Table of Contents
Rt. Hon Winston Peters
New Zealand First Convention
Sunday 23rd 2023
Mt Smart Stadium
Speech
Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for being here, at New Zealand First’s campaign launch.
81 days before Election Day, 69 days before Early Voting begins and 64 days before Overseas Voting starts, we meet here on a mission to save our country.
No doubt you’re thinking to yourself ‘what’s in it for me?’. Given the other party slogans already out there, and one in particular, that is a very good question.
This election must be about the economy. Because every issue inevitably comes back to what we must do and how we pay for it. And there’s the rub, because so many of the political promises of other parties being made have no chance of ever being kept.
Why? Well, if those parties have never delivered what they campaigned on in better times, they certainly won’t deliver on them in troubled times.
Remember Henry Ford’s words – ‘You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do’. Henry Ford built cars that ordinary people could afford. Right? All manner of politicians today are promising you a faster horse.
The critical issues for this election are our economy and cost of living crisis, our broken health system, our lack of law and order, our failing education system, and the cost of housing and rentals.
But if these five areas of crisis are not enough already, our very democracy is at risk from a rising tide of racism and separatism, that has given birth to secret social engineering that you were never warned about and most certainly never agreed to.
What’s the evidence for this? It’s the Prime Minister’s bonfire after he got the job – but the bonfire was for the paper back copies of Labour’s books, whilst they are saving the hard bound copies for after the election.
Vehicle Change
It is clear that a great majority of New Zealanders, including many Labour voters, don’t want more of the same. They are hard up against it, with rising costs everywhere, and no money left over after buying the essentials.
This majority rightfully expect to have a voice, yet Wellington is clearly not listening. New Zealanders are sick of all the changing definitions of economic and personal income security, and a vacuous goal of ‘wellbeing’, whatever that means. They know that they are forgotten New Zealanders slogging it out in difficult jobs and they ask – “where is the promise, where is the hope, where is the commitment that if we work, save, and be good citizens then tomorrow will be better for us”.
And remember many of New Zealand’s present day well off started as workers. Very few of them inherited their wealth, and malignant envy is no way to level up society. There must be rewards for sweat, tears, sacrifice, and savings. Many of us, and them, do remember from personal experience what poverty smells, tastes, and feels like.
Our country’s economic and social malaise did not happen overnight, but it’s got dramatically worse in just 33 months.
Too many of our young have no memory of when our country was a world leader, in health and education, and house ownership, and personal income the envy of nearly every other country. Let’s be honest, we have not delivered for them what our parents delivered for us.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t change direction we are certain to end up where we are going – down. So, be careful about the promises politicians make in this campaign, and ask this question – if their policies work, then why didn’t they work the last time they had power? Remember, ‘if you’re in the desert a mirage can be fatal’.
The next government must have real answers for problems economic and social, and not some ideological experiment where you and our country are the guinea pigs. Please ask, when and where did their policies ever work?
New Zealand has not paid its way since 1972. We must have policies in 2023 to grow, earn, and pay our way in to the future. Not overnight because that is impossible but improving year on year as other first world nations, once way behind us, now way ahead of us, have done.
New Zealand’s Gifted Inheritance
We have the resources, and we work the second longest hours in the OECD, so it can’t be the worker’s fault. The fault line of failure leads to Wellington, and we are going to have to fix that right here, right now.
How few commentators said a year ago that New Zealand is heading for a recession? Less than the fingers on one hand. Not strange really because most of these touted experts work for banks, foreign owned banks – and fake confidence is the reason for their existence.
Today many commentators say we are ‘broke’. But what they never say is we’re broke of ideas and polices to fix this country’s economy, and dramatically improve our national income and social performance. And what some of these experts don’t like, is being reminded that when we were number one in the world most of the politicians then had never been to university. They gaslight such success as “nostalgia”.
Longing for a past that they say is no longer possible. Well, we say it is possible again – but not with your policies.
That’s why when we look abroad, we see countries that have modernised following the script that once made us a world leader.
