'When old men plant trees': James Shaw's farewell

In the last year or so Parliament has heard some unusually good valedictory speeches from a variety of outgoing MPs. Just a few weeks ago from Labour's Grant Robertson for example, or late last year from National's Todd Muller. 

This week it was former Green leader James Shaw. So on the Sunday edition of The House we featured highlights of James Shaw's farewell statement. 

The full speech can be read below, and at the bottom of this article is an embedded video of the event.

Hansard's record of the valedictory:

Thank you - you haven't heard what I've got to say yet! Thank you, Speaker. E mihi ana ki ngā mana whenua ki tēnei rohe, a Taranaki Whānui ki Te Ūpoko o te Ika, Te Ātiawa Whānui, Tēnā koutou katoa. E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. Nga mihi nui kia koutou katoa. [Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

One night, during the course of the 2017 election campaign, I was so exhausted that I swallowed my tongue in my sleep, and I woke up-[Members laugh] It didn't feel funny at the time. I woke up on the floor on my hands and knees, choking it back up.

That was a difficult campaign. When Parliament rose for the six-week election period, I delivered the adjournment debate speech for the Green Party, and 10 minutes before I was due to speak, I got the news that the Colmar Brunton poll that night had us down 11 points. We were on 4 percent. It seemed likely at that point that I was about to become the last leader of the Green Party and to deliver the last speech by a Green Party MP in Parliament.

Well, 12 weeks later, I was the Minister of Climate Change. I was on my way to Germany to the United Nations annual climate summit, but first I had to stop over in Rome to meet the Pope.

Now, there isn't a roller coaster on this planet that comes close to the white-knuckle ride that is politics, and I am simultaneously saddened and elated to be leaving it. Actually, I am mostly elated to be leaving it. I've been in Parliament for 10 years, Green Party co-leader for nine, six as a Minister of the Crown, and I have to say it has not been easy to work out what it is that I want to say, here at the end of it all.

There are a great many people to whom I owe a profound debt of gratitude. Sometimes, in these speeches, the acknowledgments come at the end, but I'm going to start with them, because if there is one thing that I want to express, it is gratitude.

In the middle of the 2011 election campaign, I was set up on a blind date by the Green Party's campaign director, Megan Salole, and like any good political operator, Megan understood the power of informational asymmetry. She briefed me on her friend Annabel with a slide deck full of photos and bits of information, whilst telling Annabel almost nothing about me at all, presumably because if she had, Annabel wouldn't have shown up. So my date was surprised to learn that her date was running for Parliament in that year's general election. But she saw past that small flaw and many others, and 18 months later, we were married.

Now, Annabel chose this life. She chose a life with a husband who's either choking to death from exhaustion, or off overseas meeting the Pope. She chose to sacrifice the next 10 years to it, and she would have chosen another three had we won another term in government. After that, she would have filed for divorce.

This has never just been my journey; it's always been ours. Everything I have here, I owe to you. You have not sought nor received nearly the recognition that you deserve for your part in enabling me to play mine, so thank you. I love you.

I wasn't elected in 2011, so, unfortunately, I couldn't cast my vote for the marriage equality in 2013. My parents, Susanne and Cynthia, have been together since the 1980s, and it meant a great deal to me to see their love recognised as equal to anybody else's. Thank you for being here, tonight and always.

Both my family and Annabel's have always been hugely supportive of us over the years, and I particularly want to thank two of my brothers-in-law, Rob Kirkness and James Every-Palmer. Rob has been at the centre of some leading-edge climate litigation-most notably, Smith v Fonterra and Smith v Attorney-General. James helped me negotiate two governmental agreements with the Labour Party. He then advised me on the zero carbon Act, and he then sued me-twice-in his role as the co-founder of Lawyers for Climate Action. So I do look forward to less awkward family dinners. 

There are two other people in the public gallery today whom I would like to acknowledge. One morning in 2018, I was on my way to work when I was stopped by a particularly vexed gentleman, who wanted me to stop what I was doing with the United Nations, although he was not specific about what that was. To emphasise his point, he fractured my eye socket. Now, Rachel and Geoff Ridley, who were also on their way to work, came to my rescue. Geoff pulled me out of harm's way, whilst Rachel placed all five feet or so of herself between me and the assailant and saw him off.

