The steel behind the smile: Radical Jeanette Fitzsimons revealed in new book

Friday, 27 May 2022

Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons was an MP for 14 years, and the first Green politician in the world to win an electorate seat. She died in March 2020, aged 75.

Jeanette Fitzsimons was once voted the politician people would most like as a babysitter. But a new book about the former Green MP and party leader explains how Fitzsimons was a true radical, whose ideas were far ahead of her time. Mike White talks to Fitzsimons’ biographer, Gareth Hughes, as the country’s Green movement marks its 50th anniversary.

They met in the Koru Lounge, surrounded by paperwork and stale pastries.

Gareth Hughes wore a new shirt.

Jeanette Fitzsimons wore the look of a harried political leader trying to keep her head and party above water after a devastating few months.

Hughes was 24, a Greenpeace activist and employee, who was interviewing for a job as Fitzsimons’ executive assistant.

Fitzsimons was a veteran of 10 years in Parliament, and co-leader of the Green Party, which had again been shafted and shut out of government by Labour.

Former Green MP, Gareth Hughes, began writing about Jeanette Fitzsimons after he left Parliament in 2020.

* Green Party farewells MP Gareth Hughes as he heads to Quarantine Island

* Jeanette Fitzsimons: Unflinching visionary who held true to her values

* A look back at former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons' political legacy

He was in awe of his potential boss.

She was in a hurry.

Jeanette Fitzsimons above her Coromandel farm in 1996. For many of her generation, returning to the land was a temporary experiment, but for Fitzsimons, it was a way of living her political beliefs.

When it was all over, and they’d gone their separate ways, Fitzsimons phoned Hughes to say he hadn’t got the job.

But she had another offer – did he want a role with the Greens focusing on climate change and youth issues?

That was 2006, and Hughes spent the next two years working alongside Fitzsimons.

At the end of that time, she encouraged Hughes to stand for the Greens at the 2008 election.

Jeanette Fitzsimons attended Epsom Girls' Grammar in her last two years at school, but felt an outsider, having grown up in the country.

And in February 2010, when Fitzsimons retired, Hughes, then 28, was next on the party list and took her place.

“I didn’t have a cent to my name when I entered Parliament,” remembers Hughes.

“So Jeanette lent me $10,000 to buy my first suit, and move to Wellington.”

Ten years later, Hughes woke and turned on the radio, to hear Fitzsimons’ husband, Harry Parke, talking about her.

She had died the previous day, on March 5, 2020, after a stroke. Earlier that day she had been chainsawing firewood on the small Coromandel farm she and Parke owned. She was 75.

Jeanette Fitzsimons was always passionate about the environment.

Just a week before, Hughes had visited her, and the pair had sat up late drinking wine and discussing what the Greens’ environmental priorities should be for that year’s election.

The environment had been central to most of Fitzsimons’ conversations for 50 years by then, as she fought to protect it, improve it, and change how people viewed it.

She had moved from a concerned observer to a revered leader of the Green movement. She was the country’s first Green MP, the first Green in the world to win an electorate seat, and headed one of the country’s major political parties for 14 years.

Growing up in a conservative rural family, few might have forecast this future.

She spent her primary school years in Mosgiel, slight, shy and unsporty.

When her parents, Jack and Doris, shifted to Waiuku, southwest of Auckland, Fitzsimons rode horses, buried herself in books, and dreamt of being a ballerina.

Jack and Doris were teachers, lovers of the outdoors, and sensibly frugal: When Fitzsimons lost a jandal, she walked to school wearing the remaining jandal and a sandal.

Tony Brunt, left, addresses a Values Party rally in Nelson during the 1972 election campaign. Brunt remains proud of the role he played in the Greens’ evolution, and in early June, many of those involved in that campaign will gather for a reunion dinner in Wellington.

At college, she learnt the violin and played in the school orchestra. At university, she studied music and French.

Friends from the time recall she was never fascinated by fashion: Even as the 1960s unleashed rebellion, Fitzsimons didn’t talk about hemlines and hairdos, but issues.

Her cerebral nature showed when her first husband, Bevin Fitzsimons, proposed to her.

“Oh gosh, I hadn’t thought about that,” Jeanette replied. “That’s interesting. Thank you very much – but can I think about it?”

It took her six months to make a decision and agree.

After teaching for two years, the couple travelled to Europe in 1968, ending up working and living in Geneva.

Jeanette Fitzsimons, centre, at a Values Party conference in the mid-1970s.

