SHAW BOY…SURE THING?

He’s good to grab the green, green brass…off shore

The 8 March 2025 edition of The Post featured a piece by Dita de Boni about former New Zealand Parliamentarian James Shaw. Dita’s Stuff(ed) employer describes her as its “Auckland Business Editor”. Ms de Boni’s unashamedly fawning piece is about Shaw joining the Singapore operations of “Morrison”, a financial firm that runs New Zealand listed infrastructure company, “Infratil”.

James Shaw to leave NZ for greener (finance) pastures | The Post

You needn’t read Dita’s piece…palms, tealeaves, entrails or anything else…because here are some of the tackiest titbits from Dita’s dribble:

Happy to leave politics behind, his insight into the machinery of politics is still requested by panel convenors and events organisers on the regular. [sic]

…he’s a friend of current Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, while “disagreeing with almost everything” the latter is pursuing in his role [Quite how Shaw can disagree with Watts on climate change is a mystery. Watts is electric about signing New Zealand up to monstrous monetary climate change commitments]

The role he’ll assume sees him look for solid businesses and projects that Morrison’s investors…can get behind in what is loosely called the ‘natural capital asset class’; things like decarbonisation and biodiversity projects and carbon farming.

It sounds like a lot of carbon emissions, flying around the world in the new job, and Shaw admits it is. But he says Morrison has its own emissions targets, and a drive to reduce travel where not strictly necessary as well as offset it where it is.

Overall, “the calculation that I make is that if I can reduce or remove 150 million tons of C02 in the next two years, that will exceed my emissions into the atmosphere by several magnitudes.” [Quite how Juvenile James proposes to personally move 150 million tons of CO2 from Earth’s atmosphere is another mystery.]

“You have to remember that under both the EU and the UK free trade agreements, those countries can impose sanctions on us if we fail to hit our targets, or move in the wrong direction on our climate policy, so there would be a very material hit,” if New Zealand were to do that, he says. [This is the fabricated twaddle, trotted out by the likes of Shaw, that unless New Zealand pays multiple billions of dollars to overseas climate change grifters, no-one will buy NZ’s exports.]

James is a creature and product of his times. He’s what we used to describe - when I was growing up – as a bullshit artist.

Until quite recently, James has consistently claimed – including on his LinkedIn (the Facebook for people who change jobs constantly) - that he has a bachelor of arts degree from Victoria University. Which he doesn’t.

Shaw did however gain a master of science degree from the University of Bath School of Management. James’ back-of-the-Weetbix-packet one year Bath master’s degree was in “sustainability and business leadership”…whatever that means.

And this is where the plot thickens. The real difficulty surrounding Shaw’s MSc is that Bath’s master of science degree is a post-graduate course i.e. one needs to have a prior degree - which Shaw of course lacked - in order to bathe in Bath’s bunkum.

Thorny investigative journalist Ian Wishart has looked into James Shaw’s academic “credentials”. He politely asked Shaw for a privacy waiver in order to allow Bath to disclose Shaw’s entry application, in order for us all to see the basis on which Shaw jumped into his hot Bath degree. Shaw has however sustained a stony silence. The logical and most reasonable conclusion is that Shaw swindled his way into his Bath MSc, by falsely claiming to have a degree from Victoria University.

Armed with his Bath MSc, Shaw joined AIESIC, a United Nations’ non-governmental organization (NGO) that arranges internships for young people. Shaw’s internship was at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where Shaw obtained a permanent gig. He then grabbed a job at Hongkong & Shanghai Bank (HSBC), apparently working on "environmental awareness programmes for future leaders", before of course inflicting himself on New Zealand’s political system (2014-2024).

One of the few to break the resounding silence about Shaw’s bogus academic background is Jermyn Brooks, who was Shaw’s boss at PwC and now works at Transparency International.

So, since 2023, it’s been publicly known that James Shaw is a hoodwinker. Which makes it all the more bewildering that Morrison/Infratil would take him on. Shaw’s doctored curriculum vitae is not small fry. Section 256(1) criminalises the following:

Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years who makes a false document with the intention of using it to obtain any property, privilege, service, pecuniary advantage, benefit, or valuable consideration.

Of course we don’t want to see Shaw prosecuted for his probable forgery and fraud. But wouldn’t it be nice if he just acknowledged that, as a younger man, he couldn’t resist dumb dishonesty.

What could be Morrison’s motivation in taking on the tainted and vacuous Shaw, necessarily knowing that he has concocted his credentials? My guess is they mainly want to showcase Shaw – parade the Shaw pony - as a front boy in the Great Green Greedy Globalist Grift. Because Morrison/Infratil is donkey deep into the Zero Carbon lark, ESG and all the rest. This is how the globalist grift goes.

Morrison’s chief executive, Paul Newfield, trotted this out when appointed in 2022:

"To me, decarbonisation is a massive theme and there's still a lot to run in that, and our base in New Zealand with 90 percent renewable energy means we have a massive advantage, as well as digital infrastructure such as data centres and mobile towers - I think we're probably the best in the world at that."

Morrison’s chair is Rob Morrison, who is naturally one of the virtuous Voices for Wellington.

Morrison (the firm) would do well to concentrate less on virtue projecting, and more on its recruitment processes. And “journalists” like Dita de Boni might help to rekindle a modicum of faith in New Zealand journalism by being a lot less credulous, willfully blind and politically biased about sifters like Shifty Shaw.

Imagine if ACT Party leader David Seymour did not in fact obtain his university degrees (a formidable duo comprising a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical & Electronic) and a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy)). New Zealand’s legacy media would mercilessly hound Seymour from office and demand his incarceration. The double standards are nauseating.