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Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller
Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 29, 2023

Winston Peters’ wooing of Stuart Nash

Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller
Wintson Peters and Stuart Nash. Image: Tina Tiller

The NZ First leader is throwing his arms open wide to the booted Labour minister, but a waka jump isn’t on the cards. 

While the Chrisses of Labour and National competed on who was most outraged by the latest skeleton bounding out of Stuart Nash’s bulging closet of cabinet infractions, Winston Peters sniffed an opportunity. Instead of denouncing a breach of core cabinet principles in Nash’s leaking copious cabinet details to a couple of mates who happened also to be donors to his political campaigns and who happened also to have their own commercial interests, Peters spoke up for his old mate.

“Nash shouldn’t have done what he did as it broke Cabinet rules – but he is now being hung out to dry,” said Peters in a series of tweets. “Let’s not have the hypocrisy & hand-wringing from a number of Labour Ministers who constantly leaked information to media about what was happening inside the Cabinet NZF was in. Labour Ministers blatantly telling media that NZ First was being the handbrake and how we voted inside Cabinet – including blocking the $55m media bribe. This happened frequently and the media all know it. So let’s not have this ‘holier than thou’ routine.”

He added: “The fact is Nash’s comments served no personal gain. He was trying to help hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of workers keep their jobs by extending government support. On this Nash was right.”

Last night, following the cutting of the thread to cabinet – already he was on a “final warning” – Nash by his own account had a “long conversation” with former NZ First cabinet minister and pal Shane Jones. But he had not been offered a place with the rival party, he told the NZ Herald, and was not pondering jumping ship. “I’m Labour to the core – always have been, always will be, Nashes have been for a long, long, long, long time,” said Nash, whose great-grandfather was Sir Walter Nash, Labour prime minister of the 1950s.

Despite the lineage, Nash is widely regarded as so far to the right edge of the Labour Party that – back in the Cunliffe days – there was speculation he could even defect to National. Under Jacinda Ardern, that became in some ways an advantage. He could, for example, mix with Mike Hosking and Mark Mitchell in the laddish weekly politics chat on Newstalk ZB. That didn’t work out, of course. The common thread in Stuart Nash’s blotted copybook is not simply the breaches of cabinet rules, but that he announced them himself on a hugely popular radio station; or, in the leaked cabinet discussions, he sent them via email rather than, say, over the phone. 

One of those donors is Troy Bowker. A Linkedin foghorn long before Rob Campbell, Bowker is perhaps most remembered for standing down from his place on the Hurricanes board after lambasting Sir Ian Taylor for “sucking up to the left loving Māori agenda”. His most recent comment on the social media hotbed that is Linkedin blasted “the woke ideology typical of Jacinda and her followers”. Anyway, Nash said he would not take donations from his mate after the “left loving Māori agenda” moment, but Bowker, an investment banker, has been generous in other donations, including, as Richard Harman noted this morning, as “a substantial donor” to New Zealand First. 

MP Stuart Nash wearing a suit and pasted over a red and blue background
Stuart Nash (Image: Bianca Cross)

None of that means, of course, that Nash is about to leap into the embrace of NZ First. His links to Labour are real and deep and it would undoubtedly be a wrench to do so. But don’t write it off. The appeal to New Zealand First is obvious. Nash has a large personal support network in his Napier seat and across Hawke’s Bay. He has name recognition across much of the country, a knack for retail politics and – notwithstanding the occasional career jeopardising divulgence – performs well in media. 

Entertain this: Nash swaps his tie, announces himself no longer Labour but a New Zealand First MP and resumes parliamentary activity, lobbing oral and written questions, with parliamentary support staff to prosecute the new party cause. Don’t entertain it for long, though. Owing to the new rules on “waka jumping”, if he were to declare a new party affiliation, the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill kicks in, and a byelection would be triggered. 

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Nash could, however, stand down as a Labour MP and say simply that he intends to contest the next election as a NZ First candidate. In that case, the ball would be in Labour’s court on whether to invoke the bill. In the recent case of Gaurav Sharma, Labour said it was not interested in doing so; the byelection was triggered by Sharma resigning his seat. To invoke it this time would not be without complications. Not least: does the Napier electorate really need an expensive byelection as it continues to deal with the ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle?

Most of this is probably academic. As of Wednesday morning, the likeliest outcome seems to be Nash announcing he won’t contest the next election for any party. He certainly doesn’t seem sufficiently deluded and vainglorious to go down the route of creating a new “major political force” with a name like the Bring Back Democracy and Progress for our Nation Party. Still, as far as NZ First is concerned, don’t rule out Winston Peters seeking to change his mind. And an ironic footnote, in the lack of an option to transmogrify from a Labour to a New Zealand First MP, is that it is Winston Peters who made it so. The pledge to “introduce and pass a ‘Waka Jumping’ bill” was literally in the 2017 coalition agreement.


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Winston Peters greatest hits record
Available wherever records are sold (Image: Tina Tiller)

PoliticsMarch 24, 2023

The Winston Peters greatest hits hour

Winston Peters greatest hits record
Available wherever records are sold (Image: Tina Tiller)

The New Zealand First leader took to the altar of an East Auckland church today to set out his 2023 election agenda. It was, as Stewart Sowman-Lund found out, pretty much what you’d expect. 

Winston Peters rolled into Howick today with a state of the nation speech that, he claimed to media, was all fresh material. “It’s all new,” he told one reporter. “You probably wish you’d written it yourself.”

