Shaw on his new jobs, and leaving Parliament
Former climate change minister and outgoing Green Party co-leader James Shaw won’t be leaving climate change behind, as he leaves Parliament and picks up his new careers.
After his valedictory speech last evening, it was announced he is joining infrastructure investment management company Morrison, and was “on a new five-year mission, to reduce or remove 150 million tonnes of climate pollution from global emissions by 2030”.
Shaw was said to be taking on governance and advisory roles “where there is an opportunity to cut climate pollution and to restore and protect nature”.
He would be on the board of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the sustainability advisory panel of Air New Zealand. He was also the new director of climate opportunity and global development at Greenbridge Capital Management. Shaw said a move “into the world of finance and investment, start-ups and environmental NGOs is a natural progression from my work in government”.
For his valedictory speech, the public gallery was packed with past MPs and political players. Former MP Todd Muller watched on, while David Clark and Iain Lees-Galloway sat with former Green MPs Eugenie Sage and Jan Logie, while Kennedy Graham sat from the public gallery.
Wellington mayor Tory Whanau watched, as well as former Wellington mayor Justin Lester and Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr.
Shaw began his valedictory recalling swallowing his tongue in his sleep during the 2017 election campaign.
“I woke up on the floor, on my hands and knees, choking it back up. That was a difficult campaign. It seemed likely that I was about to become the last leader of the Green Party and was about to deliver the last speech by a Green Party member of Parliament,” he said. “Twelve weeks later I was the minister of climate change. And I was on my way to Germany for the United Nation’s annual climate summit.
“But first, I had to stopover in Rome, to meet the Pope. There isn’t a rollercoaster on Earth that comes close to the white-knuckle ride that is politics.”
He said he was “simultaneously saddened and elated to be leaving it”, but mostly elated. Shaw spoke about his past co-leaders. To Metiria Turei, he said her “warmth, your courage and your tenacity have been an inspiration to others and to me”.
“You deserved better than you got.” He thanked Muller, up in the public gallery. “In the face of strong political headwinds, Todd Muller earned my trust and my respect, with his integrity, commitment and candour. There are also moments when this place has a way of revealing who your true friends really are. And it turns out, he’s one of mine.”
He spoke about former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern.
“I remember meeting a promising youth-adjacent Labour candidate in 2008, when we were both living in London and campaigning for the expat vote for our respective parties.
“At the time she was president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. I said I didn’t realise socialists were still allowed into the Labour Party.”
He said serving in Ardern’s government “was the privilege of my lifetime”. “She is a woman of humility, service, intelligence and integrity.”
Shaw spoke about the biodiversity crisis. “New Zealand has the highest species extinction rate in the world,” he said. “It is a crisis every bit as severe as the climate crisis.”
To Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who was watching the speech, Shaw said, “if you let them unwind the National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity, I will haunt you”, to which Luxon laughed and smiled.
Shaw said Parliament was “becoming the place where our future is consumed rather than created”. “What I have learned during my time here is that most issues default to a tugof-war over policy differences. If I have learned one lesson, it is that we will always need political leaders who can rise above the politics that brought them here.
“A legacy is not a career, or a brand, or even a set of laws. The only true legacy we can leave is to cherish the world we’ve been given and to bequeath a better one for our descendants.”