James Shaw's valedictory statement in full:
Mr Speaker, one night during the 2017 election campaign I was so exhausted that I swallowed my tongue in my sleep.
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.
Ten minutes before I was due to speak I got the news that the Colmar Brunton poll had us down eleven points.
We were on four percent.
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.
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 roller-coaster on Earth that comes close to the white-knuckle ride that is politics.
I am simultaneously saddened and elated to be leaving it.
But mostly elated.
I have been in Parliament for ten years, nine as Green Party Co-leader, six as a Minister of the Crown.
It has not been easy to work out what 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 acknowledgements come at the end.
I shall start with them, because if there is one thing I want to express, it is gratitude.
Part 1: Gratitude
Annabel
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.
Like any good political operative Megan understood the power of informational asymmetry, briefing me on her friend Annabel via a slide deck full of photos and background information while telling Annabel almost nothing about me at all.
Presumably because if she had, Annabel would never have shown up.
So my date was surprised to learn that her date was running for Parliament in that year's election.
She saw past this small flaw along with many, many others and eighteen months later we were married.
Annabel chose this life. A husband who is either choking to death from exhaustion and stress or overseas meeting the Pope.
She chose to sacrifice the next ten years to it and she would have chosen another three, if we had won another term in government.
After that, she would have filed for divorce.
This has never been just my journey, it has always been ours.
Annabel, everything I have done here, I owe to you.
You have not sought nor received nearly the recognition you deserve for the part you have played in enabling me to play mine.
Thank you. I love you.
Family & Friends
Mr Speaker, I wasn't elected in 2011 so I couldn't cast my vote for the Marriage Equality Bill in 2013.
My parents, Cynthia and Suzanne, have been together since the 1980s and it meant a lot to me to see their commitment and love recognised as equal to anyone else's.
Thank you for being here.
Tonight and always.
Both my family and Annabel's have been hugely supportive of us over the years.
I'd particularly like to thank two of my brothers-in-law, Rob Kirkness and James Every-Palmer.
Rob has been at the leading edge of climate litigation, most notably Smith v Fonterra and Smith v Attorney-General.
James helped me negotiate two governmental agreements with the Labour Party.
He advised me on the design of the Zero Carbon Act.
He has also sued me. Twice. In his role as co-founder of Lawyers for Climate Action.
I look forward to less awkward family dinners.
There are two other people in the public gallery today I would like to acknowledge.
One morning in 2018, I was on the way to work when I was stopped by a particularly vexed gentleman who wanted me to stop whatever it was I was doing with the United Nations.
To emphasise his point, he fractured my eye socket.
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 foot or so of herself between me and the assailant and saw him off.
Rachel and Geoff, thank you. That was very kind and very brave.
At the time, Rachel worked for Kirkaldies & Staines.
She now works here at Parliament.
Be nice to her.
Staff
I wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for the efforts of many thousands of Green Party members, supporters, volunteers and Party staffers.
In the time I have been an MP, the Green Party have been ably led by its Co-convenors; Roland Sapsford, Georgina Morrison, Pete Huggins, John Ranta, Debs Martin, Katy Watabe, Wiremu Winitana, Penny Leach, Aroha Lowe, Rо̄pata Moore, Lawrence Xu-Nan and Alyssce Te Huna.
General Secretaries Jon Field and the formidable Gwen Shaw (no relation) 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 are in awe of the efforts you go to, to give people like me the privilege of this job.
Thank you.
To the Wellington Central Greens, thank you for all your support over the 12 years I was honoured to be your candidate.
Your new MP is simply extraordinary. Look after her.
My Green Party colleagues. Particularly my Co-leaders.
Metiria, your warmth, your courage and your tenacity have been an inspiration to others and to me.
Thank you for putting your faith in me in my early days.
That meant everything to me.
You deserved far better than you got.
Marama, we are the only people who know what it's like to be us.
Thank you for your partnership, your leadership and for teaching me so much these last six years.
Chloe, I am so proud of you and so excited to see where you and Marama lead the Greens into the future.
There have been well over a hundred wonderful Green Party Parliamentary staffers over the last ten years.
Much as I want to extend you the honour, I cannot thank you all by name.
But I do want to thank the remarkable people who served as my Chiefs of Staff; Ken Spagnolo, Andrew Campbell, the Honourable Deborah Morris-Travers, Tory Whanau (you were always Your Worship to us, Your Worship) and Robin Campbell.
