Shane Jones speaks out
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:
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
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.