2020 election: James Shaw criticizes Winston Peters and ‘politics of division’

Green Party co-leader James Shaw is full of disdain, but is not surprised by Winston Peters’ “politics of division”, which he calls a desperate call for votes.

Peters delivered a searing race relations speech in Orewa yesterday that was reminiscent of then-national leader Don Brash’s “one law for all” speech in 2004, which saw National emerge in the polls.

Peters said that too many Maori were “stuck in the past and want you to pay for it,” and threatened to turn the coalition upside down to block a deal on Ihumātao.

“If Labor rules after the elections, by themselves, God forbid, or with the Greens, God help us all, then they will make a deal in Ihumātao,” Peters said yesterday.

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Peters said a deal would trigger the reopening of a flood of claims set out in the Waitangi Treaty, even though the occupiers say it’s not a treaty issue, but a cultural heritage issue.

Grant Robertson, the minister leading the negotiations around Ihumātao, has also said that there is no intention to do anything that could unravel the final and full treaty agreements.

Shaw said today that Peters lived up to his old tricks by misrepresenting the subject.

“That’s his trick. He’s trying to use division politics to increase his vote and get back in Parliament. I don’t like it, I never have.”

“It didn’t surprise me at all. It made me a little sad.”

Shaw said Peters’s tactic wouldn’t resonate because people had moved on from “that worldview.”

“He’s desperate for votes, to be honest, and he’s using an old formula that has worked for him in the past, and I just hope people see it.”

Shaw and Peters have grown increasingly critical of each other in recent months as the campaign drew near, and today Shaw introduced a Labor-green government at a public meeting at the East Harbor Women’s Club in Eastbourne.

At the meeting, he outlined three crisis issues: poverty, climate change and biodiversity.

He spoke about the Greens’ wealth tax on net assets over $ 1 million, the next phase of climate action to target specific industries (agriculture, heating and transportation), and increased protections for marine life and oceans.

“Transportation is what really worries me,” said Shaw, who will release the policy on this next week.

“We have fallen completely in love with Ford Rangers. For every electric car, we bring 16 Ford Rangers. Emissions from transportation are frankly out of control.”

He also shot National Party leader Judith Collins, who said she was “reaping grievances” for saying that Labor and the Greens hated farmers.

Sustainability issues around food and fiber production were being led by farmers themselves, Shaw said.

“They want to solve that problem and they want support for that transition. It really irritates me when I hear people say that we hate farmers. What we want is better for farmers.”

It was “counterintuitive,” he said, but the best way to get Jacinda Ardern to prime minister again was to vote for the Green Party, which would ensure that the center-left bloc is larger than the center-right.

If the Greens did not return to Parliament, there would be more than 100,000 wasted votes on the left; there were 162,000 green voters in 2017.

He later told the Herald that messages about strategic voting needed to be fine-tuned as October 17 approached.

“It’s around when we’re in the [5 per cent] limit. There is a group of [left-leaning] People I know are sitting around thinking, ‘What’s the best use of our vote?’ I would say it is to give the party vote to the Green Party. “

The Greens had 6 percent support in Tuesday’s 1 News Colmar Brunton poll, which followed Shaw’s mea culpa for his defense of the private Green School.

But the party in general does not fare as well on election night as it did in pre-election polls.

“I know we have a really strong base of support,” Shaw said.

“We saw that in 2017 when we had a very challenging season and we still got 6.2 percent overnight.

“The challenge for me now is that I want to make sure that the number is higher to get more MPs.”

Even if that means cutting Labor votes?

“Well, they seem to have a lot to share.”

This week, Shaw pushed back Julie Anne Genter’s comments that the Greens’ estate tax would be an end result.

Ardern has already scrapped the Greens’ wealth tax.

Shaw said the Greens today do not draw baselines, despite some party members pushing for the party to be more aggressive as Labor embraced the center.

“If I said that asset tax and a guaranteed minimum income are the end result of this election, and then the Labor Party said, ‘You can do that, but you can’t have anything about climate change or marine conservation,’ it would be unacceptable, “Shaw said. He said.

“If you start putting lines in the sand, all you end up with is the other side having to rule things out. Then you end up in a zero-sum situation where you can’t negotiate anything after the election.”