Cabinet minister Shane Jones talks about his role in NZ First. Video / Mark Mitchell
Shanes Jones is a minister for the third time.
He is the No 2 ranked MP in New Zealand First, charged with fronting for the party regularly on core issues.
He advocates for pro-development and pro-mining policies and calls himself the Prince of the Provinces.
Whether he is explaining his views on the Treaty of Waitangi or trying to make mining virtuous again, Cabinet minister Shane Jones is subtly trying to change his behaviour as he goes about his politics.
He is playing the jester less than he did the lasttime he was in Government.
Jones acknowledges the shift after getting a message from leader Winston Peters about a year ago.
“There was a sense from Winston that he didn’t really want a 65-year-old larrikin,” Jones tells the Herald.
Jones was viewed with suspicion in 2017 and some party members set up a Facebook page to white-ant him. It eventually fizzled and while no one talks about Peters leaving politics, Jones is the obvious successor whenever that vacancy occurs.
He believes he has now gained the trust of most members and colleagues and that for the party to prosper, it has to have solutions.
“At a deeper level, we’ve got to show people that we are strong at the core.
“If a party doesn’t have strength at its centre, I believe voters can sense that…Winston and myself, whilst they throw stones and rocks at us from time to time, when you think about the skirmishes and the travails we have been through, we are rock solid at the centre.”
Fishing in the same pond
Jones is conveying the party’s central messages almost every day on social media.
It is not just a matter of keeping up the party’s profile. In a coalition with clear overlaps, the party is not willing to let National make all the running on law and order, or let Act dominate the debate on Treaty of Waitangi issues. They are largely fishing in the same pond.
But in championing development and the extractive industries, Jones has the loudest voice in Government.
Subtlety doesn’t always sit well with him. It evaporated entirely on Lambton Quay on Monday. On his way for a haircut, he crossed the street to talk to a group of climate protesters objecting to his bill overturning the 2018 ban on new oil and gas exploration. They were not in the mood for a debate.
He yelled back, saying they were hysterical, hyperbolic and losing sight of the facts.
Valerie Morse (left), and other protesters from Oil Free Wellington shouting at Resources Minister Shane Jones on Monday. Photo / Azaria Howell
In reality, it was the sort of media opportunity politicians often relish for its power to amplify their message and discredit their opponents.
And Jones has plenty of messages: pro-industry, pro-development, pro-oil and gas exploration, pro-interventionist, pro-farming, anti-woke, anti-Green, anti-Māori Party, pro-aquaculture, and not forgetting pro-mining. Or as he put it in a speech this term in support of mining for rare earth minerals: “…if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy.”
Jones is in the middle of a series of 15 regional summits in his role as Regional Development Minister, with an investment fund of $1.2 billion to oversee. He has had one in Northland, Bay of Plenty, Whanganui-Manawatū, and the West Coast.
Jones urged them to share their ideas for growth with “the ultimate growth politician”.
“I am a guy, an apostle, who believes in the growth gospel. Growth ideas don’t come from No 1 The Terrace [Treasury]. They come from the regions. They come from the business community.”
He talked about the $16 million the Government had just co-invested in an aquaculture enterprise in Ōpōtiki – and the Cook Strait ferries.
He also urged them to organise themselves to work out their own priorities.
“I’ll be a megaphone for you but the quality or the volume of the megaphone is a reflection of how well-organised you are.”
To a woman educator who had a grizzle about women being generally ignored, Jones recounted his own commitment to women and education, saying two of his daughters went to nearby Nga Tawa boarding school for two years - “which nearly sent me broke”.
Speeches delivered with a flourish
There is often a sense of anticipation before Jones opens his mouth – who will he castigate or insult, will it get him into trouble, will it be profound or flippant or will it be a riddle?
Whatever it is, it is often delivered with a flourish.
He has called the Electricity Authority as effective as a chocolate teapot in its regulation of profiteering energy companies.
He called a judge a communist – although she once belonged to the Socialist Action League.
He described environmental NGOs as “green politburo banshees” and particular opponents to seabed-mining as “pixie-like hāpu in Taranaki”.
He went to Blackball in May to give a speech reclaiming the virtues of mining and told The Country’s Jamie Mackay later that there was no point “being poor in paradise”.
“It’s all very well stroking Papatūānuku or caressing the Earth Mother but if you are going to do it from a position of impoverishment or economic uncertainty, you are going to wake up every day devoid of choices because you are still going to be poor... as God as my witness, I’m going to expand mining in New Zealand to boost our economic resilience and I don’t care about these woke-riddled muchkins who want to fry eggs on solar panels.”
After chairing the Māori Fisheries Commission, he entered Parliament in 2005 and was admitted to Cabinet for the final year of Helen Clark’s Government.
I’m going to expand mining in New Zealand to boost our economic resilience and I dont care about these woke-riddled muchkins who want to fry eggs on solar panels.
Jones retired as a Labour MP in 2014 and has now been a NZ First minister twice, in 2017 in the Labour– NZ First coalition and in 2023 in the current National-Act-NZ First coalition.
In a previous interview with the Herald, Jones put the switch in parties down to two main things: Labour changing, and the personal support Peters showed Jones when he was stood down in 2012 pending an investigation into him granting citizenship five years earlier to Labour Party donor Bill Liu.
