Shaw exits with head held high, but big gap for Greens
There was never a better juxtaposition in politics than that demonstrated by the Green Party on Wednesday night. Early in the evening former co-leader James Shaw gave a moving speech to a packed debating chamber calling time on his political career, which officially ends at 11.59pm on Sunday.
Later in the evening Green MP for Rongotai Julie Anne Genter was in Parliament during an hour-long session in the debating chamber where the Minister of Transport was answering questions, She got out of her seat, walked across the house and started waving her arms and remonstrating up close with National MP, and minister Matt Doocey. She leaned over his desk and took him to task before being ordered back to her seat by deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger.
This was highly unusual behaviour and disciplinary proceedings are under way for the outburst. Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said “it completely fell below our standards of behaviour”.
The reason it was such a juxtaposition was that there was Shaw, the unthreatening face of the Greens, who has arguably achieved more in the area of climate change than any other politician, next to an MP seemingly losing the plot during a pretty routine and anodyne debate over transport. The serious Greens versus the unserious Greens.
It follows up two other Green MPs who have also been in trouble or in the spotlight this year. Golriz Ghahraman, who quit politics after being caught shoplifting (she has subsequently pleaded guilty) and Green MP Darleen Tana, who has been suspended from the Greens pending an investigation after allegations of labour exploitation against her and her husband. That investigation is ongoing.
Meanwhile, Shaw is leaving to join the fairer fields of corporate finance and some boards. He will also be joining Greenbridge Capital Management, working part-time as “Director of climate opportunity”, and work with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) New Zealand.
His primary new job will be as an “operating partner” with global infrastructure investment fund Morrison. Morrison has some $38 billion in funds under management. It is comfortably the largest private, New Zealand-based investment fund.
He has said he is committed – through the fund – to delivering 150 million tonnes of carbon reduction by 2030 by accelerating “investment in the infrastructure of the net-zero economy”.
Paul Newfield, chief executive of Morrison, said Shaw’s track record of “making the world better for future generations lines up perfectly with Morrison’s purpose of investing wisely in ideas that matter”.
In a way it is a continuation of the work Shaw spent a considerable amount of his ministerial career getting sorted.
And it is also a signal of how well regarded he became in financial markets and business circles for his longer-term approach to climate issues. He wasn’t trying to bust up the system, but getting it to redirect its resources towards lowemissions outcomes.
While Shaw was always impatient and unhappy that emissions cuts weren’t deeper and faster (he particularly chafed under the majority Labour government in the past three years) he saw that it was a better use of his time to be a part of the Government effecting change than impotently throwing stones from the outside.
There were plenty of missteps in his decade-long career – support for the Green School was a classic one – but also significant achievements.
But even Shaw’s transition into this high-profile career highlights some of the structural problems faced by the Greens.
There are many members of the Green Party – both in the grassroots and in the Parliamentary wing of the party – who are fundamentally uncomfortable with the fact that a former leader would end up working for one of New Zealand’s citadels of capitalism – an investment firm.
Yet this is one of the things that marks him out as a true Green.
This is not to denigrate other members of the party, but to point out that while Shaw was all about social justice and inclusion, he was more fundamentally about the environment and, in particular, climate change.
The way to change energy use or to speed up the clean-energy transition is all about getting capital deployed in the right places. Shaw understood this.
He was instrumental in getting the Zero Carbon Act passed.
That set up the institutional architecture that governed the Climate Commission, carbon budgets and emission reduction plans. While each Government will work out its own ways of meeting those targets, that basic institutional framework looks very likely to persist and embed over time.
He also, somewhat more relevant to his new job, was involved in getting the world’s first climate-related financial disclosures regime.
Under this regime firms will have to account for the potential financial cost of their climate exposure in a world where CO2 and equivalents are an externality that have to be paid for.
The fact that Shaw can move seamlessly from the ministry to business and funds management is something that marks him out as the Green Party’s most consequential leader. The co-leadership that he and Marama Davidson together built for the party after Metiria Turei’s exit in 2017 was extremely successful in political terms.
Because of Turei’s issues, Shaw led the Greens as sole leader into the 2017 general election, scoring just over 6% of the vote – a drop from the 10.7% the Greens hit in 2014, when Labour was at its nadir.
That grew again, to 7.86%, in 2020 – a remarkable achievement given that Labour hit more than 50% of the vote and totally dominated the political landscape.
In the 2023 election that then increased again to 11.6% for the Greens.
Shaw’s stated aim was to lead his party into government and then back out the other side.
If that was the goal then it was thoroughly achieved. Shaw then stepped aside and Chlöe Swarbrick became the new co-leader with minimal drama.
Yet Shaw will depart as someone whom the more socialist and activist end of the Green Party regarded as insufficiently leftwing, and therefore an object of suspicion. Despite what he achieved as a minister and the footing he helped put the Greens on, he was not voted back in as leader for a brief period in 2022.
Yet while there were constant laments among both environmentalists and more environmentally-minded business types that he didn’t take off and form a genuine environmental party, Shaw danced with the ones who brought him. He remained and remains loyal to the party.
It could be a while before the Green Party sees this sort of leader again. And, much like the Labour Party, the next few years could be ones of soul-searching and reinvention for the Green Party.