Where's Winston?

Lachlan Ewing (he/him)

Winston Peters. A man, a name, a legend. For good or for bad, a legacy is attached to this name in the mind of any New Zealander. Whether it was his devilish grin resemblant of those thunderbird puppets stretching across a face, taking on everyone else in Parliament’s debating chamber at once and often winning, or incendiary rhetoric in the media, he was never far from the public eye since first entering Parliament in 1978. But like the Avatar, one day, when the world needed him most, he vanished.

Except the world probably didn’t need him all that much. New Zealanders certainly didn’t think we did when we went to the polls on October 17 at last year’s general election, when we awarded his New Zealand First party only 2.6% of the vote. Winny and the gang failed to return to Parliament. On the election night, he delivered a brief and surprisingly gracious speech to a ragtag bunch of the remaining faithful in Russel, and left us on a cliff-hanger that “as for the next challenge, we’ll have to wait and see.”

And wait I did. Surely it couldn’t end like this? Could Winston truly go gentle into that good night, or would he rage, rage against the dying of the light? But it looked as if it might all be over. I combed the internet for crumbs that may have been left behind. Winston did not post again on Facebook after 15 October 2020, two days before that fateful election. His last post was a video of him walking in slow motion, in his best black suit. Rain was falling from the sombre grey sky. It looked as if he was marching solemnly in the funeral procession of his own career. In that moment, what did he think, what did he feel? Was Winston afraid? He made one last tweet two weeks later on October 28, catching up with his good friends from the Japanese and US embassies. What did it mean? Japan is known as the land of the rising sun, and New Zealand is one of the first countries to see the coming of the new day.

America to the west is one of the last to see the sun set on the old day. There was significant symbolism of beginnings and endings in this cryptic tweet. Was this the end for Winston, or a new beginning? Perhaps he was hinting at the inner turmoil raging inside of himself. Japan and America were adversaries as recently as 1945, and this would not have been lost on Winston the history enthusiast. I couldn’t access the deeper understanding Winston was attempting to pull me into. As Haruki Murakami, who coincidentally is a Japanese author, says, “if you can’t understand it without an explanation, then you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

Thus Winston retreated from the public eye. Some say he flew north on the backs of a flock of gulls, to reside peacefully by the Pacific water that laps at the doorstep of his Whananāki home. Some say he sailed south at the prow of a ghostly waka, to face the gales and squalls of the great Antarctic in total solitude. At the edge of the world, could he cheat political death and return an immortal? I believe he burrowed down through the basement of the beehive, deep into the furrows of the national subconscious. There he lay like the unborn atua Rūamoko in the warmth of his mother Papatūānuku. He listened to the world above go on without him, kicking in a dream. He yearned for the days of old before the earth and sky were separated, and all manner of life came to spread across his earth mother. Soon, he would erupt back into the world above.

And then on June 20 this year, the eruption. Winston returned to the public eye at New Zealand First’s first New Zealand First convention since the election. It’s fair to say he covered a lot of ground in his keynote speech. Henley’s poem “Invictus” was paraphrased. Shots were taken at every other major political party. It was made very clear that New Zealand First were coming back. But why were they coming back? I was left with more questions than answers.

Firstly, who are Ngāti Woke? Winston reckons that the Government is “whacking tradies and farmers with a fee to make it cheaper for Ngāti Woke to buy new electric cars.” It seems this imaginary iwi was first conceptualised by Winston’s disciple, Shane Jones. Early last year, he pitched himself against Ngāti Woke, the people he thought were unreasonable and overly sensitive when calling out his comments on international students from India as racist. Ngāti Woke seem to have their heads screwed on right. They had the common sense and straight-talking nouse NZ First prides itself on to call a spade a spade, or in Jones’ case, a racist comment a racist comment. If the Government wants to help these sensible people to buy cars that don’t require the fuel that is driving the earth to the brink of ecological crisis, I’m not too sure what the problem is.

On a similar note, Winston claimed that there is a growing cancel culture, “where anyone who asks legitimate questions is belittled as a colonialist, a racist, a bigot, a chauvinist, or worse still, not new woke age.” What sort of legitimate questions would these be, Winston? Are they questions like “Why can’t we just say ‘Towel-wrong-ah’ like in the good old days, that’s what we all call it?”.

Instead of belittling the askers of these questions, how does Winston plan to respond? If it is to have an open discussion and educate them about how society is changing and why some old ways of thinking must change, then all power to Winny and the gang. But I have a nagging suspicion that instead he hopes to fan these flames of division just enough to convince 5% of Kiwis to vote for NZ First in 2023. If it works, there’ll be some good honest buggers who vote for NZ First. People with warm hearts who would invite you in for a scone and cuppa, but hold a number of views a VUW student may find unsavoury. They can only be held so accountable for growing up in different places and times, being trapped in different Facebook algorithms, and engaging with different people and perspectives. But what about professional politicians who exploit all of this so they can get back to scurrying around Parliament, as they have done for most of this century and a good deal of the last? It’s harder to sympathise, and harder still to understand why they bother. 

I tried to contact Winston himself, in the hope that he could clear up these questions. I had enjoyed an interview with him many years ago at the Mangawhai Village Hall. Hopefully I could leverage this Northland connection. However, perhaps he was still smarting over this writer’s Year 11 self catching him out on the true length of 90 Mile Beach, which is in fact 55 miles (86km) long. But despite his public re-eruption, he was

still dormant on social media. The New Zealand First website’s general enquiries section seemed the only open wormhole between the public of 2021 and a party grounded in primordial space and time. My message shot into the void, a lonely probe, hopeful of finding some greater meaning behind it all. But at my end, radio silence. Perhaps one day we will make contact that changes everything, and there will be a much more exciting sequel article. But for now, Winston is keeping his cards close to his chest. I would love to understand what his problem with Ngāti Woke is, and his paranoid obsession with cancel culture. For now, I can only hypothesise:

Boris Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago, “Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That is why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that is why they write symphonies.” For decades, Winston has systematically explored the riddle of political death, with a view to overcoming it. That is why he has discovered the prejudices and fears that run deep in many New Zealanders, that is why he has written speeches that package them in the new language of modern culture wars. Winston has a formidable intellect, and is one of New Zealand history’s most talented speakers and politicians. He clearly still has an abundance of energy at 76 years old. I can only hope I am wrong, and he chooses to use these qualities to add something of value to New Zealand politics. However, it looks as if he is dragging out the same dead horses, to flog with a shiny new whip.