Shane Jones
GLUTTONY Each week Megan Nicol Reed asks a public figure to choose three of the seven deadly sins to confess to. This week Shane Jones enters the box. PRIDE LUST
Having originally stood for the Labour Party in the 2005 election, the 59-year-old now serves as a list MP for New Zealand First. In 2017 he was appointed a minister in the coalition government with the portfolios of Infrastructure, Forestry and Regional Economic Development.
I was just reading an interview you did last year in which you intimated you were on a diet. Are you still? I have an unrealised dream to acquaint myself with Golden Oldie rugby, to take the field with the parliamentary team later this year in Japan. And so that does require shedding a good 15kg. I am well and truly on that track of improvement but as of the last few days I’ve been made painfully aware that there’s probably not a helluva lot of opportunity for me to get any leave at all, let alone a week or two to acquaint myself with hitherto unknown rugby playing skills.
Does this mean the diet has been relegated to the backburner? Well last night I did go to the gym for a while and then I stopped at the supermarket and got me some kai and, just as I was walking out, Whittakers are advertising chocolate and I saw that a small percentage of the price of the chocolate will be given to Plunket. So at that point I took the chocolate home and I woke up after having only eaten protein to discover there was no chocolate left, either the tooth fairy came or the wairua of gluttony. I gotta tell you, not that I’ve ever been grossly overweight but I’ve never ever been super, super skinny. For me, to see is to consume, so that’s what I constantly have to be wary of.
Which is your greater poison, booze or food? Yeah, well, it’s both. I’m perhaps a leftover of that bingedrinking generation. I grew up in Awanui, Kaitaia, five years at boarding school and it was all kind of illicit activity. So if I don’t watch myself I quickly find myself in that situation, it’s not one bottle of wine, it’s three bottles of wine. That’s all right when you’ve got great powers of recovery but turn 60 and that’s not the done thing.
I’m not so sure pride is even a transgression these days. Why did you choose it?
There’s two ways to look at pride, eh? I mean obviously we grew up with a reasonable dose of the
Bible, so there’re many admonitions and warnings against excessive pride.
But in terms of my humour, my nature and my belief in myself, I’m 24 carat, there’s nothing doctored about me, therefore I’m confident in being myself and I think that’s the best expression of pride. I know there’s a negative side to it, as in vanity and somebody who exhibits superficiality and in that way pride is seen as a vice. I think I project myself — and I have always sought to do so in adulthood — as someone who is very comfortable in their own skin, very confident of who they are with the ability, after having being knocked down or having knocked yourself down, to pick yourself up.
Speaking of which, I have to admit I was hoping you’d pick lust but given the events of 2010, I anticipated you’d steer clear.
No, no, you can dance on the head of a pin but look, I just wasn’t made like that and that particular incident, busted for blue movies on a [ministerial] credit card, there was just no way to wriggle out of that. I would say that lust snuffs out common sense. And I’ve had several bouts of that. In fact it sort of takes you into an altered state of consciousness now that I think about it. What the hell’s that great line out of the
Bible? Yeah, “do not lust in your heart for her beauty” and I think it finishes off, “and don’t let her take you in with her eyelids”. Well I’ve been taken in a few times and I’m not entirely sure it was the eyelids.
You left your first wife, Ngareta, the mother of your seven children, for Dot, who you married last year. Was it a case of outright lust, or did it begin with friendship? Ahhh … there was friendship but I would be … I don’t want to; obviously I don’t want to say anything negative and hurtful about Ngareta. We had a profound life together but then I met Dot and the fact that she’d been a successful beauty queen possibly meant that I was captured …