Opinion: When Ruth Richardson finished delivering the Mother of All Budgets in 1991, her fellow National Party MPs rose as one in the House to give her a standing ovation. Well, almost as one.
Throughout the speech, Māori Affairs Minister Winston Peters had kept his head down at his desk, preoccupied with correspondence. By pure chance his need to stand, stretch his legs and shake out the crumpled pages of the evening paper coincided with the standing ovation. Understandably, he found it difficult to clap while gathering up his papers at the same time.
That night, you might say, New Zealand First was born. Peters was making his distaste for Richardson’s policies plain, and he went on doing it so publicly that three months later, he was sacked from the Cabinet after delivering a speech provocatively entitled “Low flying with an Erebus economy”. Before the next election, he quit National altogether and formed his own party.
It’s still with us today, the longest-lived “minor” party, and Peters himself is serving his 37th year in Parliament. Remarkably, he’s the only politician of his generation still in the House, and at 79 he shows no sign of stopping. Even more remarkably, he has led his party for 31 years: imagine if someone tried to lead National or Labour that long. Actually, you can’t imagine it. New Zealand First is Peters’ baby; he created it in his own image, and has nursed it, nourished it, held its hand from day one.
Richardson’s devastating, promise-smashing budget fuelled the growing mood for a better electoral system than the one that kept giving either National or Labour all the power, and with MMP looming, Peters perceived earlier than anyone else the potential in being a centrist party, like the Free Democrats in Germany.
Since then, he has leveraged that potential four times into coalition governments, twice each with Labour and National. Not bad for a party that averages 7% of the vote and has twice been voted out of Parliament altogether.
Yet this man – who seems at times to have mesmerised the public with his aggressive charm, good looks and wolfish grin – has never been prime minister, never commanded a majority in Parliament, never held ministerial office for more than three years at a time. Yes, he has had some major policy successes, notably the SuperGold card and free doctor’s visits for under-sixes, but his influence on core economic policy has been hard to detect.
When he actually had some financial power as treasurer in the late 90s, he meekly toed the National-led government’s line. And New Zealand First’s current coalition deal with National contains very little that National would not have wanted to do anyway.
So why is he there? Whose interests is he serving? Or, to put it another way: what’s the point of Peters?
To answer that, we have to go back to the reason for his breaking away from National in the first place and for giving his party the name he did.
Like many people, he was horrified by the rampant free-market reforms of both major parties through the late 80s and early 90s, and countered with nationalist policies not all that different from what social democrats on both sides of the House used to offer pre-1984. It’s the nationalist, protectionist flag he has since sought to keep flying, despite the entrenchment of neoliberalism – which essentially means denationalisation – in the institutions of the state.
In this endeavour, he reaches a constituency of up to a couple of hundred thousand voters. Call them the lost nationalists, the displaced working class, the kind of people punished by the policies of the professional middle class. Peters has found a sweet spot somewhere between National and Labour that delivers him just enough votes, more often than not, to squeeze back into power.
He has long drawn on the disaffection of superannuitants who felt other parties had sold them out; now, cannily, he’s reinforcing that support by appealing to a different and on the whole younger demographic: a voting bloc, loosely definable as ‘anti-vaxers’, that he specifically wooed by visiting the occupation of Parliament grounds – the only politician to do so.
Apart from scratching some anti-woke, pro-smoke itches, it’s unlikely that Peters will ever be able to deliver real change for such supporters. But as an example of how MMP should work, he fulfils an essential function: being there. You could go so far as to say that it hardly matters what he actually achieves – the key thing is that he serves as an outlet for discontent with the two major parties, and as a highly visible representative of a New Zealand that those parties no longer speak convincingly for.
It’s performative as much as it’s political. Over and over, he plays the common-sense card, as if the real facts should be blindingly obvious to the most blithering fool. In his own eyes, he has never been known to make a foolish move.
All the same, it would be nice if once in a while he admitted fault or said, “I’m sorry”. To my knowledge, these words have never passed his lips in public. Far from it. The phrase “double down” has come to be intimately associated with him whenever some outrageous statement is challenged.
And perhaps because neoliberalism has made the centre a harder place to identify, let alone hold, he has increasingly been resorting to intemperate rhetoric that ill becomes a supposedly centrist leader and loyal coalition partner. He disgraced himself late last year by alleging that the Ardern-led government had known in advance about the Christchurch mosque massacres (an odious claim that led commentator Matthew Hooton, not without reason, to call Peters a moral cretin); and by saying “co-governance” and “Nazi Germany” in the same breath he has since given even more credence to this unsavoury epithet.
He’s much more likeable and more influential as Foreign Minister, whatever one thinks of his Aukustrated litany of lines as he seeks to reinvent Anzus.
It’s a role that suits his silky triplespeak and keeps him more or less out of the prime minister’s hair as he weaves his Winstonian way around the world.
The darling of his ministry, he also ensures – to his credit – that experienced diplomats, not retired politicians, are appointed to key overseas posts (for example, Rosemary Banks, recently reappointed as Ambassador to the US. If National had its way, it would probably now be Bill English).
But even in that role, Peters is capable of almost wilfully undercutting the statesmanlike image, for example, by slagging off former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr. What gets into him at times like this, when out of the blue, he breaks ranks? In this case, it was as if the strain of being relentlessly nice to chaps like Antony Blinken and AntÓnio Guterres (all that smiling and handshaking!) was just too much, and something snapped – the inside button of his double-breasted suit jacket, perhaps?
According to authoritative sources, this is not Peters’ first rodeo, so we’ll have to trust that when it comes time to hand over the deputy prime ministership to David Seymour in mid-2025, he’ll dismount gracefully rather than try to stay in the saddle.
But will he? His potential for destabilisation cannot be dismissed. The last time he was in coalition with National, he wound up being sacked by Jenny Shipley and then withdrawing his party’s support.
On present evidence, that’s unlikely to happen this time around. But you never know with Peters. He didn’t get where he is today by being predictable. Although to his devoted followers he’s the sainted figure who will lead them out of the wilderness, you sometimes have to wonder if he’s not the Messiah but just a very naughty boy.
Denis Welch is a former Listener deputy editor and political columnist.
