This is a transcript of Audrey Young’s subscriber-only Premium Politics newsletter. To sign up, click here, select ‘Premium Politics Briefing’ and save your preferences. For a step-by-step guide, click here.
Welcome to the Politics Briefing. This was the week in which Winston Peters was going tomake a serious speech to set the record straight about Aukus and what he meant by there being “powerful reasons” for New Zealand to engage practically with it, as he claimed recently in a joint statement with the US.
Today he has turned his attention to another important speech, to the New Zealand China Council, in which the word Aukus was not used. But just before his speech, his X account tweeted another broadside at critics of Aukus, saying “We should never be accepting of any irrelevant ill-informed shill for some other country to walk into New Zealand and try to tell us what to do.”
Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr says he has launched defamation proceedings against Winston Peters. Photo / Audrey Young
That’s the way he rolls - from statesman and diplomat to street-brawler, all within the same breath.
It is not surprising the Government has been concerned about the case building against joining pillar two of the bigger alliance – dubbed a technology sharing mechanism, but which nonetheless would be attached to the pillar one anti-China alliance. In the absence of detail, opponents have filled the vacuum.
Peters’ Aukus speech itself was a little contradictory. He claimed to be disquieted by a potential end of bipartisanship over joining pillar two, but launched a highly partisan attack on Labour, calling it close-minded, lethargic and incoherent in foreign affairs. He attacked former Prime Minister Helen Clark, New Zealand’s leading Aukus sceptic, suggesting opponents are reliving old anti-nuclear battles and that the concept of an independent foreign policy had a strand of anti-Americanism.
Certainly, the United States’ almost unconditional backing of the war in Gaza has added a new generation to the ranks of anti-American activists in New Zealand, as well as globally.
Essentially, Peters attempted to discredit Aukus critics as people who don’t have the intelligence (the spy kind) to know what they are talking about and to lay the groundwork for a case to join it as a protection against our “malign” world.
He pointed out the obvious - that New Zealand would first need to be invited to join Aukus II and New Zealand would have to consider it. That is not an important rider, as Peters claims. That is axiomatic.
Peters did succeed in walking back the earlier impression it could happen quickly. But what he also made clear is that a condition for joining Aukus II would be a hefty increase in New Zealand’s defence spending - and that could be the real sticking point.
“No matter my words today, this Government will not waver in its mission to exterminate Māori” - a truly jaw-dropping start to a speech by Te Pāti Māori’s MP for Te Tai Tokerau, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, about repealing section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act.
Micro quiz
Trade Minister Todd McClay has sought advice on what next steps to take against a CPTPP partner country that flouted an arbitrated ruling in a trade dispute with New Zealand. Which country? (Answer below.)
Green MP Julie Anne Genter confronts National's Matthew Doocey in Parliament on May 1, 2024. Photo / Supplied
No contest. It goes to Green MP Julie Anne Genter. Her overbearing behaviour in Parliament on Wednesday night, standing over and shouting in the face of another MP, needs to be censured with the same vigour the Greens and Labour applied to National MP Tim van de Molen last year. No excuses.
Audrey Young is the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018.
For more political news and views, listen to On the Tiles, the Herald’s politics podcast.
