Shaw confirms Greens will not contest next election

**Satire (unfortunately)

Following the announcement that the NZ First led coalition government would not be instituting a capital gains tax, Green party co-leader James Shaw has released a statement:

I am a man of my word. I realise that this is a rare characteristic amongst politicians, but as you all know the Green party is a party of principles and I intend to stay true to mine.

Because of my bedrock principle of being true to my word, I have decided that Ardern is not the only one who can make a Captain’s Call.  I have, therefore, ruled out any involvement by the Green party in the next election cycle.

As I said in the House in February and which was reported by Stuff at the time.

In his speech, Shaw laid out his case for a CGT which would tax gains on capital (such as the profit made when selling a house) similarly to the way income from work is taxed.

“The Green Party have long been calling for this fundamental imbalance to be addressed. Every expert group in living memory has agreed with us. But no government has been bold enough to actually do it,” Shaw said.

“If we want to reduce the wealth gap, to fix the housing crisis and to build a more productive, high-wage economy, we need to tax income from capital the same way as we tax income from work.”

“The last question we should be asking ourselves is, ‘can we be re-elected if we do this?’ The only question we should be asking ourselves is, ‘do we deserve to be re-elected if we don’t?‘”  

Stuff

Clearly, we were not actually bold enough to get a capital gains tax brought in, and thus, as I said then and still maintain today, we do not deserve to be re-elected.

Naturally, my captain’s call has not been universally welcomed by all current members of the parliamentary party, as many of them are well aware that they are basically unemployable in the real world.

Sitting around tweeting irrelevances and attempting to stir up racial discord, as some of my colleagues do all day, or inventing instances of hate speech, does not actually pay the mortgage. So, clearly, this decision does not sit well with the women.

Whether or not the Green party contests any further elections will be up to the party membership, but for me, this decision was the only one I could make. Otherwise, my words would be seen as simply idle posturing and that I could not live with.

It would be like someone campaigning against carbon and then flying off to a conference on the other side of the world: simply hypocritical.

Although we are only the junior part of the NZ First led Coalition we will remain in parliament for this term and will support the other parties with whom we obviously disagree on this critically important matter.

This is not the first dead rat the party has had to swallow and it probably won’t be the last.