So, Rachel and Geoff, thank you. That was very kind and very brave.

Now, at the time, Rachel worked for Kirkcaldie and Stains. She now works here at Parliament, so be nice to her.

Of course, I would not even be here if it wasn't for the efforts of many thousands of Green Party members and supporters and volunteers and Green Party staffers. In the time that I have been a member of Parliament, the Green Party has been ably led by its co-convenors Roland Sapsford, Georgina Morrison, Pete Huggins, John Ranta, Debs Martin, Katy Watabe, Wiremu Winitana, Penny Leach, Aroha Low, Rōpata Moore, Lawrence Xu-Nan, and Alyssce Te Huna; general secretaries Jon Field and the formidable Gwen Shaw-no relation, by the way-and the Green Party head office, led by Michael Pringle, Sarah Helm, Sonja Deely, and Miriam Ross; and campaign directors Matt Thomas and Chennoah Walford. All of us here are in awe of the efforts that you go to, to give people like us the privilege of this job, so thank you.

To the Wellington Central Greens, thank you for all of your support over the 12 years that I had the honour of being your candidate. Your new MP is quite simply extraordinary, so look after her. My Green Party colleagues, particularly my co-leaders: Metiria, your warmth and your courage and your tenacity have been an inspiration to others and to me. Thank you for putting your faith in me in those early days; it meant everything to me. You deserved better than you got.

Marama, we are the only people who know what it's like to be us. Thank you for your partnership, for your leadership, and for everything that you have taught me over the course of the past six years. Chlöe, I am so proud of you and I am so excited to see where you and Marama lead the Greens into the future.

Now, there have been well over a hundred Green Party Parliamentary staffers over the years, and so as much as I want to extend the honour-and you did seem to offer me a little bit more time, Speaker-I cannot thank you all by name. But I do want to thank you through the remarkable people who served as my chiefs of staff: Ken Spagnolo, Andrew Campbell, the Hon Deborah Morris-Travers, Tory Whanau (you were always "Your Worship" to us, Your Worship), and Robin Campbell. And the directors who supported them: again, Andrew Campbell, Maggie Tait, Alex Smith, Moira Neho, Joss Debreceny, David Cormack, Holly Donald, Pete Huggins, Robin Campbell, Nadine Walker, Matt Thomas, Eliza Prestige-Oldfield, Danny Stevens, and Chargn Keenan.

I was so proud when Andrew Campbell and Holly Donald graduated from our offices to become the Prime Minister's chief press secretary and deputy chief of staff, respectively. I even forgave Andrew Little for referring to that as "mining the Greens". And through you, I extend my deepest gratitude to all of those smart, passionate, and tireless people who served on the Green Party's staff during my watch. To my executive assistants: Gabie George, Dave Butler-Peck, Sedef Duder-Ozyurt, Semi Kuresa, Bonnie Hayvice, Eve Jones, and Annie Dancer; my senior private secretaries: Victoria Love, Alvina Robati, Bibiana Marsh, Elena Scheule, Alex Eichelbaum, Nina Sudiono-Price, Lani Nesbitt, and Shelly Rangihuna; my senior ministerial advisors: Robin Campbell, Deb Moran, Mark Baker-Jones, Lachlan Rule, Carrie Gage and Hamish Clark; my press secretaries: Peter Stevens, Nadine Walker, Danny Stevens, Aaron Packard, Tom Crick, Adelia Hallett and Jo Leavesley-you are some of the most remarkable people that I have ever known or had the privilege of working with.

