Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader.
Winston Peters and Shane Jones have executed one of the most shameless policy pirouettes in modern New Zealand politics. From enforced supporters of Jacinda Ardern’s offshore oil and gas exploration ban to self-appointed champions promising a $1 billion taxpayer-funded drill-baby-drill bonanza, NZ First has shown once again that principle is negotiable when the baubles of office are on the table.
In April 2018, Ardern dropped her bombshell: an immediate ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. Bound by Cabinet collective responsibility, Peters (then Deputy Prime Minister) and Jones (Regional Economic Development Minister) stood behind the policy in public, despite clear private discomfort. They traded the future of the energy sector for ministerial titles and coalition perks. That was the price of power in 2018.
Two men kept their jobs; hundreds of kiwis lost theirs. Fast forward to 2023. Out of Parliament and licking their wounds, Peters and Jones spent years on the hustings denouncing the ban as “economic vandalism.” They returned to government in the three-way coalition and immediately secured the repeal as a bottom line. Jones, handed the Resources portfolio, set about dismantling the policy he once helped enforce.
The pivot didn’t stop at repeal. In May 2025, Jones rolled out a $200 million Crown co-investment fund to de-risk new gas developments. By August 2025, the Crown Minerals Amendment Act had formally buried the 2018 ban. And this week Peters upped the ante: an election year promise of a $1 billion National Subsurface Development Survey to map offshore basins and unlock “Norway-scale” wealth for the state.
There is something almost comical about how politicians reach for a billion dollars the moment to signal seriousness. As an MP I used to explain in speeches a billion dollars: a bundle of $100 bills is $10,000 and is a centimetre high. A metre is a million. A billion? That’s a kilometer high stack of $100 bills. I had one grizzled Southland farmer still looking confused. I asked if he could now picture a billion. He replied: “No, sir — I’m still trying to imagine a $100 bill.”
Yet here we are. NZ First’s latest promise is another billion dollars of taxpayer money to chase the very resources they helped lock away just years earlier. The same party that sold its soul for Cabinet seats in 2017 now positions itself as the great defender of energy security and provincial jobs.
This is classic Peters: ruthless pragmatism dressed up as nationalism. In 1996, the price of supporting National wasn’t just the baubles — it was a $5 billion in extra spending, an eye-watering sum at the time. It wasn’t even determined where the money was to go. It was just to be spent.
Such transactional politics is what MMP delivers. It is especially evident with a party in the middle prepared always to negotiate between National and Labour. There has never been an accounting of the cost of the baubles of office but it is many, many billions. We vote for it. And we pay for it. Over and over.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
