Winston prowls Brash hunting ground

If there is one thing that gets Winston's goat, it is the Nats stealing his ideas. So in retaliation for their Treaty of Waitangi policy thievery, he has stolen Don Brash's happy place.

Orewa.

Orewa is Brash's land of opportunity, and like Sir Robert Muldoon long before, he uses its conservative, friendly ears to bid for the nation's votes; his controversial messages painted in moderate, polite words.

It is not the Rotary Club for Peters, instead Grey Power, whose members' cram into Church of St John the Evangelist.

"Our Redeemer lives. I shall rise again" reads the sign by the entrance and, given Peters' career, observing the irony of this is almost facile.

Their meeting is over, but there is a bit of a kerfuffle because the raffle has not yet been drawn and Peters is waiting to sweep down the aisle and tell of a land which may or may not have ever really existed; a time when, as one man put it, there was no risk of "walking down Queen St and thinking you were in Hong Kong".

As Peters takes the stand, the audience waits, rapt.

"As a previous minister in the regime of Saddam Hussein said when he arrived in New Zealand, 'I'm pleased to be here'."

And the audience chortles - Peters' five-point immigration policy complete with anecdotes, horror stories about fraud, deception, and scoldings of the media, "some of whom are becoming chihuahuas" for their failure to expose all of this.

He talks of tolls on the Puhoi motorway extension, and the seething mass of Asian crime, of triad operations in Auckland, and he promises more horror stories in the days to come.

He bamboozles with statistics, and sums up each list with a bit of Winnie-Vindaloo rhetoric:

"It's all part of Labour's ethnic engineering and re-population policy, and it's going on under your nose," he says. The audience is suitably scandalised.

He tells of the Tampa refugees who have since brought in 237 family members, some of them up to 11 each.

"Oooaaahhh," groans the audience.

Particularly harrowing tales - like whether Asians will be the second highest population group in New Zealand - are met with "oooohhhh"s and "Jesus".

They begin to answer his rhetorical questions about the Immigration service.

"I mean, would you trust them?"

"Nooooooo," the collective reply.

Finally he puts in his final pitch for voters to follow him or face an unrecognisable New Zealand, a country slipping from First World to Third World status.

"It is time for action and we don't mind if we ruffle a few feathers or put a few noses out of joint. And if chardonnay drinking, PC, pinky pointing liberal merchants find us distasteful we don't care."

Outside, one woman declares she's never taken much interest in politics. "But I could be convinced by Winston quite easily."