John Campbell: Winston Peters, the 'Whaddaya got?' man

Analysis: With New Zealand First near the five per cent threshold in a series of recent polls, it’s possible that the party formed by Winston Peters three decades ago, and voted out of Parliament last election, will be back. John Campbell has spent 30 years reporting on New Zealand First. From the party’s very first day. This week, his political column is a story of New Zealand First in three parts.

Sometime in the mid to late nineties, I was interviewing Winston Peters live.

He was with me in the 3 News Auckland studio. If it was 1998 or after, we would have been sitting at our flash new desk, which was really polystyrene painted to look like wood.

There’s a strange moment in the seconds before a live TV interview begins when the mics are up, and you’re both staring into the possibility of ridiculousness, hoping for the rational. And the director says a single word in your earpiece – “cue”.

From my faded memory, the interview went downhill from there.

I suppose it began with me saying something like, “Good evening, Mr Peters,” and I suspect it continued with him saying something like, “Well, I don’t know what’s good about it.”

As I recall it, a quarter of a century later, he seemed to treat every question as an impertinence, as a form of insult or character assassination, and we crashed and stumbled for seven unedifying minutes, give or take, and at the end of it I was spinning like Jupiter, and he grinned broadly, shook my hand and thanked me warmly, like I’d just bought him dinner.

And maybe I had.

I don’t remember his exact words, but I do remember the insight he gave me into the Winstonian art of politics.

In the space of half an ad-break, he explained that the more he seemed at odds with the mainstream media, the more his voters liked him.

I realised then that an oppositional interview conferred upon him the status of outsider, or maverick, or whistle-blower, or of someone speaking truth to power (and, however much journalists dislike it, we are seen as a form of power by some of those for whom life is defined by power’s absence).

And since then, every time I’ve seen or heard Winston Peters being interviewed I’ve suspected he’s speaking over the head of his interviewer, directly to those who see him as their man. Anti-establishment. Anti-all-establishments. The politician you trust when you don’t trust politicians.

In the 1953 movie, The Wild One, Marlon Brando plays Johnny Strabler, the leader of an outlaw bikie gang.

In its most famous scene he’s asked, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?", and he answers "Whaddaya got?"

Winston Peters is the “Whaddaya got?” man of New Zealand politics.

If you say black, he says white.

If you say white, he says, “look here, Mr Campbell,” then goes into coalition with black.

And if you say “black and white” his umbrage is so great that his pinstripes bristle like an ant war, and he deploys his favourite ‘c’ word - cabal.

Now, depending on what poll you trust, and the latest Talbot Mills has him at 5.4%, Winston Peters, aged 78 but weathered into agelessness, is in the neighbourhood of getting back into Parliament.

By “him”, I mean New Zealand First. Although, let’s face it, I probably don’t.

New Zealand First is the free gift you get with your purchase of Winston Peters. The steak knives. The bonus stickers. No-one votes for the party. Everyone votes for its leader.

The question is, who is “everyone”?

If Winston Peters/New Zealand First do get to 5%, where are those people from?

At first, almost half a century ago, they were National supporters.

Winston Peters arrived in Parliament, in 1979, as a National MP.

But earlier, in 1975, and this detail is important for reasons I’ll return to later, he’d run for National in what was then the “Northern Māori” electorate, a seat so safely Labour’s that trying to win it for the Nats was legendarily improbable.

He was up against the beloved Matiu Rata. Famously, Peters received enough votes to get his deposit back. The audacity was declaratory. Was he myth making then? Was he a Party man, taking the hit in the hope of an easier electorate next election? Or did he really mean it?

In 1990, after National was elected to Government, he became Minister of Māori Affairs. But following the Mother of All Budgets in 1991, he increasingly spoke out against National’s Ruth Richardson-led economic policy.

He fell out with his own party. Firstly, badly then irreparably, and Jim Bolger sacked him from Cabinet. Eventually, propelled by himself to a saintly exile, he stood against National in Tauranga as an independent and won.

And then he launched New Zealand First.

