KEY POINTS:
Mr Peters is about to take the witness stand and National has to be very careful how it treats him. Mr Peters v The Rest is his favourite position.
No, it's not about the privileges committee hearing that begins tonight into a $100,000 donation to Peters by billionaire Owen Glenn.
It's what I wrote in June 1996 on the eve of Peters' appearance at the Winebox inquiry in Auckland.
Peters and hearings go together all too easily and I've witnessed many of them.
To any other politician such hearings would be a traumatic event. To Peters they present a platform, an opportunity to attack, though it doesn't always work out the way he plans it.
Hearings pepper his political career, in fact it began with one.
In 1979 he took the witness stand during the electoral petition that overturned the Hunua election result and ousted Malcolm Douglas from Parliament for himself.
There have been numerous court hearings, such as the Selwyn Cushing defamation against him. Peters did not take the stand and was eventually dealt a withering judgment against him in both the Wellington District court and the High Court on a failed appeal.
There was also the privileges committee hearing into whether Peters assaulted former National MP and now Auckland mayor John Banks in the lobby of Parliament and committed a contempt of Parliament.
Strangely, the committee needed to know not just whether an altercation had occurred but whether it occurred on account of something Banks said of did in Parliament.
The hearing was a platform not so much for Peters but for a bitterly spurned Labour Opposition to crow-bar open the cracks in the new National-New Zealand coalition.
The result of that hearing was inconclusive excepting the committee found that Peters' conduct was unbecoming.
The so-called powerful privileges committee thundered at the end of its report: "Mr Peters may consider it appropriate to apologise to the House."
Mr Peters did not consider it appropriate.
The parallels between tonight's hearing and the Winebox are not strong but some of the the associations are.
It was four months away from an election and the inquiry became an integral part of Peters campaign.
It was the culmination of years attacks against the untoward influence of big business over Government and the agencies of Government such as the Serious Fraud Office and Inland Revenue.
It was a time when Peters' people gave generously. Many would not have known whether they were giving to New Zealand First or to Peters' legal fees. Most probably did not care.
It is not known whether Peters drew the distinction then - or now. We do know that Owen Glenn, according to his own emails, thought he was giving to New Zealand First and that his $100,000 donation ended up paying a legal bill of Peters'.
Peters' appearance at the Winebox in Auckland was full of expectation about what he had up his sleeve, what he would produce at the hearing as a knock-out blow for the legions of QCs there out for his blood.
The expectations came to not much.
One QC accused him of picking up stories from a man in a pub called Harry - the man, not the pub. It ended in high farce when the head of the Phobic Trust, Marcia Read, was subpoenaed to correct evidence Peters had given about Charles Sturt meeting Sir Michael Fay when a babysitter was present, evidence he thought he had heard from her.
It transpired that the children of David Richwhite, Fay's partner, had attended a daycare centre run by Sturt's former wife but that, according to Richwhite, the first he had met Sturt was at the Winebox inquiry.
Peters was damaged but only temporarily. He managed to put together a strong campaign for the October election and under MMP boosted his caucus from two to 17.
Peters wasted his time on the stand at the Winebox. It did not illicit the knock-out blow his followers thought it might. But nor was the high farce the enduring aspect.
That came a few years later when the Court of Appeal ruled against the Winebox, humiliating the former Chief Justice who ran the inquiry, and ruled in favour of Winston Peters and his lawyer, Brian Henry.
They finally got the courts to agree that they were right and The Rest were wrong.