“New” seems like a stretch. This was undoubtedly a Winston Peters greatest hits show, with a couple of remixes thrown in. A joke that the New Zealand First leader has used a handful of times dating back to at least 2003 got a revival, with Peters suggesting some of our MPs think “manual labour” is the prime minister of Mexico (a search through the official speech shared with the media revealed this was an improvised moment). Then there were the attacks on the media, polling, the woke, the left, the right – no one was safe from a Peters takedown. “Remember that politicians are not your masters, but your servants,” he said several times.

After a relatively quiet start to the year, today was a chance for Peters to remind party faithful that he’s very much on the campaign trail. It was also an attempt to dull any memories of the years between 2017 and 2020 when he propped up the Labour Party. The Howick church was packed; it was a sea of grey or greying hair. Plastic chairs were even filling the foyer to meet demand. Peters reckoned he could have filled a venue twice the size if he’d been given one. 

Before Peters even arrived, there was a jubilant atmosphere in the room. Auckland councillor Maurice Williamson was the support act. Earlier in the day, he’d been called out on Twitter by one of his colleagues for failing to turn up to hear from mana whenua on the annual budget. He warmed the crowd up by tackling topics that were always going to get an easy reception in that room: three waters, cycle lanes and rates. Perhaps the biggest laugh was when he mispronounced Waitematā and then, mockingly, corrected himself.

Peters was then introduced, with the moniker he’s worn since 2017: as a “handbrake” on the “runaway government” led by Jacinda Ardern. Waiting in the wings to speak, Peters was seen laughing at the descriptor. 

He started his speech by calling out anyone who might have believed Howick had ever been racist. “Forty-five years ago… this town chose someone with a Māori background to be their MP. That was all the evidence that one needs to know that Howick was not racist then, nor now,” he said to cheers from the predominantly Pākehā crowd.

From there, it was a grab bag of topics from the Peters back catalogue, zipping everywhere from GDP to gender identity. Three waters was probably the most glaring omission from his speech, though it briefly cropped up during the Q&A. 

Winston Peters addresses a crowd in East Auckland
Winston Peters addresses a crowd in East Auckland (Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund)

On education, he criticised schools for using children in “some sort of woke social re-engineering programme for vulnerable undeveloped minds”. He was later questioned on whether that meant he supported National’s new education policy announced this week, but avoided giving a straight response. There are some clear similarities, with Peters, like Christopher Luxon, decrying the lack of basic knowledge taught at school. “They would now rather teach a young child ‘virtuous self-identity theory’ than basic maths and English,” said Peters.

There was a brief diversion into Covid territory, though Peters pre-emptively criticised the media for any attempt at calling him anti-vaccination. “I’ve had three,” he said, adding that his issue was purely with mandates. “Under New Zealand First these mandates will end,” he said, to a massive cheer. The mandates Peters was referring to officially ended last September.

Peters also criticised the name of New Zealand’s health agency and pledged to give Te Whatu Ora a new name that “95% of New Zealanders can understand”.

He added: “Under New Zealand First, we will change all of the woke virtue signalling names of every government department back to English – back to what they were before the academics from university sociology departments started this madness a few years ago.”

This wasn’t, said Peters, an attack on the Māori language, but instead an attack on the elite who attempted to use the language for their own gains. Hard-working Māori were not concerned with names but instead with housing, health and incomes. “Some Māori secretly driving this agenda, are of the people but they’re not for the people,” Peters added, again to a large round of applause.

This was ultimately just an entrée to a part of the speech sub-headed “one country, one people”, where Peters condemned the “insidious attempt to change this country’s culture and institutions” and decried a minority who he saw as attempting to silence the majority. “They’re all into minority rights, teaching children gender identity theory and they’re not interested in debate. Anyone who questions them is gaslit, or culturally cancelled, or shouted down,” he said.

“This gaslighting group is a small minority while the mass majority is meant to kowtow to them, and too many political representatives are not prepared to stand up to them.”

Following the speech, Peters took a handful of questions (many of which, despite his best attempts to control the crowd, ended up just being comments) and then briefly faced the media. He only spoke to the press for seven minutes in contrast to his hour-long address, but during that conference it was clear that Peters the parliamentarian has not been lost during three years away from Wellington. He was as combative, defensive and adept at obfuscating as he’s always been. He looked to be loving it.

Winston Peters greets a supporter
Winston Peters greets a supporter (Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund)

But the question is where to from now. Peters has previously ruled out working with Labour again, though today appeared slightly less certain of this. “We’re not going with parties that make racist policies,” he said, choosing not to name Labour specifically. Most of the media questions were on potential coalition arrangements or on policies released by other parties and Peters, as usual, made it clear how little he wanted to talk about any of that.

Based on polling, he may want to talk about it more. Most polls from this month placed New Zealand First around the 3% mark – two points shy of the crucial 5% threshold. Nevertheless, at least one reputable poll has the party within arm’s reach of parliament on 4.2%. You can, as the saying goes, never rule out Winston Peters – but if he made it in alone come October it would be the first time in New Zealand First’s parliamentary history where Winston Peters didn’t have at least one friend with him (in 1993 there were two MPs). 

Peters teased that the party had a strong line-up of both new and returning talent that would be on the ballot, but wouldn’t be drawn on who that talent was. 

So for now, as we ready for what is set to be a close election, New Zealand First remains the Winston Peters machine. The party faithful love it, but can he claw his way back up the charts without some new material? We’ve got six months to find out. 

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