Candidate Kōrero: Winston Peters (NZ First)
CW: Transphobic Comments
Words by Ethan Manera (he/him)
Winston Peters (Ngāti Wai) is a political warhorse: the 78-year-old has been in and out of Parliament since 1978 and held positions such as Treasurer, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Deputy Prime Minister. But after NZ First failed to make it back into Parliament in 2020, Peters has hitched his wagon to inflammatory culture war issues, flirting with climate change denial, vaccine skepticism, and anti co-governance rhetoric.
Winston kindly came along to the Salient office for a robust and hostile 30-minute chat peppered with personal insults, including calling me ignorant, a hypocrite, and saying I need to find a new job.
Coalition Negotiations
Because NZ First is one of the only minor parties willing to work with both Labour and National, Peters has often found himself in the ‘kingmaker position’, with the power to form a government with either side. But this time around, he ruled out working with Labour, “because they simply lied to me about the secret agenda they had based on race. [...] They did it under the table, and when I found out I said, ‘We're never going to go into government with them again.’”
He wasn't keen to discuss NZ First’s role in a potential National led government, saying “I didn't come to this interview with Salient to talk about the National Party [or] the ACT party.”
Student Support
When asked if he still supported NZ First’s previous policy to wipe student loan debt for Kiwis who stayed working in New Zealand for five years, Peters denied that this was ever their policy, asking, “Where's that policy written?” When I presented a 2017 Stuff article written by Henry Cooke, he claimed “Mr Cooke didn't write what the policy was.”
Despite this, he said he still supports it, as well as being “still very strongly in favor of universal student allowance”.
“But I've just done the latest fiscals on the way up here over the last hour, driving in the car, and we are saying to ourselves, ‘The situation is so dire that all these promises other political parties are making cannot be fulfilled, they haven't got the money.’”
Housing
He said the biggest thing that can be done to improve the unaffordable housing and rental market is to reform the Resource Management Act. “We are going to have to see that commodity pricing of housing is not 45% higher in cost in Australia. There's no excuse for this.”
He said to achieve this we need to encourage the use of wood, “because we are the most efficient [...] good wood product grower in the world.”
Peters takes an anti-immigrant stance on housing, saying, “100,000 immigrants coming to this country in the next year [is a] sugar hit” that will drive up house prices.
When asked if he supports controls on the rental market, such as what the Green Party are proposing, Peters said no, and requested I not bring up the Green Party again. “Please don't ask me to talk about the Greens’ policies because they're in la la land, they're absolutely in la la land.”
“Most of them have never run a business of their own. I have, and I know what it's like to hire staff. I know the cost of having to carry that thing and do all the problems yourself.”
NZ First’s full housing policy is due to be released on 2 October.
Cost of Living
To tackle the cost of living crisis, Peters said he’s going to change supermarket regulations by “busting through the duopoly” and scrapping the Grocery Commission.
He also said he wants to conduct a “full scale bank inquiry” into Australian banks which are “ripping off New Zealand customers”.
The NZ First website claims the party plans to remove GST on “basic food”, but Peters said that policy is now on the backburner. “We can't go ahead with that one any longer since the [Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update] came out.”
“Everyone out there who's a realist knows that we're in economic trouble, and we've all got to put our shoulders to the wheel, so to speak, to get on top of it.”
Fringe Policies
I presented Mr Peters with his NZ First policy document, consisting of merely 36 bullet points, to clarify some of his positions.
Their third policy states “under NZ First, vaccine mandates will end”, despite all vaccine mandates being lifted last year. Peters argues that the consequences of mandates have not ended. “People have lost everything and got no compensation whatsoever, or taken [the] vaccine and got seriously injured [...] and my job is to stop it going on into the future.”
Another of his policies is to “stop indoctrination by removing gender ideology from the curriculum, especially from primary school”. When confronted with the fact that gender is not in the primary school curriculum, Peters claimed it is taught discreetly and said my question was uneducated “the melody of the ignorant is to be ignorant without knowing it, and on this matter, you're ignorant”.
When asked how campaigning on the harmful rhetoric of policing transgender people’s use of public bathrooms is relevant to the election, Peters clapped back. “With respect, what do you know about politics? [...] I've never heard someone so young, so ignorant, come and confront the longest standing politician in this country and tell them what an election issue is.”
Peters claimed that there have been many cases in New Zealand of transgender women assaulting cis women in bathrooms and changing rooms. There have been no reported cases of this.
NZ First’s campaign slogan is “Let's Take Back Our Country”. When asked what this means, he asked me what the name of our country is, then said that Aotearoa is a “bull-dust name from French Polynesia”. This led to a anti-governance rant which included him saying that Māori aren't indigenous to Aotearoa. “I'm here to stop the taxpayers' money being wasted teaching students ignorance and myth,” he said.
Climate Change
Although he said he supports “sound environmentalism” and wants to “fix up the pollution”, Peters claims “there's always been climate change” and doesn't believe humans are contributing to it, despite the scientific consensus stating otherwise. Peters said I was promoting a “narrative of fear” and argued against taking climate action.
“China is doing nothing, India is doing nothing, Russia is doing nothing, the United States are virtually doing nothing, and you're gonna bust our economy trying to virtue signal for the rest of the world. I've watched politicians doing that, and they are the young people of this country's worst nightmare, because they're lying to them.”
***
With NZ First consistently hitting the 5% threshold in recent polls, it seems Winston Peters may be back in the game. Peters is confident he’ll make a return, and says that when he does, he’s committed to improving Aotearoa for students and young people. “I’ll do everything I can to provide the policies for students, for a future in the country that should be, as it once was, the greatest country on Earth.”