“That counted for a lot…I never forgot that.”
The last time Jones was in Government, he oversaw the $3 billion provincial growth fund – referred to at the time as “a slush fund” by many of his current coalition colleagues in National and Act.
The potential sleaze factor has been reduced by requiring that 75 per cent of the $1.2 billion is designated for co-investments in regional projects, not grants. As well as Regional Development, he wears the ministerial hats of Resources, Oceans and Fisheries, Associate Energy and Associate Finance.
Shane Jones calls himself the Prince of the Provinces. Photo / Mark Mitchell
He is working professionally with many of those former adversaries but says Chris Bishop is his favourite.
“He is the ultimate pragmatist.”
From Awanui to Harvard
Jones calls himself the Prince of the Provinces.
He clearly tries hard to be modest but it is difficult. He is, after all, a high achiever in both te ao Māori and the Pākehā world.
“I never advertise the fact that a boy from Awanui made it all the way to Harvard,” he tells me unprompted.
But from his description of his upbringing, he was regarded as a special boy from the outset, doted on by his grandmother, Ma Jones, one of 13 children of Māori and Croatian heritage who went on to have 17 children herself. Shane Jones is the oldest of six children and he and his first wife Ngareta had seven.
Jones’ mother, Ruth, was a teacher and his father, Peter, was a farmer. They spent their first few years of married life living with Ma Jones in Awanui before buying a house on the marae just across the paddock and the small boy went between both.
Nana Myrtle on his mother’s side, “an extraordinarily bright woman”, was an avid reader of Reader’s Digest and magazines such as Let’s Learn.
“The real flowering for me in terms of status and confidence in things Māori happened through St Stephen’s School,” said Jones.
“But I have to give the glory to my mother and my grandmother because you have to think about the real formative influences in your life and that’s what they are traceable back to.”
From Ma Jones, her sister Aunty Hazel, and the Rev Maori Marsden, Jones had a thorough grounding in te reo Māori, the whakapapa of the north, and the Bible. Their hopes of him becoming an Anglican priest went unfulfilled but the church is still a big part of his life.
He is widely recognised as being among the creme de la creme of native speakers. Jones led the Government speeches at King Tuheitia’s tangi last month and at Waitangi in February in which he recited the elaborate whakapapa links to distinguished visitors to Ngāpuhi.
Waitangi this year, from left, Christopher Luxon, Tama Potaka, Winston Peters, Shane Jones and David Seymour. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Jones pro-development, pro-growth, pro-jobs agenda is a largely positive focus for him. But his other big interest, the development of Treaty of Waitangi politics, is more negative, emotional and upsetting for him.
“I am highly distressed by the way in which the whole debate around the Treaty, the whole debate around Māori identity has got out of kilter,” he said.
“I don’t like the idea that the Treaty has been dismembered and now it has become fashionable to only conceive of the Treaty as Te Tiriti. And if you are Māori and you do not subscribe to a conception of the Treaty beyond Te Titiri, if you refuse to see the Treaty in any other way but Te Tiriti, then you are ‘wasting your Māori blood’ or you are ‘a traitor to your Māori blood’.
“You have got no idea how that makes me angry.”
He and Peters in Parliament are easily riled by Te Pāti Māori, and particularly its focus on the effects of colonisation and whether Māori ceded sovereignty when the Treaty was signed (Te Pāti Māori says No and Jones says Yes).
“They have invested the Treaty with a meaning that is upheld by a sense of a separate sovereignty.”
That was not something Tāmati Wāka Nene, Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir James Hēnare or Matiu Rata ever conceived,” said Jones.
“I have to confess though, increasingly among our young people, there is a view that mana motuhake means a separate native sovereignty.
“And I acknowledge that the Māori Party have turned that conception of the Treaty into a new recruitment tool and rally cry. And politics is a contest of ideas and it is not an idea that I like so I am going to decry it at every opportunity.”
Te Pāti Māori caucus from left: Takuta Ferris, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, Hana Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader Rawiri Waititi and Takutai Tarsh Kemp. Photo / Te Pāti Māori / Kiriana Eparaima-Hautapu
NZ First has two major Treaty-focused policy initiatives in the next two years: a review of the Treaty principles in legislation; and to refocus the Waitangi Tribunal away from areas NZ First thinks do not concern it.
Jones has referred to the tribunal as a “star chamber” and “totalitarian” for which he was rebuked by Attorney-General Judith Collins, and Peters.
“The lens that they are looking at it through is a lens of perpetuating grievance,” he said.
“It’s almost like a Marxist thing, ie the permanent revolution.”
He said it was a legitimate political theory to see oneself as part of a marginalised group and “to participate in the perpetual revolution or perpetual hīkoi”.
“I just don’t think that is the purpose of the Waitangi Tribunal.”
He did not want to fall out with the tribunal and stakeholders personally in the inevitable fight that would follow. But they had to be prepared to debate the philosophy that drove them.
“I have stood for office at great expense without the protections of judicial independence, without the safeguards of legal or judicial process but the rigour of political debate which hardly knows any boundaries,” he says.
“So I don’t want to be closed down or shouted down through nuanced petty processes when I derive my ability or my legitimacy to participate in the contest of ideas through a political process and they didn’t - and somehow, my process is ‘soiled’ and theirs is ‘pure’.
