Polity: Shane Jones speaks out

• notices and features
• 10 years ago
• Categories: labour, Shane Jones
• Tags: polity

For any long-suffering political activist, it is difficult to argue with what Rob Salmond says about Shane Jones and his less than elegant exit. Unless they wrap their own party of the single personality around them, politics isn’t really the place for a caucus prima donna with an appetite for awkwardly timed solos. 

On 3news last night, Shane Jones gave a staged interview where he got some things off his chest. Not exactly a graceful exit, but there you go.

Two of the things he said were especially interesting to me. Shane said:

1. Labour is taking too narrow a view of what counts as acceptable ideas for its MPs to have. It needs to be a broader church; and
2. If Labour had formed a coalition with the Greens, Jones would have walked away.

Now I like Shane and I agree with his first point, as I said yesterday. But he simply cannot have it both ways.

If you are going to demand that everyone else be a team player within Labour, accommodating in the caucus views they do not agree with, you can’t then turn around and refuse to be a team player in a Labour-led government with another party whose views you may not agree with.

Maybe it was just the bravado of a newly free man. But the sentiment was ugly – I won’t suck it up, but everyone else should.

Either everyone is a team player, or nobody is. Shane Jones included.