Mojo Mathers

Mojo Mathers
Member of the New Zealand Parliament for Green party list
Incumbent
Assumed office 10 December 2011 (2011-12-10)
Personal details
Born	Mojo Celeste Minrod (1966-11-23) 23 November 1966 London, United Kingdom
Nationality	New Zealand
Political party	Green
Relations	H. L. A. Hart (grandfather)

Mojo Celeste Mathers (née Minrod, born 23 November 1966) is a New Zealand politician and a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. She became known through her involvement with the Malvern Hills Protection Society and helped prevent the Central Plains Water Trust's proposal to build a large irrigation dam in Coalgate. She has been a senior policy advisor to the Green Party since 2006 and has stood for the party in the last three general elections. Her candidacy for the 2011 election created significant media interest due to her high placing on the Green Party's list. Mathers was elected to the 50th term of Parliament, becoming the country's first deaf Member of Parliament.

Private life

Mathers was born in London, UK in 1966. Her parents named her after the Muddy Waters' 1957 version of the song "Got My Mojo Working". She herself has three children. In her personal life, she "strive[s] to reduce [her] personal impact on the environment by being vegetarian, supporting GE free, non-toxic, organic, fair trade and local, [and] using public transport".

Mathers "was born profoundly deaf after oxygen was cut to her as newborn baby during a difficult birth". She is not, however, mute, and is a lipreader. She only began to make significant use of Sign Language in the late 2000s (saying she had "found it very useful for some situations"), preferring to lipread and communicate orally before that.

Her grandfather was the renowned legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart.

Professional life

Mathers has an Honours degree in Mathematics and a master's degree in Conservation Forestry. She has applied her environmental ethos to her work, being the joint owner of a "small business offering forestry management services" from 2001 to 2006. She has been a senior policy advisor to the Green Party since 2006.

Political career

Her interest in political environmentalism began when she settled in Coalgate, a village in Canterbury region in New Zealand. She became spokeswoman for the local community's opposition to the building of a large dam, proposed by the Central Plains Water Trust as part of a broader project to "convert the local area into intensive dairy farming". She was a founding member of the Malvern Hills Protection Society which "managed to stop the dam being built".

Mathers first stood for Parliament in the 2005 election in the Rakaia electorate, when she was ranked 16th on the Green Party list, winning 1,631 votes. In 2008 she was ranked 13th and contested Christchurch East, winning 1,843 votes. On neither occasion was she elected.

Parliament of New Zealand
Years	Term	Electorate	List	Party
2011–2014	50th	List	14	Green
2014–present	51st	List	9	Green

At the 2011 general election, she was number 14 on the list, and stood again in Christchurch East. She finished third in her constituency, with 4.5% of the electorate vote, but her main hopes had lain with being elected as a list MP. Indeed, opinion polls just prior to the election had indicated that the Greens could hope for up to fifteen MPs, and The Press reported that Mathers was "poised to become New Zealand's first deaf MP". Mathers noted that, if she were elected, she would need "some sort of laptop or screen coming directly to me at the desk" in Parliament, along with a sign language interpreter. She suggested that "having sign language in Parliament" might help "enable the wider deaf community to access political debate". New Zealand Sign Language is already an official language of New Zealand but, unlike English and Māori, it was not represented in Parliament. The preliminary election night vote counts gave the Green Party only 13 seats, but when official counts were released on 10 December 2011, they had obtained sufficient special votes to gain another seat, meaning that Mathers was elected into Parliament.

Mathers had previously made submissions to Parliament on bills, opposing clauses of the Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill 2009 and arguing for the "setting of minimum environmental standards" across the country. She also wrote in opposition to the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill 2009, arguing it "would substantially weaken the existing emissions trading scheme, reducing incentives to reduce emissions while providing large ongoing subsidies to climate polluters at enormous cost to the taxpayer".

Mathers describes her areas of policy interest as "rural issues, biodiversity, forestry and water, as well as animal welfare, disability and women's rights".

As an MP, Mathers was provided, after some delay, with an electronic note-keeping assistant. Speaker Lockwood Smith also said he "planned to develop a captioning service to make proceedings of the House more accessible to the hearing impaired" among the general public.