OPINION
Peter Allan Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week
peterallanwilliams.substack.com
The thing about politicians is that you have to be able to trust them, and to gain trust it helps if they tell the truth about their life and times and background before they went into politics.
For some bizarre reason James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change and co-leader of the Green Party, is telling the world through social media network LinkedIn that he has a BA from Victoria University.
But he has previously told the Otago University student magazine Critic that he didn’t finish his degree before he went off to England in the late 1990s. So he is putting about that he has an undergraduate degree which he has admitted is not the truth.
To quote from Critic, “I never actually got my undergrad.”
It is technically a crime to claim that you have an academic qualification that you don’t have. Others have lost jobs or positions for making such claims.
A staffer at James Shaw’s office has now confirmed that James Shaw does not have a BA from Victoria University. So why is it still on his LinkedIn page? That is demonstrably false information. If we can’t trust him with his academic qualifications, what else can we not trust him on?
The answer to that, of course, is plenty.
He also says on LinkedIn that he co-founded an outfit in the UK called Future Considerations and that he was a shareholder in it. The only problem is that on his CV he says he started working for Future Considerations in 2005. The company was founded in 2002.
Shaw said in his maiden speech at Parliament in 2014 that he worked at Future Considerations, “an organisational development company I helped to establish.”
So the question is – did he mislead Parliament from as early as his maiden speech?
The thing about these issues is that Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine has been writing about them on Twitter for over a week. Nobody in the mainstream media has bothered to follow up on the story, no questions have been asked, and there’s been no response from Shaw or the Greens to the thread on Twitter.
If this was David Seymour or Chris Luxon – or Ben Uffindell – with some palpably false information on their LinkedIn CV do you think the media would let that sleep?
Who says our media don’t love and protect the left?