NZ First leader Winston Peters has accused Dame Jacinda Ardern of a lack of transparency over the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.
NZ First leader Winston Peters has accused Dame Jacinda Ardern of a lack of transparency over the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.
Winston Peters has further clarified his controversial March 15 tweet, which claimed that he and the public only discovered yesterday that the prime minister’s office had been alerted to the fact an attack was likely to take place minutes before the terrorist, Brenton Tarrant, arrived at the mosque.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the public the day after the attack that her office had received an email from Tarrant, which prompted Parliament staff to alert the police eight minutes later - roughly the exact time the attack commenced.
Peters told the Herald that as foreign minister, he chaired Cabinet’s External Relations and Security Committee. As the chair of that committee, he should have been immediately alerted to the fact that a foreign national was about to commit an act of terror.
He also said the police and the two mosques should have been alerted more quickly.
“They should all have been happening at a parallel time at the greatest speed possible. That is what crisis response looks like,” Peters said.
“How is he still in the country when he should have been expelled from it. Washing our hands as though we are trying our best. This won’t do for an answer,” Peters said.
Outgoing Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni has called for Peters to apologise over the tweet, while Muslim leaders have accused the NZ First leader of “political posturing” and spreading misinformation.
As outlined yesterday during the coronial inquest into the terror attack, the terrorist sent his manifesto to the Prime Minister’s Office in an email just minutes before beginning his attack, which killed 51 people. A parliamentary staffer called police shortly after reading the email.
But Peters, who was deputy prime minister at the time, claimed it was only yesterday that “we found out for the first time” about that email and the phone call. That’s despite it being widely reported by news media and addressed in a press conference the day after the attacks.
Posting to Twitter/X on Wednesday night, Peters accused former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern of a “lack of transparency to the New Zealand public” and called for her to give evidence at the inquest.
We waited until today to find out, for the first time, that the Prime Minister's Office received information about the March 15 terrorist attack before the massacre took place. Jacinda Ardern should be called to the hearing and asked to explain this appalling lack of transparency…
In a second, late-night tweet Peters acknowledged the information had been discussed in a press conference the next day but doubled down on his criticism of the Prime Minister’s Office.
He said in his phone call with Ardern immediately after the massacre “not once were we transparently informed of this information - such as the phone call her office made to the police - despite the obvious expectation and clear opportunity”.
Speaking to RNZ this morning, Sepuloni called for Peters to apologise, calling the tweets “a bit bizarre” and saying Ardern had been transparent about what happened at the time.
“I would hope that Winston Peters would apologise for those tweets because they are pushing misinformation,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office yesterday said Peters’ post was “completely inaccurate”.
“Peters should remove the tweet and post a correction,” the spokesperson said.
National leader Christopher Luxon has not commented on the incident, and how it reflects on the incoming government which may need Peters’ votes.
National referred requests for comment from Luxon to remarks made by National MP Simeon Brown on breakfast this morning.
Brown said Peters remarks were “ultimately up to him”.
“He’s the leader of the NZ First party.
“There’s an inquiry going on into this issue at the moment and really the whole conversation needs to be about the coronal inquiry, where that’s going and what happened when,” Brown said.
He said that only Peters knows the “more intricate details of what happened when at the time”.
For those political apologists and feckless media, there is an existing transcript of a phone call made by the Prime Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister at the vital time of a crisis when a terrorist had just massacred innocent people. Not once were we transparently informed of…
A Muslim leader has criticised Peters for politicising the mosque attacks, saying he was spreading misinformation and now was not the time for “political posturing”.
Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ) chairman Abdur Razzaq Khan told TVNZ’s Breakfast this morning the phone call to police from Ardern’s office was detailed in the report of the Royal Commission, so Peters’ comments suggested he had not read the report.
”This is an age where tweets and social media can divert genuine public discourse - you can actually bring in misinformation and make it the fact.”
Asked if he expected Peters to apologise, Khan pointed out that even after the mosque attacks Peters had refused to apologise for previousoffensive comments he had made about Muslims which had contributed to “Islamophobia”.
”Whether he apologises or not, we still respect him - he’s a political leader. We expect a lot more from him.”