And we were supported by a dizzyingly talented array of people. The private secretaries from the Ministry for the Environment: Alex White, Ankit Kishore, Billy Rine, Cassidy House, David Mead, Georgina Beasley, Jessie Algar, Kate Ryan, Kay (now Ambassador) Harrison, Laurette Siemonek, Lindy Fursman, Maggie Fellowes, Nicolasa Fuller, Rachel Ward, Rio Yoon, Sarah Deblock, and Sophie Lord. From the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade: Jonathan Rowe, Kate Wilson-Butler, Peter Shackleton, Stuart Dymond. From the Treasury: Ben Temple, Laura Berntsen, Mark Sowden (now Chief Statistician), Scott Russell and Shahlaa Al-Tiay. And from Statistics New Zealand: Grace McLean, Josh Martyn, Natalia Albert, Scott Kaiser and Tom Crick. And the many others who provided cover and filled in and helped out when we needed it the most.

Together, that group of people created what I believe was one of the most productive, hardest working, and inspiring places to work on campus, and we had that reputation right across the government. And behind them of course there were dozens of others: at the Climate Change Commission, Green Investment Finance Ltd., the Environmental Protection Authority, EECA, the Ministries for the Environment and Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Treasury, and Stats NZ; as well as the 20 or so other ministries, departments, and agencies who supported our work-even when they opposed it [coughs] MPI.

I have many more friends than enemies now, and I think the ratio is about 3:1. There are three friends, in particular, that I want to acknowledge. So I'm a liberal leftie from the Aro Valley, fairly famously, so if you asked me at the start of my career who I thought I would become close friends with, my first pick would not be a Catholic conservative from Tauranga. But in the face of-I have to say-strong political headwinds, Todd Muller earned my trust and my respect with his integrity, his commitment, and his candour. New Zealand would not have an enduring Zero Carbon Act or a Climate Change Commission without him. And I have to say, there are moments when this place has a way of showing you who your true friends are. It turns out, he's one of mine.

Through four election campaigns I enjoyed the great pleasure of standing alongside Grant Robertson in Wellington Central. There was one year we did 36 public meetings, sometimes two a night, and we finished-I can see some nodding heads over there who are familiar with Wellington Central-with the Mount Victoria Residents Association. By that point, Grant and I had repeated our stump speeches so often that we considered swapping them to see if anybody noticed. And then local resident, the Rt Hon Dr Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, presumably agonising about who to vote for, showed up to cross-examine us on the Resource Management Act. So Grant and I thought the better of things and decided to behave ourselves.

It was an honour and a pleasure to work with Grant in government, including a term as his Associate Finance Minister. I have to say, there have been a lot of awful things said about Grant recently, but in my experience he is one of the most decent, principled, and thoughtful people I have ever met and the most talented politician of my generation.

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, and I said that I didn't realise socialists were allowed into the Labour Party-which I might not have said if I'd known that nine years later I was asking her to make me her Climate Change Minister. But I am profoundly grateful that she did, because serving Jacinda Ardern's government was the privilege of my lifetime. She is a woman of humility, service, intelligence, and integrity, and she also deserves better than she has been receiving. Grant and Jacinda were the best of us.

And what can I say about being in a government during a time that included the country's worst terrorist attack, a deadly volcanic eruption, a global pandemic, and then capped it off with fatal floods and cyclones and the displacement of thousands of New Zealanders from their homes? Helen Clark's government had SARS, and September the 11th, and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; John Key's had the great financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquakes. But it kind of felt like we were getting served up a little bit more than our fair share of catastrophe cake. One of the reasons, I believe, that successive governments had never really dealt with climate change is that they're so busy dealing with the fiasco du jour, and then they kick the long-term, really big challenges down the road. The fact that we dealt with those things and also put in place an intergenerational framework for dealing with climate change, I credit with the leadership and sponsorship of Jacinda Ardern.

There are some other less famous foundation stones of the framework included, such as the establishment of New Zealand Green Investment Finance Ltd. and a little-heralded shareholder protection measure, the snappily entitled climate-related financial disclosures, or as we like to call it in the Public Service, CRFD. Now, New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce that measure, and for that, the Hon Kris Faafoi and Hon David Clark can take a bow. The United Kingdom was the second. There are now three dozen countries. Australia is introducing it right now.