Once poor countries like Singapore, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland and an Island called Taiwan, transformed their economies to become wealth creators, maximising added value before exporting, maximising IT to assist wealth creation, providing great health systems and educating their people to the max, and knowing they could only get there with high wage economies – as we once did.
And they all have three more features:
- They have taxation policies that assist businesses and workers, not unfairly hinder them,
- They have disciplined populations, many with a police ratio to population less than ours, but far less crime, and
- They regard their people as human capital where expenditure is necessary investment, not wasteful cost.
And so did we once, when Parliament was full of practical people, not university union politicians who wouldn’t know a real worker if they fell over one, and don’t know how to fill out a simple ‘profit and loss’ account, or ‘pecuniary interest form’.
If you want to know who are the most forgotten people in New Zealand today, it is the kiwi worker – and New Zealand First has always cared for them.
New Zealand’s Broken Health System
When we formed New Zealand First 30 years ago, one of our founding principles was ‘that expenditure on health, was an investment’ – our country’s human capital needed to be healthy, and if sick, medically treated as fast as possible.
In the next three years we are going to set up a single health system – where need, not race, is the priority.
To do that, we’re going to reprioritise government expenditure, provide funding increases for primary health care, and reassign wasted resources to urgently deal with hospitals and waiting lists.
We are going to stop $29 billion plus on Auckland Light Rail which will not work, and spend it on items like Emergency Departments and residential care for the aged. And we are also going to use savings from wasteful pet projects to get the specialist medical staff, so that our medico-patient ratios are again first world, not third world.
And we know that we will only get essential frontline staff if we pay them properly – and pay them properly we will.
And as a remit at our conference yesterday said, Pharmac was set up so politicians could dodge being held accountable. New Zealand First believes that New Zealand has long had inferior first world pharmaceutical delivery. All first world international comparisons prove that, we are at the bottom of the OCED for access to medicines, and the eight plus years delay to get approvals is simply a national disgrace.
All the other political parties believe in the Pharmac model, we don’t, because we don’t believe in fobbing off political responsibility.
So we are going to take money from wasteful expenditure, to provide innovative lifesaving medicines quickly, and provide timely access to patients to developed high cost treatments.
We are going to provide the new model an extra $1.3 billion on top of the present $1.2 billion “existing underbudget”.
New Zealand First is the “Health Party”.
New Zealand’s Failing Education System
There is much going wrong with our education system.
Education Minister Tinetti was recently crowing about student attendance rising to 60%. It didn’t occur to her, for that to happen the best schools must be at least 90% and the worse schools for attendance at 30%. That’s 60,000 plus truant pupils in any given day, a tsunami of educational failure at a personal and national level and billions of wasted taxpayers’ dollars.
New Zealand First’s policy is to fix that, as common-sense politicians once did, as long ago as 1877 when they made education compulsory.
We will not get back to having a leading economy without first fixing our education system.
We were at the very top of the education world once. And we didn’t get there with some of the stupid education policies we have today.
But once we have properly trained our young, we must pay our workforce competitive incomes to keep them here.
New Zealand taxpayers are paying a fortune to train too many young people who then go overseas and benefit, for free, some foreign economy.
New Zealand First has nothing against an “OE” (Overseas Experience).
But New Zealand First is most certainly against “OF” – that is, a skilled workforce “Overseas Forever”.
New Zealand First is the “Education Party”.
Taxation – Towards An Export Power House
It is said that there are only two things certain in life – “death and taxes”.
If we look at our once great past, and today’s ‘small country economic world leaders’, they have one thing in common – they are export power houses – like New Zealand once was. Iceland, Norway, Finland, Singapore, and Ireland are small countries maximising added value before exporting, maximising IT, maximising education, and ensuring that they pay their workforce high wages.
And we must again follow that prescription with taxation policies that assist that outcome.
That’s why we are going to bring in tax incentives, to promote added value before exports, IT, and productivity.
That’s why we are going to ensure that the tax income brackets are adjusted to inflation. That is New Zealand First’s policy.
We know we can both lower taxation on business and give higher wages for workers, with our polices to rapidly double our Gross National Product.
And for those that say it can’t be done, we point to countries like Singapore to refute their myopic ideological mindset. We will announce details over the next two months.