I was there that day, July 18 1993, at Alexandra Park. He was wearing the pinstripe suit that he has never stopped wearing since. And he was smiling, to quote Philip Larkin, at “success so huge and wholly farcical”.

if you look to the right of the photo published in the New Zealand Herald the next morning (and used here with their kind permission), you can see me following him, a political reporter at TV3. I have a leather folder, which must have been purchased in honour of my fancy job. The future is stretching out in front of us both, endlessly.

But it’s more interesting to look at the people in the crowd. And that’s what makes this photo so revealingly good. They are standing, and clapping, and smiling. And even then, on the Party’s very first day, they already resemble what we have come to know as New Zealand First’s core constituency. People who ordered something by mail order that somehow never arrived.

People for whom life has not quite been as they imagined it would be. And Winston is theirs. Look at the smiles to his left. They are looking at him, and when he speaks they are hearing the echoes of what they’d say – if only the world would let them.

In 1996, just over three years after that photo was taken, New Zealand First received 276,000 votes. They won 17 seats, including all five Māori electorates. It was an extraordinary performance. And they have never done better.

I was there that day, too.

There we were, waiting for his pronouncements. (He may never have been happier.) Who was he going with? National or Labour? National or Labour? National or Labour? (We kept asking that question for weeks.)

It was National, for better or worse. Mostly the latter. The whole thing fell apart. And the 276,000 votes New Zealand First received in 1996 fell to 88,000 in 1999.

The opposition man had not worked in Government.

And every time New Zealand First have been anywhere near Government – kapow.

In 2005, New Zealand First signed a Confidence and Supply Agreement with Labour, and Winston Peters became Minister of Foreign Affairs. (He was good at it, by all accounts.)

In 2008, New Zealand First were dumped from Parliament.

In 2017, New Zealand First went into coalition with Labour, unexpectedly propelling them into Government and making Jacinda Ardern Prime Minister.

And in 2020, New Zealand First were dumped from Parliament.

In the thirty years since New Zealand First was formed, they’ve supported National once, Labour twice, not been required (or desired) as a coalition partner four times, and voted out of Parliament, completely, twice.

They function, in short, as MMP’s equivalent of the tail in the Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Sometimes (1996 and 2017) the National and Labour donkeys are both desperately braying at them, “pick me, pick me”.

Sometimes (1999, 2002, 2011, 2014) the National donkey or the Labour donkey has a lovely big tail of its own, or gets a tail from another creature, and New Zealand First’s tail just hangs about, dejectedly, fly blown.

And sometimes (2008 and 2020) they miss the donkey’s arse so completely their tail is out of the game.

And throughout it all, Winston Peters endures, insisting that he’s not the tail but the donkey, or railing against the bigger donkeys, or the impudent younger donkeys, or the donkey cabal, or the PC donkeys, or the outrage of using Māori to call a donkey a kaihe, or despairing at the treatment he receives and, in the words of Eeyore, the greatest donkey of all time, bewailing, “A tail isn’t a tail to them; it’s just a little bit extra at the back.”

In the life of this country there are four mornings worth getting up early for.

ANZAC Day, the shared grief and imaginings of the dawn service. The remembrance, joy, gratitude and existential wonder of Matariki, especially at Ōrākei Marae. Waitangi Day at Waitangi itself – where, on a fine, summer morning, the pre-dawn Treaty Grounds alive with families whispering their excitement, the waka coming into shore below you, and the sun rising out of the Pacific as it would have done on that morning in 1840, you can almost, almost, get a sense of what it might have been like to be there.

The fourth morning, and possibly the least well known, is the Sunday of Koroneihana, at Tūrangawaewae Marae in Ngāruawāhia.

Koroneihana is the annual celebration of the leader of the Kīngitanga movement.

But more broadly than that, as Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu said at the 35th anniversary of her own coronation: “Kīngitanga stands for the love we bear for one another. It tells us when we are right and what is right. It stands for Mana Motuhake, the importance of our faith in ourselves under God. It draws us back, always to have respect for orderly conduct according to both Māori custom and the law of the land which came with the Treaty that was signed by two people during the reign of Queen Victoria.”

