Shane’s world: Same office, new pitch for NZ First’s deputy

It’s back to the future for Shane Jones as the NZ First minister picks up where he left off. Vernon Small reports.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s a fair point New Zealand First’s second-ranked minister Shane Jones makes as he settles into his Beehive offices.

Because it is the same sixth floor suite he had as minister of infrastructure, forestry, and regional development during his days in the 2017-2020 Ardern Government.

There is no art on the wall, few staff and the ministerial IT system is in transition. The Beehive website, where government information and press releases are posted, is showing “Site under maintenance”. But some things have changed. While in public Jones reined in some of his views during the Ardern years, as a new minister in the National-led coalition he is clearly taking the gloves off.

He has picked up associate roles in energy and finance and has taken on the resources portfolio – a specific request of leader and deputy prime minister Winston Peters. He again has regional development, with a $1.2 billion fund to splash on infrastructure instead of the $3b Provincial Growth Fund of 2017-2020.

Most controversially he has been given Oceans and Fisheries – a Dame Jacinda Ardern creation aimed at balancing commercial and environmental issues.

In 2017, Ardern gave the fisheries role to Stuart Nash rather than Jones – a move to avoid criticism over Jones’ past links to commercial fishing and industry donations for his campaign.

The 2023-vintage Jones goes there without prompting. “It’s disingenuous of me to hide from the public or other stakeholders [that] my background in fisheries was through the Māori Fisheries Commission and it was commercial fisheries.”

He was also chair of Sealord and later was appointed by National’s minister of foreign affairs Murray McCully as a fisheries economic ambassador, working to help Pacific islands get the most from their fisheries.

“Greenpeace have already complained that I should not be in the fisheries portfolio. But … just because a party or a candidate receives donations that are openly declared, and were a part of a legitimate electoral process, that should not be – but it will be – used to either demean or declare that someone is unfit to hold the portfolio. I should imagine there’s going to be a fair degree of that froth around the fisheries portfolio.”

When it comes to the consultations around bottom-trawling in the Hauraki Gulf, he says: “I don’t know where the ball will bounce.”

But he baulks at exemptions for Māori customary fishing.

“There’s one part of it that I was alarmed about, that there was going to be closures to secure better outcomes for local stocks, highly localised areas, but an exemption made for the local tangata whenua, that they could continue to harvest. I don’t like that. If the situation is so severe and the science says it’s so severe, then we all stand shoulder to shoulder as Kiwis and for a period of time we lock it down.”

It is a typically forthright comment from Jones, who has long been one of the most eloquent – and occasionally florid – voices in New Zealand politics.

Thirty years ago, when I first interviewed him in Parliament in 1993, he revelled in the nickname “Geronimo” – apparently given because of his ponytail and tooled leather boots, when he was studying in the United States.

Back then, he bowled up to the press gallery to defend Northland kaumatua Sir Graham Latimer against calls for the Government to strip him of his knighthood after he was found guilty of negligence in

filing tax returns. Sir Graham, as president of the Māori Council, was a key player in litigation to secure Māori rights over te reo and to challenge asset sales by state entities. He was also pivotal in securing a clause in the SOE Act that boosted the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in the constitution.

Jones says his own history in the Māori rights movement started when he left St Stephens school and was swept into the Bastion Point protest, and then eventually “caught the tide uncorked” by the Lange government. “But what we sought to do was recover property rights. Everything that we were endeavouring to do with Matiu Rata and Sir Graham Latimer was about property rights.”

Now he sees different issues in play, and is backing the Government’s agenda, including abolishing the Māori Health Authority and a pledge to either repeal or replace all references to the Treaty of Waitangi principles in legislation.