In this cost of living crisis, we are going to Exempt Basic Foods, like fresh food, vegetables, meat, dairy, and fish, from GST.
We challenge the tax purists, to explain why other First World countries can do this, and we can’t.
New Zealand First is the “Sound Economics Party”.
Law and Order
Three days ago in Auckland, sadly, two innocent victims lost their lives, police officers were injured, and ten others were hospitalised. The offender was shot by the police – a tragedy for his family.
What’s going wrong with law and order in this country is best described by the Police Commissioner’s comment who said that the offender – ‘had not breached his Home Detention conditions’.
Ladies and gentlemen, he got hold of a shotgun and right there was a massive breach. And if we can’t understand as a country what constitutes illegal behaviour, then we are destined to see it repeated over and over again.
But even worse, how did someone sentenced for choking someone almost to death receive just five months home detention?
How was he able to get home detention and access to a firearm if he was assessed as being “a threat to others”?
Our courts are failing us with these soft sentences that put community safety last, and offender’s rights and excuses first.
These judicial failures need an inquiry – just like all those police officers who now have to be stood down and questioned just because they did their job and shot someone who was shooting at innocent people and them.
We want justice and common sense returned to our country.
New Zealand First says anyone who is a threat to the safety of our community shouldn’t be on our streets.
Ladies and gentlemen, the other parties are shouting ‘law and order’, much like a drunk person leaning against an evening lamppost at night – for support not illumination. All the other parties on the right, had a policy of ‘catch and warn’, and on the left, have a policy of ‘catch and release’.
They have a record of having frozen police budgets, closed over thirty police stations, and cutting frontline police numbers.
How is that being ‘tough on crime’?
Only one Party has a record of investing in our police – New Zealand First. We got a massive increase in frontline police numbers, not once but twice, when we were in government. And on law and order we are the only party whose promises you can trust – not on what we say but on what we have done.
New Zealand First will:
- Designate gangs as terrorist organisations – like Western Australia and Queensland; and
- Establish a dedicated gang prison to minimise prison recruitment of non gang members.
Most importantly, to address the causes of crime we have policies to address real needs – such as enforcing compulsory education, making housing including public housing affordable for ordinary families, make health care available for people who need it, and getting people, who have spent years on the dole, back to work.
And something else. Crime, whether its “gang collar, blue collar or white collar”, we will treat the same. New Zealand First is the only party that has had the courage over the decades to expose white collar crime when the rest would not.
Remember the vitriol that has come our way from the establishment when we said white collar crime is going on and we are going to prove to you what is happening – and prove that to you we did.
New Zealand First is the “Law and Order Party”.
The Attack On Our Democracy – Separatism
The first New Zealand election was in 1854, Maori voting was added in 1867, and women got the vote in 1893.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people”. That means one person, one vote, and every vote of equal value.
Secretly, before 2020 and after, the Labour, Greens, and Maori Party have launched a full-scale attack on the essence of democracy.
Ordinary Maori want safe affordable homes, ready access to health care, educational escalators for their young, and first world wages. That is what all ordinary New Zealanders want, and it’s those four policies that New Zealand First is committed to delivering on – no matter what race you are, what church you are, what gender you are.
Yesterday, in her insightful speech Casey Costello set out the numerous racist attacks on our democracy.
And the revisionists’ agenda is to force all government and quasi-government agencies into compliance.
Ordinary Maori never asked for any of this. Only the elite Maori have.
There is no historic justification for them, which is why they have set out to re-write and reconstruct history.
To get to where these politicians want to take us, they deal in lies, including these four claims:
- That European arrival ruined the peaceful paradise of Maori,
- That the Treaty saw Maori begin a partnership with Queen Victoria,
- That the Treaty was not about Maori ceding sovereignty,
- That the Treaty meant Maori ‘self-government’
Stop for a moment and ask yourself, whether you’re Maori or non-Maori, can any of those four statements be remotely true?
Every Iwi history of the inter-tribal wars makes the ‘Maori Garden of Eden’ a complete myth. Look at the local Maori history here.
