No champion of genuine Green values
JAMES Shaw is sorry. Yes he is! Genuinely, abjectly, politically and electorally sorry — as he damn well should be! His decision to grant 12 million public dollars to a privately owned Taranaki ‘‘school’’ (which appears to specialise in promoting every cliched remnant of the 1970s hippy culture) was way beyond stupid. If the Greens sink below the crucial 5% MMP threshold on October 17, then a fair old chunk of the responsibility will belong to Shaw.
All over the country, people are asking each other: ‘‘How could he have been so dumb?’’ Leaving aside the school’s promotion of New Age mumbo jumbo which, of itself, raises serious questions about the adequacy of Ministry of Education oversight, there was the small, but hopefully still important, matter of Green Party policy.
How could Shaw not have known that what he was doing contradicted his party’s longstanding opposition to the public funding of private education? Did he really think that Green Party members and supporters wouldn’t notice?
Maybe he did. Unlike Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria
Turei, Shaw has never shown any recognisable affinity for the kind of Green Party they represented.
Nothing I have ever heard from Shaw has ever reassured me that he subscribes to either the hardcore anticapitalist critique of the ecological socialists, or the radical antimaterialist ideas of the Greens’ visionary forerunners in the Values Party.
On the contrary, Shaw has always struck me as the sort of Green politician you would be sent if you asked a highpowered corporate publicrelations agency to supply one.
Unkind? Probably. But the transformation which has led the Greens to this unfortunate fork in the road has been driven by the corporate world’s urgent need to, first, disarm, and then, absorb, its most serious threat.
The above reference to public relations is, therefore, not intended as an insult. It speaks directly to the way in which the world’s largest corporations have expended billions on convincing the world’s peoples that, while capitalism may have got the planet into its present predicament, it is also — paradoxically — the only viable means of getting it out.
Shaw’s career, prior to entering Parliament, was built upon this dubious proposition. He became an indefatigable promoter of ‘‘green capitalism’’: a guide, if you will, leading consumers to the promised land of ‘‘sustainable’’ capitalist production. He offered living proof to the rising generation of ambitious Green Party activists that they could look sharp, rub shoulders with the rich and famous, and still be nongenderspecific siblings in the struggle to save Parent Earth. Just like Bono.
So why not throw a wad of taxpayer cash at a couple of millionaires committed to training up an army of green warriors and sending them forth to take their rightful places around the boardroom tables of a climate changestricken planet? Fully conversant in the idioms of wokefulness; tested adepts of ceremonial magic; shrewd manipulators of social media and spreadsheets: what’s not to like?
How like the masters of capitalism to simply toss all the contradictory elements of the green world view into their cultural blender and flick the on switch. Gaiaworship and Marxism; reason and unreason; science and mysticism; mix ’em all up.
Throw the empirical proof of climate change and the radical paranoia of the antivaxxers into the same swirling potion and invite all the wideeyed seekers after a better world to drink deep. When your only purpose is to render effective resistance impossible, feeding people contradictions makes perfect sense.
Just so long as the Greens cease to be the party of wellinformed idealists that bought this country 20 years of freedom from genetic engineering. The party that forced all the other parties in Parliament to at least pay lip service to the reality of climate change. The party that offered voters the inspiring examples of Rod Donald’s great heart and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ brilliant mind; the principled activism of Sue Bradford; the wisdom and courage of Keith Locke; the resinous mysticism of Nandor Tanczos. The party that, for however brief a moment, vouchsafed its fellow New Zealanders a glimpse of what the world could look like if we loved it and each other with equal fervour.
The only school fit to teach young New Zealanders the geography of this new heaven, this new earth, is a genuine Green Party. The sort James Shaw wouldn’t want to be found dead in.