And the directors who supported them, 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 all of you, I extend my deepest gratitude to all those smart, passionate, 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 I have ever known or had the opportunity to work with.
We were supported by a dizzyingly talented array of 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 many others who provided cover and filled in and helped out when we needed it most.
Together this group of people built up a reputation on the precinct and across the public service as one of the most productive, hardest working and inspiring offices in Government.
Behind them were dozens more 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 twenty or so other ministries, departments and agencies who supported our work.
Even when they opposed it.
Colleagues
I have made more friends than enemies here. I think the ratio is about three-to-one.
And, there are three friends, in particular, I want to acknowledge.
I'm a liberal leftie from Aro Valley, so if you asked me at the start of my career, who I thought I would become close friends with, my first pick wouldn't be a Catholic conservative from Tauranga.
But, in the face of strong political headwinds, Todd Muller earned my trust and my respect, with his integrity, commitment and candour.
New Zealand would not have had an enduring Zero Carbon Act or a Climate Change Commission without him.
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.
Throughout four election campaigns I enjoyed the great pleasure of standing alongside Grant Robertson in Wellington Central.
One year we did 36 public meetings, sometimes two a night.
We finished with the Mount Victoria Residents Association.
By this point, Grant and I had delivered our stump speeches so often that we considered swapping them to see if anyone noticed.
Then local resident the Rt Hon Dr Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC, presumably agonising about which party to vote for, showed up to cross-examine us about our positions on the Resource Management Act.
So Grant and I thought the better of things and behaved ourselves.
It was an honour and a pleasure to work with Grant in government, including a term as his Associate Finance Minister.
There have been a lot of awful things said about Grant recently.
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.
I said I didn't realise socialists were still allowed into the Labour Party.
I might not have said that, if I'd known that nine years later I'd be asking her to appoint me Climate Change Minister.
I am profoundly grateful that she did.
Serving in Jacinda Ardern's Government was the privilege of my lifetime.
She is a woman of humility, service, intelligence and integrity.
And, she also deserves far better treatment than she has been receiving.
Jacinda and Grant were the best of us.
Part 2: On my watch
Ministerial
What can I say about being in 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, September 11th and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
John Key's had the Great Financial Crisis and the Christchurch earthquakes.
But it did feel like we got served a bit more than our fair slice of catastrophe.
One of the reasons successive governments have never really dealt with climate change is that they're so busy dealing with the fiasco du jour they end up kicking the can of the really big, long-term challenges down the road.
The fact that we dealt with those crises and also put in place an intergenerational framework for dealing with climate change, I credit the leadership and sponsorship of Jacinda Ardern.
Other less famous foundation stones of the framework included 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 liked to call it in the public service, 'CRiFiD'.
New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce this measure and for that, the Honourables Kris Fa'afoi and David Clark can take a bow.
The United Kingdom was the second.
There are now three dozen.
Australia is introducing it right now.
Mr Speaker, The pace of events overwhelmed us.
The most urgent of these is the biodiversity crisis.
New Zealand has the highest species extinction rate in the world.
I'll say that again.
The highest species extinction rate in the world - 63 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.
This 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 those endangered species on the fast-track to oblivion.
So those numbers will probably go up.
It is a crisis every bit as severe as the climate crisis.
I would have liked to have had better success in protecting and restoring our wildernesses and wildlife.
One of the times I really had to burnt a chunk of of my political capital was to secure the $1.3 billion for Jobs for Nature in Budget 2020.
As a COVID response measure, it was only ever going to be time limited.
But in that time, it has empowered ten thousand of our most precarious citizens in some of our most fragile, remote regions and they have done the most extraordinary work repairing our rivers and estuaries, wetlands, forests and bush.
And Nicola, I know how to keep it alive. [Call me!]
One of the hardest battles I fought was to complete the Honourable Nick Smith's dream of national direction for Councils on how to protect indigenous biodiversity under the RMA.
The quid pro quo for landowners would be biodiversity credits and incentives.
I know the current Minister is more interested in the quid than the quo, but Christopher, if you let them unwind the National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity, I will haunt you.
The Greens
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 that seemed like a bold promise.
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.
In 2023, we did it again.
The Greens now have more Members in the House of Representatives than we have ever had.