“I was always opposed to the Treaty being deployed as a divining rod in terms of how you allocated social resources. I don’t like the notion that, in an almost Marxist sense, the Treaty is a doctrine of eternal rights, because those rights reflect perpetual revolution. That’s the thinking of the leadership of the Māori Party. Of course, they’re not bright enough to explain it in that vein. They’ve reified – indeed, deified – what they conceive to be the rights of the treaty to be a permanent, eternal set of rights that do not have to go through the democratic sieve, or indeed, the rational analysis of science and economics.”

He opposed signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People “shoulder to shoulder with Helen Clark”, although National did sign up.

“That forced a redefinition of the role and the primacy of the Treaty in matters designed to change the governance of New Zealand. That fed an appetite of essentially reordering the governance of New Zealand. Now it sounds a bit high-faluting what I’m saying, but that’s what I think has happened. The latter portion of that happened without anyone mandating it.”

Does he feel embarrassed about the Government’s direction on Māori issues?

“No I don’t. I really think that the changes that we’re making – we are cleaning the Augean stables of Wellington: the excess of how te Tiriti [is used] which has become tokenistic, give everything a Māori name.”

He understands the desire to use Māori names but “the output and impact” of those departments for Māori “has not improved commensurate with the ubiquitousness of all these names”.

It’s not just in the Treaty area that Jones is giving himself some Herculean challenges. He is also backing changes that put the Government on a collision course with environmentalists and some communities opposed to developments.

Those include a fast-track law giving ministers the power to say yes or no to key infrastructure projects – a move signalled by Chris Bishop, the Minister Responsible for RMA reform. The new law, proposed by Peters during coalition talks, picks up the fast-track law put in place by former environment minister David Parker, even though the rest of Parker’s RMA changes will be scrapped.

But instead of leaving the final call with an expert panel after a referral from the minister, as occurred under Labour, Bishop and Jones want to give ministers the power to OK major projects upfront. That would leave the panel to set what Bishop calls “the nitty-gritty” of the consents.

Jones concedes this could be seen as picking winners or “Muldoonist”, but he and Bishop are “hand in glove, though I am not sure who’s the mace and who’s the velvet glove”.

For critically important projects, he believes the minister should make the decision. “It’s not a situation where jurists or panel members make a decision on behalf of New Zealand. I believe that the moral authority and the origin of the legitimacy should be with the politicians.”

His fear, as Regional Development Minister, was the time it takes to deliver infrastructure projects.

“Regional economies need an efficient, robust way of boosting infrastructure outcomes that draw on common sense and do not get controlled by engineers, protesters and objectors, and they become so expensive that the projects don’t go ahead.”

The Government’s coalition agreements also signal plans to promote greater use of minerals, as well as repeal the current ban on future oil and gas exploration permits.

Jones thinks that lifting the oil and gas ban may not lead to much exploration because investors have deep concerns about sovereign risk and that the rules may change again.

The Government is also eyeing a change to the blanket ban on mining on conservation land. Ministers are planning a joint Cabinet paper on the issue. “I don’t want to feed the slightly delirious minds who feel that we’re starting to mine very sensitive conservation areas, but stewardship land is not conservation land. Stewardship land was placed temporarily from the lands and survey department in DOC and it was to be further allocated.”

Jones said his plans for the resources sector are not just about “the residual coal or gold industry, both of which, I have to confess, I’m very keen to see continuing for as long as possible. I’m sick to death of watching all my nephs (nephews) pack up and go to Kalgoorlie and dig up Western Australia yet we’ve got legitimate opportunities here in New Zealand”.

He believes a clearer pathway is needed for consents. For example, an Oceania Gold project in the Coromandel faced litigation and long delays.

“What about the people and the families that are starting to drift to Australia if they don’t have meaningful jobs in that part of New Zealand? And who determined that a blind frog is more important than the communities, the whānau, and the businesses of that area? Who is the best moral arbiter of that? I say the politicians are. And if you don’t like us, vote us out.”

It’s a risk he has faced before.

“We are cleaning the Augean stables of Wellington: the excess of how te Tiriti [is used] which has become tokenistic, give everything a Māori name.” Shane Jones