And it was here that Fitzsimons’ environmental awakening occurred, as she read the books that proliferated in the early 1970s about how the planet was being poisoned.

As she sat on a beach in Corsica in 1972, Fitzsimons opened a letter from her father. It contained two clippings about a new political party back in New Zealand – the Values Party.

Jack was a dedicated National voter, but understood his daughter’s questioning and nascent political interest.

“I think it might have some interesting ideas you might like,” he wrote.

On May 30, 1972, Tony Brunt stood up in front of 60 people at Victoria University, gave a marathon monologue, and audaciously launched the Values Party.

The 25-year-old student was kicking against the traditional Labour-National, left-right duopoly, and harnessing people’s concern about unbridled economic growth and the damage it threatened, as demonstrated by the Save Manapōuri campaign.

An early Values advertisement included the line, “Can money buy us a new planet?”

Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons celebrate the Greens entering Parliament under their own name in 1999.

It was the world’s first national environmentally-focused party – the first Green Party, before the name had been coined.

“It was a time of great idealism for me,” recalls Brunt, now 75. “And I suppose I’ve got to be grateful that I was once idealistic.”

Within six months, Values had won 2% of the vote at the general election. Three years later, the party got more than 5%.

“We stepped off a cliff into space in the 1972 campaign,” says Brunt, “and it was a 50:50 call whether the whole movement would have relevance in the years ahead.”

From Geneva, Fitzsimons sent a letter applying to join Values, feeling she had found her political tribe, determined to make its policies relevant.

Jeanette Fitzsimons beside Rod Donald’s empty seat in Parliament, days after he died in 2005.

When she returned home in 1974, now with two children, Fitzsimons immediately began environmental work, becoming Values’ energy spokesperson, and standing for the party in 1978.

But when Values was crushed at the 1981 election, gaining less than 0.2%, Fitzsimons resigned her party role, lamenting, “There seems to be no room in New Zealand politics at the moment for a Green party.”

At the moment…

Within 10 years, Green groups, including Values, had coalesced into the Green Party, and despite a Listener writer branding it “all bumper sticker, no car” got nearly 7% of the vote in 1990.

And by 1996, with MMP now operating, Fitzsimons, her Green Party co-leader Rod Donald, and Phillida Bunkle, became the country’s first Green MPs, albeit under the Alliance umbrella.

Fitzsimons’ father, Jack, by then 97 and a Green voter, was in Parliament’s gallery to hear his daughter’s maiden speech.

Jeanette Fitzsimons makes her valedictory speech in Parliament in February 2010.

She would remain in Parliament for 14 years.

Gareth Hughes only recently discovered the truth about why Fitzsimons remained an MP for so long.

Shortly after the 2005 election, Fitzsimons resolved to retire, confident the party was well settled in Parliament, and well set to continue without her.

The morning she was due to fly to Wellington to inform the Green Party executive of her plans, she received a phone call telling her Rod Donald had died a few hours earlier.

Donald had been her political companion for a decade, and his death, aged just 48, rocked Fitzsimons.

While Fitzsimons never managed to get arrested, her biographer, Gareth Hughes, was more successful during his time as a Greenpeace activist.

Her retirement plans were immediately sacrificed to help the Greens survive, and she nursed the party through another election, eventually leaving Parliament in 2010.

Gareth Hughes remembers Fitzsimons wheeling in filing cabinets to his office as he took over her parliamentary place and portfolios, the heft of the paperwork matched by the enormous weight of responsibility he felt.

Throughout her political career, Fitzsimons was caricatured and chastised as some loony fringe dweller.

National MP Lockwood Smith once quipped that for all the time Fitzsimons spent worrying about the planet, “it’s amazing how little time she spends on it.”

His National colleague Max Bradford branded her a Stalinist, and one time raged that she had an “idiotic, ill-thought-through, prehistoric view of the world”.

Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson were both strongly influenced and encouraged by Jeanette Fitzsimons.

Fitzsimons never bit back.

Even when riled, she remained rational.

She used facts as ammunition, employed science not sarcasm, and chose intellect over insults, big ideas over petty personal attack.

Jeanette Fitzsimons with Gareth Hughes in 2018, protesting at an oil industry conference in Wellington.

“Nothing in politics requires you to be rude, abrasive or contemptuous,” she once said. “To me, resorting to that type of behaviour is the mark of failure.”

Importantly, whenever she criticised something, she always provided a solution or alternative.

By the time Fitzsimons left Parliament, to return to her Coromandel eco-house and farm, she was widely admired by colleagues and the public for her dignity, principles and research, affectionately known as the “steel magnolia”.

