Peters has poked at Luxon plenty of times before, but this latest falling out is a new low for their relationship, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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‘A process mistake’
By Thursday afternoon, Winston Peters had a solution for the coalition crisis roiling the Beehive: a staff training session. The foreign minister told reporters outside parliament that “a couple of my staff are going to be at a training session this afternoon on the matter” – absorbing responsibility (but only a little) for what he called a “process mistake”.
The story broke on Thursday morning, when the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reported that in the days after the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, Luxon’s office had pushed for New Zealand to show “explicit public support” for the US action – a position Peters’ team resisted, calling it “imprudent” and contrary to “New Zealand’s national interests”. After crisis talks on Wednesday night, Luxon’s office said Peters had acknowledged “he made a mistake” in releasing the emails without telling the prime minister’s office.
By Thursday, as The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire writes this morning, “Peters was reported as saying he had been mistaken in saying it was a mistake, though by the afternoon he seemed to suggest it was a mistake to say he was mistaken to say it was a mistake”. He ultimately settled on contrition, telling parliament: “We have a habit, when we make a mistake: we admit it … In this case I made an assumption and I should have had it checked out”.
Just a mistake?
Many saw it as more than just an innocent mistake. As the NZ Herald’s Adam Pearse reports, Nicola Willis accused Peters of “political game-playing” and said the failure to notify Luxon’s office of the release might breach the coalition agreement’s good-faith provisions. She said it should serve as a warning to voters: Peters “has said that he won’t support a Labour, Greens, Te Pāti Māori Government. But what if he gets confused?”
Former foreign minister Phil Goff, speaking to RNZ’s Midday Report, was even blunter: “There was no mistake about Winston Peters’ comments at all. He knew that exposing Luxon’s view would be damaging to Luxon and he wanted it to be.” That Luxon had not sacked Peters for it, Goff said, “shows his weakness in relation to his coalition partner”. Herald commentator Matthew Hooton agrees. “Don’t for one minute think Peters or his staff made some sort of mistake,” he writes this morning (paywalled). “This was another calculated attempt to undermine a Prime Minister for whom Peters acts like he has no respect.”
‘A total failure of communication’
Critics say the incident casts an unflattering light on Luxon’s approach to foreign policy. Speaking to Toby Manhire, Clark said the emails provided “much more clarity about why Luxon got into such trouble” articulating New Zealand’s position on the war – and that Peters “obviously appreciated it would become a quagmire”. The emails showed “a total failure of communication at the levels needed”, she said.
In The Post (paywalled), Anneke Smith writes that while the prime minister’s office (PMO) claims that Peters mischaracterised Luxon’s position, the PM’s apparently instinctive alignment with the US was “a huge problem for a prime minister whose personal popularity appears to be on a downward trajectory in an election year”. There is disquiet in the coalition over the PMO operating as a silo, Smith writes, and the emails only harden that view. “This situation could reflect two things; either a complete relationship breakdown between Luxon and Peters or a staggering lack of political judgment on Luxon’s part. It could be both.”
A pattern of pokes
Thursday’s episode was not the first time Peters had punctured his coalition partner. In early March, when Luxon stumbled through days of confused messaging on the Iran war – at one point appearing to suggest New Zealand would support “any actions” against Iran, later saying he “misspoke” – Peters remarked to ThreeNews: “Why didn’t you call the foreign affairs minister, then no one will have misspoken?” In October, after Luxon posted about a new Southeast Asian trade partnership as if he had secured it alone, Peters’ official foreign minister account reshared the photo with a single word – “We…” – before the post was later deleted.
Most recently, Peters publicly condemned Luxon’s decision to call a confidence vote on himself, calling it a “very bad move” that would have “consequences”. Now the sniping has prompted accusations of dirty tricks and a late-night “crisis meeting” in the Beehive. Clark, for one, says the situation may be terminal. The two leaders are “feasting on each other” and “that’s not a great position for coalition partners to be in, in the run-up to an election. It almost makes you wonder whether this can last much beyond the Budget.”
