Back in May, James Shaw was travelling around the country on the Green Party regional tour for the co-leaders election. Critic was able to talk to him about his bid to co-lead the party.
Shaw went on to win the co-leadership. Last week, we got to sit down with him again and hear what he’s been doing, what’s next from the Greens and what his thoughts are on New Zealand politics.
The Green Party has recently announced its new overarching areas of focus to be climate change and child poverty. How did you decide on these issues?
What we did after the election was, we said, ok, we’re really going to focus all the efforts of our entire team and our entire party around those two major things, climate change and child poverty, because we think that those are the greatest challenges today. And they’re not necessarily popular causes, but … when the Greens campaign on something consistently and we put all of our efforts into it, we actually do lift it up to a voting-level issue.
You reached out to National with the offer to work together on climate change. Is cross-party consensus the answer?
The big thing about climate change is that you need a long-term plan for it and, given that we’re relying pretty heavily on the business sector to do the heavy lifting because that’s where the emissions are mostly located, what that means is that they need some predictability so that they can build that into their plan because [businesses] tend to plan in 10–15 year horizons. For New Zealand to be doing anything like its proportionate share of emissions reductions, we need to reduce emissions by about 40 percent by the year 2030.
How would you rate the likelihood of National working with you out of 10?
Low, but not hopeless. I’d give it about a two and a half. I think politics is the art of the possible, and I think what this prime minister has shown consistently is that when public pressure gets to a point, he changes his mind. So our job through the climate change campaign, and people who aren’t associated with us [Greens] but are concerned about climate change, what we need to do is build that level of public pressure on the prime minister to say this is an issue that we care about so much that we actually want you to respond to.
How do you plan to balance imposing policies like carbon taxes with economic development? When one will always ultimately hinder the other.
They’re the same thing. If you want to have a low-carbon economy, what you need is a sustainable economic development plan; if you want to have a thriving economy 30 years from now, in a carbon-restrained and resources-restrained world, you need to factor in climate change. So these aren’t balancing factors, they’re not opposed.
You recently replaced your chief of staff, Ken Spagnolo. Can you explain the rationale behind that?
Ken’s had a huge experience and made a great contribution. He led our team through the two most successful parliamentary elections. At the same time, Andrew Campbell is a phenomenal political operator and, you know, new leadership team, new management team.
What’s the current status of the Labour-Greens coalition? Is there a formal status?
No, there isn’t. Labour have also had a new leadership change and they’ve also had a lot of organisational and staff structure changes going on, so my sense is that now Labour are doing the really hard internal work that they probably ought to have been doing over the last eight years — they’ve finally turned that corner. The mood around there feels very, very different. We’ve actually got a pretty good working relationship with Andrew [Little], and Annette [King] and Grant Robertson and Jacinda [Ardern].
What’s your thoughts on the Labour leadership? Do you think Andrew Little is doing a good job?
Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s a long hard road. Andrew [Little] is the kinda guy who I think is fairly steady, methodical, you know, he’s not that flashy but, frankly, I don’t think they need flashy. I think they had flashy and that didn’t work out too well. But he’s got a strong organisational sense, he knows his own mind, he’s self-confident, he’s capable of making decisions in a pretty short time scale if he needs to.
Right now Labour are considering whether or not to replace Annette King with Jacinda Ardern as deputy leader. What are your thoughts?
Annette [King] is one of the strongest performers in parliament. She is outstanding. She would have made a great leader herself if she had decided to go for it. But, you know, she didn’t want to, she didn’t put her hat in the ring, and they put her alongside I think because she’s got this amazing parliamentary experience and so Andrew coming in as a new leader, it’s good to pair him up with someone who’s been around for a while.