Gareth Hughes retires
Newshub reports:
Green Party MP Gareth Hughes is retiring from Parliament to spend more time with his family.
The 38-year-old is the party’s longest-serving MP, but says his kids – aged nine and 12 – are missing out on having a dad around.
“If I do another term, my eldest will be 16 and he won’t really want to hang out with me anyway,” Hughes told Stuff, adding that he’s been frustrated with the Government’s lack of progress on key issues.
I wish Gareth well. I worked with him on a few issues back when he was Comms/IT Spokesperson for The Greens and he was great to work with. Understood the sector, and had a great principled stance on most Internet issues.
Of course in most other areas, I disagree with him strongly.
Gareth’s retirement makes it even worse though for his female colleagues. The Green’s nutty gender quotas are going to screw over the female MPs in their caucus, even though they were designed to help women.
Here’s the 2017 Green Party List, minus those not standing in 2020:
- James Shaw (M)
- Marama Davidson (F)
- Julie Anne Genter (F)
- Eugenie Sage (F)
- Jan Logie (F)
- Golriz Ghahraman (F)
- Mojo Mathers (F)
- Barry Coates(M)
- John Hart (M)
- Denise Roche (F)
- Hayley Holt (F)
- Teall Crossen (F)
It’s female dominated because they had two male candidates pull out at the last moment.
So they now only have one bloke (James) in their top seven. And they on average are polling to get 7 to 8 MPs. Now if they didn’t have their stupid gender quota they could say we want to keep Eugenie, Jan, Golriz and Julie Anne in the top seven as they are doing well as Ministers or MPs. But they can’t.
At a minimum two or three blokes need to be promoted above these women, which means instead of say Jan Logie you’ll get Barry Coates.
So it is going to be ironic to see the Greens force out of Parliament some of their high performing female MPs, simply because they’re not male. What a blow for equality.