Mojo Celeste Mathers (née Minrod, born 23 November 1966) is a New Zealand politician and a former Member of Parliament (MP) for the Green Party. 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. Mathers was elected to the 50th term of Parliament in 2011, becoming the country's first deaf Member of Parliament. Early life and career 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". 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. She 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". Her grandfather was the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart. Mathers has an Honours degree in mathematics and a master's degree in Conservation Forestry. Between 2001 and 2006, she was the joint owner of a "small business offering forestry management services". She worked for the Green Party as a senior policy advisor between 2006 and 2011. Political career Her interest in political environmentalism began when she settled in Coalgate, a village in Canterbury region in New Zealand. She was the 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" from 2001 to 2004. She was a founding member of the Malvern Hills Protection Society which succeeded in halting the dam project. 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. In 2009, Mathers wrote submissions opposing clauses of the