Now, the pace of change did overwhelm us. The most urgent of these crises is the biodiversity crisis. New Zealand has the highest species extinction rate in the world. I'm going to say that again: the highest species extinction rate in the world. Sixty-three percent of our ecosystems are threatened. Those ecosystems are the home to our native species, of which 4,000 are either at risk or threatened with extinction. That includes 90 percent of our seabirds, 82 percent of our native birds, 94 percent of our reptiles, and 72 percent of our native freshwater fish. There are some in the new government who seem to want to put these endangered species on the fast-track to oblivion. So those numbers may well go up. It is a crisis that is every bit as severe as the climate crisis. I would have liked to have had more success in protecting and restoring our wildernesses and wildlife.

One of the times when I really burnt a chunk of my political capital was to secure the $1.3 billion for Jobs for Nature in Budget 2020. And it was a Covid response measure, so it was always going to be time limited. But in that time, it has empowered 10,000 of our most precarious citizens in some of our most fragile, remotest regions in the country, and they have done the most incredible work restoring our rivers and estuaries, our forests and our bush. And Nicola, I know how to keep it alive. [Gestures for the Minister to call him]

One of the hardest battles I fought was to complete the Hon Dr Nick Smith's dream of national direction for councils on how to work with farmers and iwi to protect indigenous biodiversity under the Resource Management Act. The quid pro quo for landowners would be biodiversity credits and incentives. I know that the current Minister is more interested in the quid than the quo, but Christopher, if you let them unwind the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity, I will haunt you!

When I ran for co-leader in 2015, I said that I wanted to lead the Greens into government and then safely out the other side. We had never been in government with Ministers before. The dreaded minor party curse saw every coalition partner punished by the voters. So, at the time, it did seem like a bold promise. But in 2017 we entered government, with Ministers for the first time. Our vote went up at the 2020 election, and we became the first support party to increase our support after a term in government. And then, in 2023, we did it again.

The Greens now have more members of Parliament than we have ever had before, including three electorate seats, which we have never had before. We have more Māori in our current caucus than the total number of Māori MPs we have had in our history leading up to this point. We brought into Parliament the first member of Parliament who had arrived in this country as a refugee, we added to our caucus our first Pasifika MP in 2020, and then a second in 2023.Of course, we still desperately mourn the loss of Faʻanānā Efeso Collins. I do want to thank the House for the heartfelt tributes yesterday. We brought in our first Vietnamese MP, our first Chinese MP, and next week our first Filipino MP. We now look more like contemporary New Zealand than we ever have before. Whether all those things happened because of me, or in spite of me, they did happen on my watch. And in my entirely objective and unbiased assessment, the Greens are now in better shape than we have ever been before.

People keep asking me what I'm going to do next. I am in a real hurry to protect and restore our wildernesses and our wildlife and our atmosphere and our oceans. I am a Star Trek fan, so I am giving myself a five-year mission to boldly reduce or remove 150 million tonnes of climate pollution from global emissions by 2030. If that number sounds familiar to some of you-and it should-it's because it is also New Zealand's nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement. Now, getting Cabinet to commit to that target almost led to my resignation, so I feel I have some responsibility for it. Whether the government will be able to claim any of that towards its Paris target will really come down to whether it gets the policy settings right.

The single biggest lever for change is in the world of politics-that's why I chose to run for Parliament. The second greatest lever for change, in my view, is in the world of finance. My maiden speech included a prescient warning about the dangers of climate change from Margaret Thatcher, and now some of my Green friends became very excited to hear a Green MP quote the Iron Lady, so I'm going to round out my speeches out with a quote from Henry Ford. He said that, "The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life." Now, I know what you're thinking: if Henry Ford had just used batteries [Laughter]. Now I believe, having said that, there is a huge opportunity to leverage the power of finance to massively increase the scale and the speed of the transition to a net zero economy, so, Simon, I will race you. The last one to 150 million tonnes buys the drinks. [Applause]. Now, speaking of drinks, you are all invited to the post-match reception over the road at the National Library, once we're done here, and I'd better get on with it because I'm now standing between you and a glass of wine.

