"The victims of gang culture, drugtaking and criminality and the effect this has on their own women and children – but I shouldn’t be robust? ... I am not resiling from that challenge."

Shane Jones is back and he’s got billions to spend. The new minister of regional development aims to spread forests and jobs across the landscape. Useless young persons who won’t grasp the carrot of employment might face the stick of ‘‘working for the dole’’.

Critics say he will be minister in charge of the pork barrel, to which Jones gives a robust reply. This very male politician has been in a lot of fights and suffered some spectacular humiliations.

But he’s still amused that ‘‘life is rich in irony and randomness’’. He’s ended up in former foreign minister Murray McCully’s old office in the Beehive – Muzza, who gave him an ambassador’s job after Jones fell out with Labour.

‘‘I’ve yet to extend an invitation to him to visit his ambassadorial appointee in the ministerial suite,’’ he purrs.

Jones found new political life with NZ First and now he’s got real power. His new totem is the small pine tree in his office.

‘‘The timber industry has finally found a champion,’’ he says, referring to himself, ‘‘and I’ll leave no stone unturned.’’

The minister of forests intends to plant up to 100,000 hectares a year, which will ‘‘tick a lot of boxes’’. They will provide a carbon sink, a vital help in the fight against climate change.

This fact alone, he says, shows why those who accuse him of picking winners show ‘‘churlish and lazy thinking’’.

The turbocharged forest industry will provide timber for the Government’s ‘‘massive housing programme’’ as well as many jobs in the regions. And here Jones points to the problem of ‘‘deep pockets of dysfunctionalism’’.

‘‘The Nga¯puhi in the north have a saying, ‘monaroa’ – it means something like a drifter or ne’er-do-well.

‘‘And we do have, and what aggravates me ... [is] that pocket who are not work- ready, who show no signs of making lifestyle choices away from drugs, away from gangs, away from criminality.

‘‘Working for the dole,’’ he says, is his shorthand for getting tough on people who refuse to work while living on a benefit.

Working for the dole ‘‘is not the policy of the current Government but you can expect me to continue to advocate for steps like that …

‘‘I can talk authoritatively about that because it’s in my rohe. Come with me to Kaikohe, come with me to Kaitaia, and not a single person will doubt the accuracy of what I’m saying.’’

This approach might not sit well with the ‘‘liberal or prevailing Wellington view’’, but he makes no apologies.

‘‘I say to you as a 58-year-old leader amongst my own people of the north, do we really think a liberal approach is going to change [things]?

‘‘The victims of gang culture, drug-taking and criminality and the effect this has on their own women and children – but I shouldn’t be robust?

‘‘I shouldn’t sound slightly over-the-top from time to time in dealing with that issue? I am not resiling from that challenge.’’

But then there’s the bacon issue. Both he and his leader-pal Winston Peters are Northland politicians who stand to benefit from favours to their region, such as shifting the port of Auckland to Whangarei.

How can we be sure that regional development isn’t another name for pork?

Look, he says, ‘‘civic leaders are hollering for help, and in my view we’re in a political time just now where we’re going to be honest that in many of the provinces, there is no market solution.

‘‘But we still have people living there, we still want productivity in the regions ... and this is the type of policy we fought an election on.’’

Even National’s Steven Joyce talked about market failure and the need for government investment. But National had dithered.

Under the new Government, projects would have to meet rigorous public criteria.

‘‘This is not something where a delegation arrives and in some polite moment or whim you decide on spending $100 million somewhere near the Foveaux Strait.’’

So what sort of projects would there actually be?

One obvious one, he says, is a new wharf at Opotiki, an area with all the wrong social statistics. He and fellow MP Parekura Horomia suggested it nine years ago ‘‘and forests have been cut down while consultants crunched numbers and wrote reports ... nothing was actually done’’.

Most projects would be infrastructure work of this kind, ‘‘unlike [National’s] Simon Bridges, who not only promises to build 10 bridges [in Northland] and three years later not a single bridge has been built. Now that’s real pork’’.

Critics ask, how can NZ First, which got only 7.2 of the vote, get to choose the government?

Jones’ reply has a sharp edge. That complaint, he says, comes from National.

‘‘The reality is that they [National] ran a campaign called ‘Cut out the middleman’. It was a devastating line [and] but for 2.2 per cent they may have succeeded. They didn’t, and there’s a cost to that ...

‘‘They ran a first-past-the-post political strategy – every coalition partner they’ve had they’ve either destroyed or they’ve completely consumed, other than the pet poodle they picked up from the political equivalent of the SPCA [Epsom Act MP David Seymour].’’

National, he says, just ended up with no mates.

He also notes that NZ First’s preference for a drastic cut in immigration ‘‘did not survive the [coalition] negotiations. We are only 7.2 per cent of the vote and some things just aren’t agreed to’’.

Still, there’s some rancour left. When National revealed that Peters’ superannuation had been overpaid, ‘‘we knew we were in a knife fight’’, Jones says. This took the election campaign ‘‘to a whole new level, to an incredibly personal level’’.

Jones knows how personal politics can get. When it was revealed that he used his ministerial credit card to pay for blue movies, the result was a scandal which he now admits deeply embarrassed both himself and his family.

Not everyone knows that Jones comes from a long line of Anglicans; at one stage his mother even hoped he would become a clergyman. An orator in two languages, he was raised on the Bible and likes to quote it.

The scandal seems to have added to a more general crisis following his bad defeat in the contest for the Labour leadership.

‘‘You could hear my booming voice,’’ he now says, ‘‘but often I couldn’t see what I was doing. I was in a dense fog constantly booming out like a big ship but sailing perilously close, e hoa, to the rocks of treachery and death.’’

Dorothy Pumipi, now his fiancee, entered his life and became ‘‘like a navigator’’. Jones used to keep quiet about his family (he and wife Nga¯reta had seven children). Now he’s happy to talk about Dorothy and their marriage next January in Rarotonga.

As for the scandal, ‘‘I’m sure PR experts would advise me, ‘Don’t talk about it’. But hey, I wander through bloody airports years later and there’s always some clown halfpissed who still raises it with me so I’ve just got to deal with that past.

‘‘And this is a more seasoned politician who most certainly will not ... this will not be the weka who puts his head back in the same noose.’’