OPINION:
If plague, war and stagflation aren't enough, Winston Peters is back.
The perennial kingmaker largely disappeared after 2020, but is gently raising his profile. Before you know it, he'll be part of the political furniture again.
Peters reads polls as closely as anyone. National-Act is marginally ahead of Labour-Green, with the latter boosted by Te Pāti Māori and the MMP overhang. After the John Key-Māori Party deal, there won't be a second pact with National, at least until there's been one with Labour.
If Peters once again concocts a brew to bewitch 5 per cent, he's on track to choose the Prime Minister again.
Peters would probably anoint Christopher Luxon, for the same reasons he backed Ardern in 2017. His experiences after saving Jim Bolger in 1996 and Helen Clark in 2005 made him wary of propping up a declining status quo. Better to chance it with something new.
For Labour's part, Ardern and her strategists developed the same loathing of working with Peters and his circle that National acquired a generation earlier. Reversing 2017, Peters would face frosty 2023 Labour negotiators but a desperate National.
If Peters' Ardern experiment didn't work out either, he can blame Covid. In late 2019, NZ First was hanging in there, securely over 4 per cent, with reasonable expectations of again holding the balance of power. After lockdown, NZ First crashed to the ones and twos, never looking credible again.
Learning from Donald Trump, Peters plans to be 2023's social media king. Narrow targeting through social media makes sense given that Peters needs only one in 20 voters, and can more easily win them over if he is less open to mainstream critique.
The remaining 19 voters and the mainstream media can loathe and belittle him as much as they like. It makes no difference to Peters under MMP, the system he campaigned for after the Royal Commission in 1986.
If anything, the scorn of the 19 and the media helps.
Some of Peters' usual campaign issues may be unavailable to him for 2023, mainly because he has already won the debate.
No party will impose a surtax on wealthy baby boomers, the way Labour and National did to better-off superannuitants a generation ago. Nor will anyone increase their retirement age. Those changes will be imposed after the last boomer has died and as Gen X turns 65.
Xenophobia won't differentiate Peters much either.
Labour has adopted his long-standing positions, indicating large-scale immigration will never resume after Covid, and by tightening foreign investment rules, especially on houses and land. National fudges its position on both. We're a long way from when Peters' messages on immigration and foreign investment were denounced as racist by Bolger's National and Clark's Labour.
After He Puapua, Peters could go vote-hunting by attacking the good old Brown Table and their "sickly white liberal" enablers. He almost certainly will, but Act's David Seymour is already competing in that space with his call for a referendum on Māori- Pākehā co-governance.
Peters' best shot is the urban-provincial divide. That may seem unlikely with Fonterra pumping billions extra into rural New Zealand with its record $9.30-$9.90 payout. But not everyone south of the Bombay Hills or north of Transmission Gully, is in dairying.
As far back as the mid-1990s, Peters successfully argued that Auckland house-price inflation causes the Reserve Bank to raise interest rates, which inflates the dollar and so cuts exporters' returns. His case has the virtue of being partially true, and will in fact become a problem once Adrian Orr decides his job is to deliver price stability after all.
More important to Peters, his story allows him to play off namby-pamby, latte-drinking Auckland property speculators, splurging on imports with their ill-gotten gains, against hard-working Kiwis in the provinces, producing things and selling them overseas.
Mercantilism may be self-defeating economics, but Peters always makes it work for him on the stump. Like all his narratives, it's a base from which to divide so-called decent Kiwis from the Other.
Peters is under pressure from the remnants of NZ First not to join a government again. It's argued that whatever policy gains have been delivered from coalition deals and around the Cabinet table — even when impressive, as with superannuation, immigration and foreign investment — aren't worth it, if going into government puts the movement at risk, as it has three times. Better to sit on the cross benches and negotiate issue by issue.
More cuttingly, it's argued Peters' record as Bolger's treasurer and Clark and Ardern's foreign minister was mainly reading lines written for him by others.
Whether he'd give it another whirl, this time as Luxon's foreign minister, will be his decision. But the cross benches would give him more power over every government decision than he's ever had.
Since 1996, Peters has often been treated as a lovable rogue at worst, and as an iconic Uncle Winston at best. Journalists forgive much in exchange for good copy.
But even as the NZ First, Labour and National donations cases meander through the courts, greater scrutiny than ever is needed on anyone who might achieve decisive power.
Compared with the golden eras of the mid-1990s, mid-2000s and even before Covid, the world is at its most dangerous since World War II. Grave decisions may be needed in the next few years.
Would our Government send young New Zealanders to a land war in Europe? Would China cut us loose if we tried to seriously check it expanding its military footprint into the South Pacific? How would we respond to the enormous and immediate economic consequences? Would we join the other Five Eyes allies and Nato in confronting China militarily over Taiwan? What would that mean for our so-called "independent" foreign policy? Or our survival?
China is already alleged to have successfully infiltrated Labour and National, parties much less desperate for members, money and candidates than NZ First. It has never been adequately explained why NZ First was so keen on a free-trade agreement with Russia and Belarus — at odds with its usual mercantilist stance — that it demanded Labour write it into the 2017 coalition agreement.
In an era with clear evidence of interference by adversaries in other western elections, it's not unreasonable to demand that all parties provide transparency over their campaign donations, policy-writing processes and candidate selections — even if their leader is the journalists' mate.
Given plague, war and stagflation, it's not enough for the media or law enforcement to think that who controls our government is just a bit of a lark.
• Matthew Hooton is an Auckland-based public relations consultant.
Bayly apologised for his behaviour last month.