So, Parliament should be where the future of the country is created but ideals and vision, in my view, have themselves become endangered species. In their absence, Parliament is becoming the place where our future is consumed rather than created and I think there has been a shift in the nature of politics and political campaigns. We have a lot more data about voters. The public would be very nervous if they knew exactly how much we knew about them. We have market research, qualitative analysis. We don't need to present a vision for the future anymore because we can just give swing voters the things that they want today, financed by borrowing them from tomorrow. I have used many of these campaign tools-or at least the budget knock-down version of them-because politics is a contest and if your opponents are using those tools then it means that you also have to. But there has to be more to politics than data and marketing.

So, during my time here, I have tried to cultivate an approach that's both viable in a modern political campaign and the modern media environment but also, in spite of those things, creates enduring solutions to the great challenges of our time. Because one of the things that attracted me to the Green Party in the first place 30 years ago was that they wanted to do politics differently, and I said in my maiden speech, 25 years after that point, that "Political tribalism is, I believe, the single greatest barrier to creating enduring solutions to the great challenges of our time. … I know that the first step [to] finding [those] answers is to work together. Presently we are stuck. To get unstuck, we will all need to let go of some things and to be more committed to finding the answers than to being right or to others being wrong." Well, that wasn't a bad speech.

I like to think that for the most part I lived up to that commitment. And what I have learned during my time here is that most issues default to a tug of war over policy differences. It is entirely possible for hard-working, well-meaning people to strive for change for their entire career, but to accomplish very little because there's always someone pulling in the opposite direction just as hard. So my message to this House is that if you take positions that are lateral to that tug of war and to those entrenched debates, and you build alliances across them, then you can actually radically shift the political centre in your own direction because there's no one resisting you. And where I did, it worked; the zero carbon Act, the Climate Change Commission, the emissions targets, and our five-year emissions budgets, our 2030 target under the Paris Agreement and our 2050 net zero targets all seem to have largely survived the change of government when very little else has.

I want to thank the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Christopher Luxon, for his personal leadership on this. Christopher used to be the CEO of an airline. He was instrumental in establishing the Climate Leaders Coalition. We became friends during that time and I thank him for his support. I clearly have a fatal attraction for bald Tories. [Laughter]

Last week-I'll just let you recover from that for a moment-we got the news that New Zealand's emissions fell for the third year in a row. Whilst methane is still off track-something to do with not being priced, I understand-we also got the news that we were on track to meet our target of net zero long-lived gases before 2050, in fact, before 2050. At least, we were on track as of last July. Andrew Morrison, who is the former president of Beef + Lamb, is in the gallery today. Andrew got rolled from his job the same year that I was also briefly rolled from mine, and for much the same reason. The partisans in our tribes thought that each of us had sold out to the other. Pressure is building and the consensus is fraying and some of those partisans sit in this House and some of them are now government ministers. So the framework is being quietly sabotaged and subtly undermined, and there is an increasing risk that New Zealand will collapse into the climate culture wars that we see in the United States or Britain or Canada or Australia and elsewhere.

Journalists who have been watching this have been asking me what will become of my legacy. That word makes me very nervous because the politics and the policy of climate change isn't about me. It's not even about anybody in this House, in this room. It's about people who won't be born for decades and who in their entire lives will never once know any of our names.

There's a proverb that civilisations become great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know that they will never sit. In the Waipoua forest stands the great kauri Te Matua Ngahere, "the father of the forest." That tree is somewhere between 1,200 and 2000 years old. By the time Kupe chased the great octopus of Muturangi across the ocean and discovered these shores, Te Matua Ngahere would have been almost as tall as it is today. At its youngest, it predates Angkor Wat. By the older estimate, Te Matua Ngahere may have been a sapling when Cicero was writing about old men planting trees.

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 that we can leave is to cherish the world that we have inherited and to bequeath a better one for our descendants. Civilisations become great when old men plant trees. This is the only way that any of us will ever create anything that lasts beyond our time in this House or on this earth. Everyone we care about, everything we argue about happens here on what Carl Sagan calls "this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." So look after it. Mr. Speaker, it has been my privilege.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

This is a link to Parliament's on-demand video of the valedictory statement. You will likely have to click on the half-obscured picture that is presented to see a full version.