Tanczos out in the cold but cool about it

Nandor Tanczos plans to go bush and spend some time with the trees. Picture/ Dean Purcell

When we arrive at Nandor Tanczos' house in Hamilton, he is wearing a blanket. Not just a blanket, thankfully. He's not Keith Locke. But he looks more at ease wearing such a thing than he ever did in his famous blue hemp suit - which always looked a bit like a costume.

He says he imagines being an actor is something like being a politician. "You've got this public profile where everyone thinks they know you, everyone thinks they know who you are."

You become, he agrees, a slightly larger-than-life version of yourself. "It was like this personality that I'd put on for performances and it was sometimes quite weird: the transition to being me at home in my slippers, to going to Parliament and putting on a suit."

He is no longer an MP, so can wear what he wants. It is cold enough to warrant a rug. Most people would put a heater on. But then most people wouldn't be wearing a blanket, or not people I know. Perhaps the people Tanczos knows wouldn't blink.

In the kitchen his partner, Sharney Kiekie Murphy, - "you better watch her, she's a radical" - and their daughter, Pirimaia, are in bare feet. Murphy is making some sort of frittata. She says to Tanczos that she doesn't know the "tikanga" for making this particular dish, so she's just going to do it her way. There are Maori phrases taped to the wall, with English translations.

They do not go in for ostentatious comfort. The dining table, where we do the interview, is a slab of wood with two hard, narrow pews. They are an earnest, and, obviously, hardy household.

In Tanczos' case, this sturdiness is tempered with a dreamy mysticism, Rasta-style. He says he thinks the Greens "can be pretty earnest at times", but that he has a "pretty warped sense of humour, actually. But I mean, I'm pretty serious, I think."

He is 39, which is young for a politician, but a bit old, you might think, for playing hacky sack and riding skateboards. This may be part of his warped sense of humour, which he says he can't explain. "Oh, you'll have to see."

He says one of the ways Parliament has changed him is that "it's matured me. I've got older. I've got greyer". There's no way of telling. He suspects he might be rather greyer than he would have been had he not gone to Wellington.

Other than the hair, he looks younger than his age - this might be a result of all that meditation he's fond of. He can sound much older. He is, as he says, a very serious fellow.

He'd hate to be thought of as pompous: "A word to describe other people. I think we saw it on election night." He's obviously referring to Peter Dunne. There is no love lost there from either side.

He says although most MPs are quite genuine, despite what he thought when he entered politics, "There are some scumbags, no doubt about that." When I ask who, he says "Umm, wait for my book". Then, "I don't want to say. In terms of this interview, I don't think that's the most important thing to be done." Oh dear, that is pompous.

But he is in shock a bit, I think, so perhaps he's not quite himself. He really thought he'd be returning to the House and the day he heard he wasn't, he spent feeling "sort of numbed out, really". It must feel odd to be on the outside while his formerly fellow Green politicians are in Very Important Talks.

Ego comes into it, of course it does, he says. On being dropped down the list: "I've got an ego, like anyone. And being dropped down the list from fourth to seventh is like, 'Oh stink'."

He didn't get depressed or stressed then and he's not going to now. He does meditation and is "pretty good at letting things be".

He hasn't had so much of a profile during his second term, but when he became a Green politician six years ago "there was a real media feeding frenzy, but very much on the externals, the superficial things and there wasn't a great deal of interest in what I was actually saying".

The superficial things were, and are still, his hair. "I tried to turn that attention so when the media says, 'Oh, what about your hair?', I say, 'Well, OK, let's talk about the hair', about natural living and that's the lean into organics. And try and bring it back to the issues." I wonder how well he did. He laughs: "I think probably ultimately not very successfully."

Fascination with the hair

He's in two minds about the ongoing fascination with the hair, the dope smoking, the Rasta beliefs. "On the one hand, being the kind of person that I am is an advantage in terms of its general attention. But it's also been a disadvantage because it's shut me out to some degree being taken seriously on some issues."

He doesn't believe his cannabis law reform bill had a bearing on the Green vote or on his place on the list. "My view is that the net effect is probably neutral."

He makes, by the way, dope smoking sound incredibly arduous. "I say a prayer as I light it, I give thanks to my creator, I give thanks to the plant ... " and so on. He could do this without lighting something mind-altering. "Oh, yeah, sure. But I think it's miraculous that there's plants put on this planet which ... change the way we think."

He sounds slightly peeved that "after six years I'm just starting to be acknowledged in the media for the positive contribution on justice issues". That, you might think, would annoy the hell out of most people. He's not, as we have already ascertained, most people. He just smiles sweetly and says, "Oh well, it's a little bit irritating, but you know ... There's no point in getting all uptight about it."

The Herald ran a letter this week saying he should get a haircut and a real job. That doesn't get him uptight either. It sends him off on a spiel about "conservatives who don't like anyone not like them", and wealthy, white, male, heterosexual people "who are the most privileged people in society". He has, I point out, just about described himself. He is good natured enough to appreciate that little irony.

Besides, he's sure it won't last. He bought a house in Auckland (ha, now he's a property investor) while he was an MP because "I figured this is probably the only time in my life a bank's going to lend me any money".

He's lived most of his life on "the margins of society". It'll be interesting to see whether he returns there. "I don't know. I'll have to see, won't I?"

He'll give it his best. "I want to go bush for a little while. Go and spend some time with some trees ... because trees have an amazing vibration ... they just sit there and they're alive and, I mean obviously, they're plants, they're totally different from us. They're quite amazing.

"To just sit quietly ... to say your thoughts. It just means the constant chatter of the mind, just quieten it down a bit, let it fade away and then when it's still ... or just becomes a quiet babbling brook at the back of the mind rather than the roaring flood at the front, once that happens, then that leaves space."

I say: "Parliament hasn't changed you at all."

"Thank you very much," he says, beaming, "that's the nicest compliment that anyone's paid me in the last couple of weeks."