Greens co-leader James Shaw in action while playing pool against the NZ Herald at the Ballroom in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
James Shaw seems a little more relaxed than usual.
It is, after all, the day after the final day of Parliament - perhaps it’s a gentle lull before the intensity of the election campaign begins, or perhaps it’s the afterglow of a few celebrations the night before.
It could also be that the Green Party co-leader is about to take on the Herald’s top pool player on a Friday afternoon and he understands he has absolutely no chance at victory.
We begin with a beer - obligatory before any pool game, that much these two amateurs do know.
“Something hoppy,” requests Shaw, a well-known craft beer aficionado (he grew up in Aro Valley, after all).
He then tells me this is the first time he has played pool in about 12 years. The last time was during his stag do, at this very pool hall on Courtney Place.
Did he do well?
“Absolutely not,” he says through laughter and with a tone that I should really know better.
“What I did find out was that my brother-in-law is an absolute pool shark.”
We spent weeks trying to find a suitable activity for his Herald leaders series interview.
We toyed with going diving: he does have his advanced open water scuba diving qualification and recounts exploring a wreck off the Egyptian coast among his top underwater adventures, well before he became a politician. The middle of winter in Wellington made replicating that a slightly different prospect.
We also thought about getting him to cook me a meal: he does thoroughly enjoy cooking - his wife Annabel is a “real foodie”, he says - when he has time, which he rarely does, but another media outlet beat me to it.
The difficulty of finding an activity speaks to the nature of being a politician, which Shaw has now been for almost 12 years: they simply don’t have a lot of time outside of Parliament to take up hobbies.
Back to pool. I get Shaw to break.
“I’m very nervous, particularly because I’m trying to do something on camera,” he says.
“And it’s been a really, really, really long time.”
But it’s not bad. He in fact hits the balls and they spill across the table evenly - even he laughs at his good fortune. I can hear photographer Mark Mitchell sigh in the distance - this might be a long game.
I come to the rescue and manage to sink a few balls.
Shaw then shares his pool strategy that may or may not give some insight into the Greens: “So my strategy for playing pool is to let you sink all of your balls to make it easier to sink my balls.”
As I soon discover in between shots, while he might not have time for too much outside of politics today, his life before Parliament was a different story.
Shaw was born and raised in Wellington, mostly around the Greens stronghold of Aro Valley, near where he now lives.
He was raised by his mother Cynthia, who split with Shaw’s father before he was born.
From the age of 12, Shaw was raised by two women after Cynthia began a relationship with another teacher.
It was around the time of homosexual law reform.
“It was the 1980s, it was a different place,” said Shaw, adding it was a source of interest but not made to be a big deal.
He has said in the past it was one of his great regrets that he was not in Parliament for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2012.
“I remember when the civil unions bill passed, which I hated, the idea that there was a second class of marriage.”
At 23, he headed overseas to London, where he ended up working in environmental consulting.
“I’ve had an amazing life and an amazing career. And I had the privilege of doing a lot of development work in countries like Brazil, and Argentina, and Mexico, and India, and Indonesia and other places.”
He recounts visiting a mangrove forest in the southeast of Brazil, where a huge proportion of fish in the Atlantic breed.
“I bring all of that to this work, getting to some of the most remote wildernesses and working with local communities and some very, very kind of amazing, dramatic, remote, beautiful places - they’re all incredibly at risk.”
There is a bit of back and forth as Shaw and I fumble around the pool table. We decide it’s an abnormally large table with small pool cues.
After I sink a few more, Shaw’s pool strategy comes into play, and he manages to get a point on the board.
To say he’s ecstatic is an understatement, although relief to have at least one caught on camera might be closer to the truth.
Shaw pinpoints the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 and a discussion in his Wellington High School classroom as when he first became politicised.
Not long after that he joined Greenpeace and Amnesty International, before campaigning with the Green Party in its first election as an 18-year-old.
He even ran on the Green ticket for the Wellington City Council in 1992, losing to a then little-known Andy Foster, who would go on to become mayor.
During his time in London, he said there was a moment when he realised advocacy could only get the green movement so far, and made the decision to return home and run for Parliament.
London was clearly a defining point of his life - he recounts a moment being broke and “hitting rock bottom” but getting through it.
“That was a transformational moment for me and gave me a sense of perspective about pretty much everything else.
“Dealing with crises ... I think that perspective, staying focused on the difference you’re trying to make, connected to your values ... That’s the best way to deal with stress - don’t dramatise or blow things up, there’s enough of that.”
That perspective appears quite relevant to his role as Climate Change Minister, a thankless task it seems where he has achieved arguably the greatest progress in the space in this country’s history, including getting the Opposition onboard, yet was still nearly rolled by his party’s membership.
He is also, despite being the person responsible for the country’s response to the greatest crisis of our age, at times impotent, sitting outside Cabinet by just a few per cent of the vote, and having the Labour majority Government at times make crucial decisions without him.
We’re incidentally speaking the day after climate protesters interrupted Shaw in the final question time of the year.
He didn’t like their timing but said he agreed with the call for a climate election and protest action.
He cites the School Strikes 4 Climate as one of the biggest moments in the movement here, and what helped get the bipartisan Zero Carbon Act over the line.
But he also understands why it’s complicated, in his typically tolerant manner.
Shaw often says he’s pissed off, and that he’s angry, but he rarely shows it.
But if there’s any anger, it’s not at the constituents nor at the farmers, but at the politicians seeking to endlessly exploit the lingering concern.
“Families are under a lot of pressure and so you can completely understand why that’s the focus.
“But we’ve got thousands of people whose lives have been completely disrupted by the cyclones and floods. For them, you know, climate change is that kind of ‘bread and butter issue’ right now.
“There’s always a ‘now isn’t a good time because we’ve got to deal with this thing’.
“The Global Financial Crisis, the Christchurch earthquake, bird flu, an inflationary spike off the back of a Covid response - you’ve got to deal with those things.
“But we have to deal with climate change, or it’ll eat all of those other crises for lunch.”
It’s Shaw’s sixth campaign - he lost the first two - which he says is miles apart from his first in terms of party organisation.
He’s buoyant about the party’s prospects, the quality of their policies on offer, and campaigning - with record numbers of volunteers on board and contesting a record number of seats, for both the party vote and the electorate: “two ticks”.
But Shaw says it’s incredibly different as well in terms of unprecedented levels of abuse and violence. Shaw himself in 2019 was the victim of a physical attack as an MP, but he says he’s more concerned for female MPs, in particular those of colour.
“I think there is a real misogyny and racism that’s kind of washing through at the moment, and it’s ghastly.”
By now Shaw has sunk a few more balls - three to be precise. As we approach the hour mark - not sure that’s a good timeframe for a single game - I manage to put the staff waiting for us to end and head on to the great Aro political debate that evening out of their misery.
I comment that this was probably not the best activity, especially given the drubbing exacted on behalf of the Herald.
I do discover though (and perhaps an option for another year) is Shaw’s passion for Dungeons and Dragons - which perhaps also offers a little insight into his personality and political tenacity.
“I played all the way through high school and university, but not so much when I was living overseas.
“Then when I became an MP it kind of fell apart.”
He reckons there has been a public perception shift about role-playing games, and those who partake in them.
“It used to be a real like, ‘he’s such a dweeb’.
“Now it’s really cool. I think we can thank Stranger Things for that: ‘The geeks shall inherit the earth’, as they say.”
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