When Winston Peters referred to Nazi Germany in a speech and got into a fight with a British punk band, he generated a miasma of ironies. It was the sort of confusion that must suit Peters down to the ground. Was he being deliberately vague in at least one of his appearances on TV? You couldn’t be sure, because the TV news, with its emphasis on snappy brevity, wasn’t the best forum for untangling such a problematic knot.
Reports of Peters’ speech seemed garbled at first. It was necessary to go looking online for the comments he said he was referring to. Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi last September had defended the statement in his sports policy in 2022, “It’s a known fact that Māori genetic make-up is stronger than others.” When asked by Jack Tame on Q + A if this was racist, Waititi denied it was, and added, “It’s stronger in me, and I’ve got a whole lot of genetics in me.”
Peters must have anticipated the uproar a reference to Nazis would generate, and how it would play out. He’s always so tactically outraged when it goes (one assumes) pretty much exactly as he’s envisaged. He later said he’d been criticising the leniency with which Waititi’s assertion had been treated. That the news media immediately sought comment from the Jewish community only increased the uproar.
It would be interesting to know. Does Waititi understand the word “stronger” to mean “better than”? In what respect are his genes stronger? Is Peters genetically stronger? More interestingly, does it ever concern Waititi that the divisive aspects of his party’s stance might undermine a broad social-justice agenda? How would he answer the suggestion by a socialist, say, that his private-rights push has damaged the left-wing project?
Our discourse is so local and complex. Listening to a discussion among Pākehā Te Pāti Māori voters, I detected a faintly patronising tone. Assertions of stronger Māori genetic makeup didn’t bother them because they simply couldn’t take them seriously.
Interestingly, though, when someone asked whether they would vote for Te Pāti Māori if Māori were the demographic majority, one voter said, “Fuck, no!” For him, the support went only so far; after that, an instinctive resistance kicked in. Perhaps, even though he didn’t take the assertions seriously, they aroused a sense of caution.
The objection to Peters’ reference to Nazism is that it’s cynical ‒ a populist trope. Trump does it, even as his own fascist traits are widely recognised. The horrifying Nazi ideology was fuelled by grievance – Germany was impoverished and humiliated after World War 1. Since grievance is a dangerous motivator, useful for all political opportunists, we need democratic rules-based order on all fronts.
It worked well for Peters when Chumbawamba demanded he stop using their song Tubthumping at rallies. Now, the culture warrior could valiantly square up to some woke old punks. (His own lyrics should be “I got kicked out/I flirted with conspiracies/ shamelessly to get back in.”)
Guitarist Boff Whalley called Peters bigoted and small-minded because Peters courts voters with those traits. But Whalley also said Peters was “spouting misguided racist ideologies”. There were complexities at every turn. Here was an Englishman labelling a Māori politician a racist for, as Peters tells it, criticising another Māori politician’s assertion of “genetic strength”.
The upstanding punk just wanted his song back; now he was lost in a Kiwi miasma, as Peters made capital by grinningly winding him up. Peters was so provocative and performative it reminded me of the late Dame Edna Everage. He could make one of her aphorisms his own at future rallies: “Life is a melody if only you’ll hum the tune.”
