Green plotters are wrong: James Shaw is a radical achieving as much as he can

Thursday, 28 July 2022

Green MP James Shaw says he will again stand to be Green Party co-leader, and wants to lead the party into the next election. Shaw's co-leadership of the party was opened up for contest by a vote during the party's AGM on Saturday, July 23, 2022.

Josie Pagani has worked in politics, aid and development. She worked briefly for Alliance, when the Greens were part of it.

OPINION: I don’t know where James Shaw has failed in the eyes of some of his party while his co-leader Marama Davidson has succeeded, other than his conventionality. And maybe his identity: not a Boomer, but one rung down the intersectional ladder. He is white, male and, on the party website photo, he alone wears a suit.

It’s hard to think of Davidson as unconventional. I have done media slots with her and a few of her colleagues, including before they were MPs, and if I recall anything they said it was their reluctance to say something controversial.

There’s no courage required to say what your core supporters expect to hear.

* Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono considering co-leadership bid

* James Shaw vows to 'redouble' efforts as he bids again for Green Party co-leadership

Greens co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson. In the eyes of Green leftists, Davidson has succeeded where Shaw hasn’t, and that baffles Josie Pagani.

Whereas Shaw is a realist. He wants to do good, not just feel good.

He knows that, if you want change, you have to persuade more people and that, with 8% of the vote in 2020, the Green Party doesn’t have a mandate for a green revolution.

The compromises Shaw has made as a minister in Jacinda Ardern’s Government makes him more radical than if he were protesting on the fringes, writes Pagani.

He is radical, not an extremist, in the sense that he wants the opposite of a conservative, the opposite of the status quo, while the extremes are distant from the median voter.

Being in government to make change is more radical than protesting on the fringes, where no tough decisions or accommodations need to be made.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. Compromise isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s the point of our democracy. If you’re not prepared to do it, you will usually have to accept the status quo. The opposite of compromise isn’t revolution.

The wonderful, messy thing about our politics is the different views and opinions. We learn from each other and, on the way, reach better decisions and make them sticky by building support.

Controversial policies such as paid parental leave and same-sex marriage lacked support at first. Passionate activists reached out through media such as women’s magazines and at church services with messages that reflected the values of doubters, convincing them the new policies were ways to make businesses and families stronger. Now they are mundane, conventional. Like James Shaw.

Those landmark social changes are models of how change can be made, how radicalism can make a better world.

Green MP Teanau Tuiono is considering challenging Shaw for the co-leadership role.

Full disclosure, I worked for the Alliance in 1998 as the staffer who ran its paid parental leave campaign.

When we joined Labour in government, some Alliance MPs wanted to hang out for our gold-plated policy of six months’ paid leave. We compromised on Labour’s preference for three months. Incrementalism works. Today we have six months.

It’s possible that Chlöe Swarbrick may have won the radical but not extreme campaign to decriminalise marijuana if she had worked more willingly on the values of doubters.

Swarbrick has declined to challenge for the leadership. Gracelessly, because she could have given her full-throated support to her leader. She would have made herself instantly his heir. She says the process is “extremely democratic”.

The Greens’ process is the opposite of democratic. Thirty-two faceless people have managed to unseat a parliamentary leader and minister. They have not communicated their reasons to Green voters of 2020, 18 months ago, who understood that they were voting for a party jointly led by Shaw.

I doubt that anyone outside the families of Elizabeth Kerekere, Ricardo Menéndez March or Teanau Tuiono voted Green to get them into Parliament. No registered voter elected the nameless party hacks who made the decision to overboard Shaw. They didn’t even comprise a majority of the party activists.

The Greens were always advocates of MMP, pushing back on claims that faceless, unaccountable party officials would control MPs. The vote against Shaw is a democratic, constitutional and representational hijacking.

Life is always tough for smaller parties.

They deliver less because they have a smaller mandate. Telling activist supporters that they have to compromise in government is futile. “If I wanted to compromise I would have joined the Labour Party,” they will thunder.

Where smaller parties lean towards ideological extremes, disappointment is as hard-wired as idealism.

But Labour won an outright majority at the 2020 election. It didn’t need to phone the Greens at all. That they were offered two ministerial posts signalled more Labour’s metamorphosis into a low-fat Green Party than the Greens’ electoral support.

In a smaller party, there are fewer places to hide non-performing MPs and fewer “seen it all before” old-timers to help them through the tough spots. They have to cover the whole country with a quarter of the resources.

Now several commentators have noted that support for Shaw in the media has the unintended consequence of persuading Green activists that he is too moderate.

He is not a moderate in the sense that he compromises too much. He compromises because he is a radical achieving as much as possible.

Editor’s note: Former Alliance members have challenged Josie Pagani's description of the negotiations on paid parental leave, pointing out that the party's official position was always for 12 weeks, which was achieved and introduced in 2002.