Including three electorate seats. Which has never happened before.
We have more Maori in our current Caucus than the total number of Maori MPs we've had prior to this one.
We brought into Parliament the first MP 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.
We still desperately mourn the loss of Efeso Collins.
I thank the House for their heartfelt tributes yesterday.
We brought in our first Vietnamese MP, our first Chinese MP and next week, our first Filipino MP.
The Greens now look more like contemporary New Zealand than we ever have before.
Whether all these things happened because of me, rather than 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.
What's next?
Mr Speaker, people keep asking me what I'm going to do next.
I am in a real hurry to protect and restore our wildernesses and wildlife, atmosphere, and 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.
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 it towards our Paris target will really come down to whether it gets the policy settings right.
The single greatest lever for change is in the world of politics.
That's why I chose to run for Parliament.
The second greatest lever for change, is in the world of finance.
My maiden speech included a prescient warning about the dangers of climate change from Margaret Thatcher.
Some of my Green friends became very excited to hear a Green MP quote the Iron Lady.
So I'm going to round 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 instead of gasoline, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
I believe there is a huge opportunity to leverage the power of finance to massively increase the speed and the scale of the transition to a zero-emission economy.
So, Simon. I'll race you. Last one to 150 million tonnes buys the drinks.
Speaking of drinks, you're all invited to the post-match reception over the road at the National Library, once we're done here.
Which I had best get on with, as I'm now standing between you and a glass of wine.
Part 3: Old men planting trees
Parliament should be where the future of the country is created.
But ideals and vision have themselves become endangered species.
In their absence Parliament is becoming the place where our future is consumed rather than created.
There's 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 just how much we know about them.
We have market research. Qualitative analysis.
We don't need to present a vision of the future because we can just give swing voters the things they want today, financed by borrowing from tomorrow.
And I've used many of these campaign tools – at least the budget version of them – because politics is a contest and if your opponents use them then you have to, as well.
But there has to be more to politics than data and marketing.
During my time here I've tried to cultivate an approach that is both viable in a modern campaign and the modern media environment but also, in spite of those things, creates enduring solutions to the challenges of our time.
One of the things that first attracted me to the Greens 30 years ago was that they wanted to do politics differently.
In my maiden speech, 25 years later, I said 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 in finding the 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.
Mr Speaker, I like to think that, for the most part, I lived up to that commitment.
What I have learned during my time here is that most issues default to a tug-of-war over policy differences.
It's possible for hard-working, well-meaning people to strive for change their entire career but accomplish very little - because there's always someone else pulling just as hard in the other direction.
My message to this House is that if you take positions that are lateral to those entrenched debates and you build alliances across them you can radically shift the political centre in your own direction - because no one is resisting you.
And where I did, it worked.
The Zero Carbon Act, the Climate Change Commission, the emissions targets in our five-year emissions budgets, our 2030 target under the Paris Agreement and our 2050 net-zero targets, all seemed 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 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.
Last week we got the news that New Zealand's emissions fell for the third year in a row.
And while methane is still off track – something to do with not being priced – we also got the news that we were on track to meet our target of net-zero long-lived gases before 2050.
(At least we were on track, as of last June…)
Andrew Morrison, the former President of Beef & Lamb, is in the Gallery today.
He got rolled from his job the same year I was also briefly rolled from mine, and for much the same reason.
The partisans in our tribes thought each of us had sold out to the other.
And pressure is building and the consensus is already fraying.
Some of those partisans sit in this House.
Some of them are now Government Ministers.
The framework is being quietly sabotaged, subtly undermined.
There is an increasing risk New Zealand will collapse into the climate culture wars that we see in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
Journalists watching this have been asking me what will become of my legacy.
That word makes me very nervous.
Because the politics and policy of climate change isn't about me.
Nor is it about anyone in this room.
It's about people who won't be born for decades and who, in their whole lives, will never once know our names.
There's a proverb that civilisations become great, when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they'll never sit.
In the Waipoua Forest stands the giant kauri Te Matua Ngahere, the "Father of the Forest". That tree is somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 years old.
By the time Kupe chased the great octopus of Muturangi across the ocean and discovered these shores, Te Matua Ngahere would already 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…
Mr Speaker, 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.
Civilisations become great, when old men plant trees.
That is the only way 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".
Look after it.
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
It has been… my privilege.
No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.
