Party co-leaders scale heights in getting to grips with work ahead

Russel Norman and Jeantte Fitzsimons.

Russel Norman spent his first week as co-leader of the Green Party discussing strategy with co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons in a typically Green way.

Typically different, that is.

The co-leaders talked together all day Thursday as they climbed the Coromandel range peak on the property Ms Fitzsimons shares with her husband, Harry Parke.

And then again at night over pasta, beetroot and carrot salad from the garden, and baked German apple pancake that Fitzsimons whipped up in her solar-powered kitchen.

Then again yesterday morning.

Mr Norman left the Kauaeranga Valley yesterday with his partner Katya Paquin, a sister to the Oscar-winning actress Anna Paquin, to drive back to Wellington in their Toyota Corolla - a 1988 model.

"We keep it very well tuned," Mr Norman quickly insisted, lest an image takes hold of his car leaving a trail of sooty emissions.

The pair met when she worked as Ms Fitzsimons' secretary in Parliament and they now share a house in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai.

Today he delivers his second speech as party co-leader, subbing for MP Sue Kedgley at an animal welfare conference.

He speaks of the assignment with surprising eagerness, not exactly exuding a love of things furry but more a love of things intellectual. "Coming out of university I studied philosophy quite a lot so I have always been quite interested in questions of animal rights and how it all works."

He cites a "riveting" book by a fellow Australian Green philosopher Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle.

"If you look at what has been going on in human history there has been this expanding circle of things that matter. That circle is starting to include animals other than human beings. I have a lot of sympathy for that philosophical position."

Mr Norman, 39, won the leadership ballot a week ago, filling the vacancy created by the sudden death last year of Rod Donald, with whom he shares more than a passing resemblance.

Mr Norman moved to New Zealand from Australia in 1997, having visited in 1996 to help with the election campaign, when the Greens were still part of the Alliance.

He made a close study of the Alliance, gaining a PhD from Sydney's Macquarie University with his 100,000-word thesis, The Relationship Between Internal Democracy and External Effectiveness: A Case Study of the New Zealand Alliance.

"I was very interested in the Alliance, the idea of trying to pull together red, green brown if you like. I thought it was a very interesting political project."

And the conclusion of his thesis? It lacked democracy and that's what did it in.

For five years he lived on Waiheke Island on a farm and vineyard that used to be part-owned by former Alliance MP Laila Harre and her husband, Barry Gribben.

Mr Norman grew up in a working-class housing commission area of Brisbane - state housing that the tenants eventually buy.

His father was a boiler-maker in the sugar refineries of north Queensland before going back to school to qualify as an engineer and to eventually lecture in engineering, "a really big deal in our area".

His mother worked in the hospital laundry, delivered direct-mail around the neighbourhood and took in ironing. It was his mother who, having lost the battle to name her youngest son James, insisted that if he was to be Russell, it would jolly well be with only one "l" to be different.

Mr Norman was the youngest of six, and the only one among his siblings to go to university - three times.

The first time, he spent 3 1/2 years studying medicine at Brisbane before dropping out, much to his mother's horror.

In that time he became politically active in Australia's Socialist Workers Party before later enlisting with the Australian Greens.

"I left socialist politics ... because they didn't take the environment [or] democracy seriously enough."

Asked if there was a catalyst for his joining the Greens he says no, but then speaks with nostalgic reverence for once-threatened eucalypt trees in Gippsland, South Australia.

"Something about the majesty of those trees was very, very moving and has never really left me."