Any day now Jacinda Ardern will have a baby. While there has been much discussion about how she will manage her dual responsibilities as Prime Minister and mother, not much has been said about what difficulties this poses for the Deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters, who will act in her place for at least six weeks. If she is the first of our Prime Ministers to give birth in office, he is the first deputy to take over in these circumstances. It poses particular problems for him.
His uppermost concern has to be to trouble the young mother has little as possible. The last thing he will want to do is cause her to lose any more sleep than a new baby will do. He will also know Ardern is not the sort of person who seems likely to take a mental holiday from her job. She will remain alert to what is going on and there would be no point pretending trying not to worry her with problems if they arise.
It is Peters' job to see that problems do not arise or, if they do, that he deals with them in the way she would. This will not be easy for him. It is hard to imagine two more different politicians in every way. She is by nature agreeable, consensual, non-confrontational. Peters can be all those when he tries hard but his natural political impulse, as the public well knows, is to be curt, contrary and needlessly aggressive. He will need to work hard on himself over those six weeks.
He will also need to work hard on the papers that will cross his desk, harder than he has ever had to work before. A Prime Minister needs to be in touch with much more of a government's activity than a minister with any portfolio. Peters does not have a reputation for strenuous paperwork, he is a politician who has always operated largely on cunning and verbal dexterity, which are not always up to the task. His needless aggression in interviews is often in response to questions he cannot answer. A Prime Minister has to be better than that.
Peters learned his politics from Sir Robert Muldoon in the 1970s when he was briefly a new MP in Muldoon's government. If Peters had become Prime Minister in his own right, as he might have been had he stayed in the National Party, he could have copied the manner of Muldoon if he wished, though it would not have worked as well for him. Muldoon was always well-informed.
