Mojo Mathers

In the 2019 New Year Honours, Mathers was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to people with disabilities.

She lost her seat in the September 2017 general election.

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 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.

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 was a senior policy advisor to the Green Party between 2006 and 2011. In 2019 Mathers started working as a policy advisor for Disabled Person’s Assembly of New Zealand (DPA).

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.

Mojo Celeste Mathers MNZM (née Minrod, born 23 November 1966) is a New Zealand politician and a former 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 was a senior policy advisor to the Green Party between 2006 and 2011. She stood for the party in 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.

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”.