If no one in Britain or the UK or the whole British Empire was in partnership with the Crown on the 5th of February 1840, then how could it be constitutionally true that Maori were, two days later?
The fact is Maori ceded sovereignty to the Crown when they signed the Treaty. The Chiefs back then said so, as did many leading Maori later, including Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Maui Pomare, and Sir Peter Buck. Yet today’s elite power-hungry Maori and their cultural fellow travellers deny history and fact.
All Maori Iwi pre-1840 and well after, were under the control of their ‘Tino Rangatiratanga’. That means their Chief’s word was gospel. If there was back then co-government, which Chief’s word, if different, was gospel?
The elite’s argument does not stand the slightest scrutiny. And every ordinary Maori knows it.
New Zealand First is the “One Standard of Citizenship Party”.
Social Engineering
Behind closed doors a small unelected cabal of opinionated virtue signallers want to “integrate gender content into the curriculum”. They want to stop the science curriculum being about physics, chemistry, and biology, but include sexual and gender education. They have no authority to be doing this. They never ever asked you.
This election is about stopping them.
The government has no place in the nation’s bedrooms – so why are our school children, from age five, now being taught about ‘relationships, gender, and sexuality’?
New Zealand First is going to restore education and stop indoctrination.
New Zealand First is the “Common Sense Party”.
Caring For Seniors
In our country are about 890,000 people who are seniors, who receive Super and enjoy the tens of thousands of shopping benefits, plus free travel, that comes from the Gold Card.
When over the years every political party has attacked seniors and changed the law to harm their incomes, one party alone has defended seniors.
In past times of economic difficulty, the seniors have been the first one the other parties have attacked.
New Zealand First will make sure, as in the past, they don’t succeed.
New Zealand First is the “Standing Up For Seniors Party”.
Conclusion
In the last two days the media have gone back to their 30-year-old question – “who are you going to go with?” How many times must we tell them that our record means we will never go with parties that have racist policies. The last Party other political parties want to talk to before Election Day is New Zealand First, and the first Party they want to talk to – the day after.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most critical election in our lifetime.
Under MMP you have two votes. One for a local electorate political Party candidate, the other for the political Party of your choice; the Party Vote. New Zealand First is asking for your Party Vote – to keep them honest.
New Zealand is at an inflection point and a change in government is critical. But it must be for a much better government and not just ‘it’s our turn now’. You’re entitled to ask them “your turn to do exactly what?”
And one thing that the last three years has proven is that certainty, common sense, and experience, is critical to good government. On their own the Labour Party has proven an utter mess.
And looking across the political divide ask yourself this question, “Is this their first rodeo?” Because for many it is. They have never had a Minister inside of Cabinet. They will need our certainty, our common sense, and our experience.
New Zealand First is a Party for ordinary New Zealanders. We understand the economic challenges and we don’t have extremist policies that have never worked in the history of any country.
New Zealand First is the insurance voters need to avoid an ideological lurch in either direction.
We are a Party that for thirty years has put New Zealanders First. Certainty, Common Sense, and Experience is desperately needed in New Zealand now, and even more so after this coming election.
It’s with that in mind that we ask you to get ready, to make a commitment, right here right now, to save our country.
If you do, the future is certain.
Democracy will prevail.
But it is ‘Now or Never’.
We oppose racist co-government.
We oppose their Three Waters take over.
We oppose our country’s name being changed.
We oppose separatism in policy and in law.
We oppose this insidious woke agenda being driven by an elite cabal of social and ideological engineers.
We support policies – based on need, not race.
We support the rule of law – where everyone is equal before it.
We support the right of free speech – and that means we support the right of New Zealanders to say, ‘I disagree’ and not be mandated out of existence.
We support the right of New Zealanders to disagree with government policy and not be punished for it.
And we are never going to work in Parliament with any political party whose policies threaten those fundamental rights.
We have watched over the last three years Labour and its cohorts taking our country away from us.
That’s why we are asking you to Party Vote New Zealand First.
We’ve got the policies, the grit, the experience, and the courage to stop them and rebuild New Zealand.
We are asking you to join us, and,
“Let’s Take Back Our Country”.