Prime Minister Helen Clark with Green Party co-leaders Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons during coalition talks in October 2005. Clark spurned the Greens in favour of forming a government with New Zealand First and United Future, incensing Donald and Fitzsimons. Donald died a month later, aged 48.

She continued to protest – chaining herself to factory gates, sailing into oil-drilling zones, infiltrating mining conferences.

Fitzsimons tried many times to be arrested, believing this would bring attention to the causes she was fighting for, but failed.

At her memorial service in 2020, Gareth Hughes suggested the police minister might like to posthumously grant her wish.

“She really wanted to do something that would grab us by the shoulders and wake us up.”

In the months after her death, Hughes began thinking that Fitzsimons’ life needed to be recorded. And when he left Parliament at the end of 2020, burnt out and cynical, he retreated to an island in Otago Harbour and began writing.

He researched her archives, read every word she spoke in Parliament, and interviewed more than 60 people.

In an effort to get arrested, Fitzsimons chained herself to the gates of a Fonterra factory, protesting against its use of coal.

Learning how Fitzsimons had doggedly kept fighting for the things she cared about, eventually inspired Hughes to emerge from his funk and get back into political action and debate.

And while tracing her life and career, Hughes realised many of the issues that motivated Fitzsimons, remain just as pressing today.

“A lot of things she talked about from the ‘70s onwards were controversial and radical for their day, but time has shown she was on the right side of history, and years ahead of wider society. Her ideas were often far ahead of her time.”

As an example, Hughes points to Fitzsimons being behind the country’s first attempt to warn about greenhouse gas emissions, Campaign Climate Change, in 1989.

Jeanette Fitzsimons, centre, on the yacht Vega, protesting against deep sea oil drilling in 2013.

Current Green Party co-leader James Shaw says Fitzsimons put climate change on the political agenda in New Zealand and pushed it into public consciousness.

“And I guess one of the things that saddens me is that it’s taken us most of the intervening decades to get to a point where we’re actually doing something about it.”

Shaw says Fitzsimons’ guiding credo that you couldn’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, is just as true now as when she began espousing it, 50 years ago.

“She was saying things that we didn’t necessarily want to hear, but that we all, deep down, knew were true.”

There were disappointments, though.

Political power plays meant Fitzsimons never became a Cabinet minister, and this remained her biggest regret during her years in Parliament, says Hughes.

She didn't want it for the limos or baubles, but because that was where she thought she could make the biggest changes.

Acrimony, an adroit Labour political machine, and questionable acumen saw the Greens opt out or be shut out of coalition with three Helen Clark-led governments, something Hughes says is sad, given what Clark and Fitzsimons could have achieved together.

He describes Fitzsimons as the greatest Cabinet minister New Zealand never had.

And one of our most radical MPs.

Not perhaps in the sense of Green colleagues like Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos.

But beyond the image of the kindly, grandmotherly politician, Fitzsimons held fast to immutable principles and bottom-lines, says Hughes.

Sometimes, her refusal to compromise – such as over genetic engineering and Corngate at the 2002 election – cost her dearly, politically.

“I think people will be surprised to learn how deep-seated her strong desire for widespread change was.

“She had a strong sense of where she stood, and ultimately kept her eye on the big picture - which was how to literally reshape the way we organise our world.”

But ultimately, and sadly, says Hughes, Fitzsimons was left with a sense of regret that change hadn’t happened.

“She was quite downcast in her latter years about the state of the world.

“She’d poured such huge effort and intellect into challenging some of these sacred cows of our society, and things were still going backwards. I think that was hard for her.”

Green co-leader Marama Davidson says Fitzsimons was a mentor and model for her, and the current Green Party is the result of her work.

“We owe absolutely everything to Jeanette, particularly me. She had some hard yards that I could not imagine, that I will never have to face, breaking the ground.”

It’s no secret Fitzsimons had some concerns about the Greens’ direction after she left Parliament, with Hughes pointing to her disillusionment with the party’s lack of effective action on climate change, and its controversial support for the “waka-jumping” legislation.

“She would always challenge them to be courageous and keep speaking up on the most important issues.

“She didn’t see the Greens as just an add-on to the Labour Party, focusing on a small number of policies.

“She believed they were a genuinely new, radical face of politics – and they were there to fundamentally reshape our politics, our society, and our economy.”

*A Gentle Radical. The life of Jeanette Fitzsimons, by Gareth Hughes, (Allen & Unwin, $39.99) is published on May 31.