KEY POINTS:
Difficult though it can be at times to find reasons to defend Winston Peters, the current calls for his sacking as Foreign Minister amount to nothing less than a witch-hunt.
Those demanding Peters' resignation say his opposition to the NZ-China Free Trade Agreement makes his position untenable. The charge simply does not stack up.
Peters has always been totally upfront about his party's trenchant opposition to FTAs with low-wage Asian economies. He reaffirmed that stance as recently as three weeks ago.
Negotiation of the China agreement began in 2004. Peters did not become Foreign Minister until late 2005. His confidence and supply arrangement with Labour was accordingly constructed to avoid policy differences such as the FTA negotiations becoming a problem for either him or Labour in terms of ministerial responsibility.
Nothing has changed in the interim. Suggestions that Peters has suddenly placed the Government in a constitutional quandary are laughable and his critics know it. However, they are using his opposition to the China FTA as a convenient tool to mask their real agenda - ridding Parliament of him and NZ First.
Peters has many enemies in the political and business establishments. They have long detested the NZ First leader and they view his party as a dead weight on New Zealand politics. They resent Peters being a pivotal figure in post-election power plays.
With NZ First registering around 2 to 3 per cent in polls, Peters' enemies see this year's election as offering a very real possibility of getting the NZ First monkey off their backs once and for all.
But they fear Peters will pull off yet another Houdini-like escape from parliamentary oblivion. So they have attacked under the cover of the FTA, knowing that Peters is constrained in his ability to hit back. Every time he criticises the trade deal, he is seen as criticising Labour, more particularly the Prime Minister and Trade Minister Phil Goff, the deal's architects.
True, NZ First ran some newspapers adverts after the signing of the trade pact. The timing was provocative, but the adverts weren't. They have been interpreted as Peters beginning his pre-election distancing from Labour, but if Peters was really doing that, he would have been far more damning of the FTA this week. He instead pulled his punches so as not to embarrass Labour any more than he had to in order to highlight his party's brand of economic nationalism.
Peters had to come out against the deal. Not doing so would have run counter to his party's fundamental planks. It would have meant he went into the election with one arm tied behind his back.
His way around the conflicting positions of Labour and NZ First was to criticise the deal as "not being good enough", a softer option than slamming Labour for negotiating one in the first place. He blamed the unilateral tariff slashing of past governments - not the current one - for weakening New Zealand's negotiating leverage.
He waited until after the deal had been signed before declaring his party's position on enabling legislation, rather than upstaging the Prime Minister beforehand.
The newspaper ads were carefully worded so they could not be construed as criticising Labour.
In Parliament, Peters and his colleagues deliberately passed up at least three opportunities during the week to have a crack at the FTA.
These subtleties have been largely missed or ignored by critics. To some degree, they were obscured by Peters' trademark abrasiveness.
But rather than credit Peters with a measured response, his critics instead exploited public ignorance of NZ First's confidence and supply arrangement with Labour to falsely portray him as redundant as Foreign Minister.
It may be anomalous for the Foreign Minister not to support what, for Labour, is a major triumph in trade policy. But that anomaly has existed ever since Labour agreed to give him the foreign affairs portfolio. The anomaly is apparently now an absurdity. If so, Labour - not Peters - should be taking the rap.
However, the absurdity only seems to be a problem for Peters' critics and constitutional purists who have difficulty coming to terms with the mechanisms built into NZ First's confidence and supply agreement to protect that party from being swamped by Labour.
This is not the first time Government partners have clashed over an FTA. An agree-to-disagree clause was written into the Cabinet Manual in 2000 so the Alliance could maintain a point of difference from Labour by opposing the New Zealand-Singapore Free Trade Agreement signed that year.
The Alliance's leader, Jim Anderton, was not Foreign Minister at the time. But he was Deputy PM. No one suggested he resign.
The Alliance subsequently imploded under the pressures of Government. That experience prompted a further refining of the agree-to-disagree principle.
Under rules listed in a Cabinet Office circular, Peters is bound by collective ministerial responsibility when he talks about issues within his foreign affairs portfolio. He speaks for the Government and "as part of the Government" when he wears that hat.
When he speaks about matters outside his portfolio, however, he speaks as a leader of a political party or an ordinary MP, rather than as a minister. With one caveat, he is essentially free to say what he likes. The exception is when he is overseas. Then, as the Government's representative, he is required to speak for the Government "on all issues" discussed with international counterparts.
At his press conference on Tuesday, Peters was mindful of not infringing that rule, saying he would only explain NZ First's stance on the FTA if pressed. He relented even further two days later, saying if he was asked about the FTA, he would confirm that negotiations had been successfully concluded, but that they were Goff's responsibility.
It is ludicrous to suggest Peters intended pinging the FTA in every capital he visits. The reality is that the matter would never have come up. Other foreign ministers would simply be briefed by their diplomats not to raise the issue with him.
Likewise, domestically, Peters is unlikely to keep vociferously campaigning against the FTA. To do so would put real strain on relations with Labour. His longevity in the foreign affairs portfolio would then come under question. But only then.
Peters' right to criticise Labour policies outside his portfolio responsibilities is meant to be a safety valve - not a license to mount all-out attacks on the governing party.
Peters has been Mr Restraint, barely exercising that right in the two-and-a-half years he has been working with Labour.
As foreign minister, he has hardly put a foot wrong. If he does nothing else, his success in speeding the normalising of relations with Washington and the rapport he has with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has more than justified his tenure of the foreign affairs portfolio.
But that, too, has been forgotten in the rush to condemn him.