The word “love”, the phrase “it draws us back”, the ideal – “what is right”. There are moments at Koroneihana when it really does feel like we’re collectively capable of something special.

More prosaically, it’s a kind of stocktake. And on the Sunday morning of Koroneihana the politicians arrive. And everyone stands outside together, in whatever the weather, waiting to be welcomed on.

This year it was drizzling. (It was late last month, it had been drizzling for weeks.) Despite the weather, everyone arrived dressed to the nines – none more so than Te Pāti Māori’s Rawiri Waititi, who wore something that may have been velvet, and was the green of Chartreuse, and when he took his raincoat off to reveal it all the kuia giggled like they were young again, and the men all knew we were beaten.

The oratory at Koroneihana is reliably magnificent.

“Don’t treat Māori as a political football,” Che Wilson (a former president of Te Pāti Māori, now chair of the King’s Council) said, suspending the words in the air the way a mobile hangs above a cot, making the space after each sentence a challenge. Did you hear that? Did you?

And then Rahui Papa stood. It was raining lightly at first, then heavily, and someone held an umbrella above him. He was dressed in a cream suit and leaned forward towards the guests, his voice a kind of thunder.

“IT IS NOT YOUR POLITICAL MANIFESTO TO BELITTLE TE IWI MĀORI IN THEIR OWN WHENUA.”

“We also think you have an obligation to stamp out the negative, racist, politicking in this country”, Rahui Papa continued, so loudly that the microphone someone had put in front of him seemed completely redundant.

Opposite him, the Prime Minister and assorted Cabinet Ministers were listening, the Leader of the Opposition and senior National MPs were listening, the Greens were there, Te Pati Māori were there, Brian Tamaki was there, looking like he may have misread the word “King” as an invitation to an Elvis theme party.

The politicians all nodded, politely… respectfully… admiringly… who knows? But possibly, Monsieur Chartreuse aside, not in agreement with terribly much of it.

Still, they came. And they listened. And that felt appropriate. And respectful. And healthy.

Act weren’t there. This wasn’t surprising to anyone. The party that dishes it out seems remarkably brittle about taking it. Was ever a freedom-of-speech quite so thin skinned? Or maybe they always are?

But New Zealand First was also not there. And in that absence is something revealing about Winston Peters.

Remember where he stood as a National candidate in 1975? Northern Māori. Remember what New Zealand First achieved in 1996? The unprecedented feat of taking all the Māori electorates off Labour? (Never done before, never done since.)

But in 2023, they do not attend Koroneihana. They are not standing in the Māori electorates. And if we go to New Zealand First’s website, that same Party asserts, “we will change all of the woke virtue signalling names of every government department back to English”.

Yes, that’s the fourth “commitment” on their “commitment” page. A dog whistle so loud that even Lassie heard it and leapt up, and that very good boy has been dead since 1958.

So we find ourselves with a politician who once, literally, stood for northern Māori (and Northern Māori), who was once so resoundingly perceived as a voice for Māoridom that his party won every Māori seat, a politician who once railed against the greater inequalities he despaired would be a product of Ruth Richardson’s time as Minister of Finance, now picking a fight with the name, “Waka Kotahi”.

It is, by the way, called “Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency.” The English name remains.

Incredibly, this was a central platform of New Zealand First’s first AGM, after its eviction from Parliament in 2020.

Yes, in 2021, seeking to propel his rejected Party back into the spotlight, what did Winston Peters go with? Waka Kotahi.

This Te Karere story by Te Okiwa Mclean can barely contain its incredulity.

But if you watch it you can see the remnants of the crowd from that New Zealand Herald photo in 1993, reduced in number, older now, but still grateful that Winston says the things they don’t feel able to say.

Winston is their man.

But whose man? Really.

Māori?

Māori briefly thought so.

In 2005, New Zealand First issued a media release headlined, “New Zealand – The Last Asian Colony”, in which Winston Peters said: “Māori will be disturbed to know that in 17 years’ time they will be outnumbered by Asians in New Zealand.”

Was he anti-colonisation? No. He was attacking Asian immigration, as he’s done so very often over the past three decades.

In 2017, Hayden Donnell gathered together examples in The Spinoff. It’s a truly miserable read.

And what makes it so very bewildering is the contradiction it encapsulates. When Winston Peters demands all government departments are named in English, he’s embracing what was an immigrant language. But when the immigrants are Asian, he uses phrases like "Asianisation by stealth", and he says, “we struggle to know what a New Zealander really is”. (NB: Just for verification purposes, that last quote is from here.)

And here’s where the one-size-fits-all opportunism of this is laid out as attractively as roadkill. In the 2005 speech where he talks about struggling to know “what a New Zealander is”, Winston Peters says, “We used to be an English speaking country”. But here it’s not the use of Māori he’s bristling against, it’s the fact the “last census revealed that over 300,000 people in New Zealand spoke little or no English”.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Although, he may not be quite the same.

We see glimpes of his best self, still.

I’ve written about this in passing, recently. I was looking at “the politics of poverty” and I recalled the speech Winston Peters made in 2017, as he was announcing New Zealand First was going into coalition with Labour rather than National.

“Far too many New Zealanders have come to view today’s capitalism not as their friend, but as their foe,” he said. “Capitalism must regain its human face.”

He said those words with such feeling that they felt genuine, authentic, as much of what he says feels attention-seeking. Craven. There were shades of the much younger man who spoke out, in 1991, against his own National Party, and the direction it was being taken on by Ruth Richardson.

In June 1979, when he gave his Maiden Speech in Parliament, Winston Peters asked: “What is my New Zealand?” And he answered: “It begins with my family. My father is a Māori elder and my mother is a Scot.”

Later, he referred to the statue of Sir Āpirana Ngata, in a lobby near the debating chamber.

“At a time when there are those in our midst who would have us believe that our race relations have reached troubled waters, his memory is a reminder to all Māoris of what we can do… New Zealand is not a monotonous garden where every flower is the same; it is a garden where the diversity of the blooms enriches the view.”

By 2005, the same man was saying: “The scary thing is, the situation is only going to get worse, and New Zealanders are going to be left wondering where their country has gone.”

By 2023, he was calling New Zealand First’s election campaign, “Let’s take back our country.”

From whom?

(Asians? Māori? Trans people?)

For whom?

(English speakers?)

It seems to be working, if “working” is the right word – it feels far less meritorious than work. Still, five percent is the target, and he’s hovering thereabouts.

“Your columns can be quite depressing”, a friend sighed, after reading “Chris v Chris”.

So, let’s end on a high note, for all our mental health.

I found it in that Maiden Speech from 1979. He was young then. (Was he ever, really, young?) And he knew the future needed to contain a promise worth aspiring to.

“The message of the 39th Parliament must be one of hope”, he said. “The people long for hope”.

Winston Peters.

And in that speech are passages that suggest how brilliant he more often could have been, beyond his prodigious capacity to repeatedly drag a party that is mostly only him up and into Parliament.

He was talking about “the critic”. People who whom “criticism is a goal in itself.”

“This critic never joins the ruck of human existence; his opinions are never put at risk. His non-participation is a fail-safe device. For instance, this critic cares nothing about the Māori or Polynesian people, for he seizes every opportunity to set these people against their European brethren.”

He’s on fire now, young Winston. Standing for Māori. Standing for hope. Standing for the “garden” and the “diversity of the blooms”.

“It is curious that those who have this attitude see others as an appropriate target,” he said.

“Others.”

His othering has become a default setting.

“I'm making it very clear, somebody that's got a male appendage should not be in a woman's bathroom or a girl's bathroom,” he said, last month.

Male appendages, Asian immigrants. Government agencies with Māori names.

The “Whaddaya got?” man. Tail in hand. Hoping for a donkey’s arse to pin it on.