Winston Is Back From the Dead…Again

John Denton

Oh, the irony. Post-election, Winston Peters, in his usual “I’ll do the talking sunshine” mode, railed against being “marginalised and shut out” by the “corrupt media”, despite it being they who were totally responsible for his comeback this time around.

We know our mainstream media are heavily biased towards the political left (Massey University Survey October 2022: 87% of journalists admit to being left of centre in their personal politics, with 25% of these saying they are “hard or extreme left”) but two months ago the MSM faced a dilemma as it became abundantly clear that Labour was done for. In response to this, they switched tactics, running news coverage of Winston Peters at every opportunity, boosting his profile to split the conservative vote and spit in the eye of National and ACT, and it worked.

From nowhere, Peters is back and anticipating a “kingmaker” role yet again. Claiming to represent democracy on the back of his minuscule 146,000 votes in a country of 5 million people, this result shows the utter stupidity of the MMP system where one man (and let’s face it NZ First is only one man) can dictate who gets to run the next parliament.

We can now expect to be subjected to weeks of preening and strutting as he negotiates, ostensibly on behalf of his voters, but primarily on behalf of Winston Peters, as he pursues every dubious honour, perk and reward of office that he can screw out of the long-suffering NZ Taxpayer.

As we contemplate the horror of the coming three years, perhaps we should remind ourselves how woeful Peters’s record has been in the past. Claims of Business Roundtable bribery (untrue), the Winebox Affair (unproven), the Owen Glenn donations (unaccounted for), his vote against homosexual law reform (unacceptable) and the turning of his coat more often than the fabled Vicar of Bray to catch the prevailing political wind for his own personal advantage, show Peters to be the very epitome of the unprincipled politician.

On the plus side however, we must admit that he got us the Gold Card so we can enjoy free off-peak trips to Waiheke Island and 5% discounts on a whole raft of products that we either don’t need or could probably get 10% off for ourselves if we just cared to ask for it.

Then there is the incident that perhaps shows his true colours the most, “Pensiongate” where it was revealed that Peters, in addition to the huge salaries he has amassed during his terms of office and the equally huge parliamentary pension he commands, feels entitled to collect NZ Superannuation as well. And what’s more, he overclaimed this latter pension, accidentally we are told, for seven years before the error was uncovered. (Which begs two questions. Firstly, how come a man who thinks he has the intellectual capacity to run the country hasn’t got the brains to fill in a simple pension entitlement form correctly? And, secondly, why on earth does he need this paltry $25,000 extra per year from NZ Super – to pay for his cat’s caviar ration perhaps?)

But what about The Provincial Growth Fund, I hear you ask. Wasn’t that a great idea that did wonders for the provinces and created lots of jobs for disadvantaged Kiwis? In answer to that, let’s check the facts there as well.

In 2017, when the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund was extorted from Jacinda Ardern by Peters as the price of his collusion in the establishment of her Government, fewer than 2 million jobs existed in New Zealand. That works out at a levy of more than $1500 per job, per worker.

Then Peters, and his sidekick Shane Jones, set off around New Zealand, like mediaeval merchant princes, distributing their largesse to the grateful peasantry with the aim of creating goodwill for NZ First and, it was claimed, new jobs, right, left and centre.

What then of these extra jobs supposedly attributable to the PGF? It was initially calculated by some observers that every job created under the scheme cost $484,000. But in 2022 Labour’s Stuart Nash (remember him?) was able to say that wasn’t so, and as many as 8,400 jobs resulted from PGF investments. Doing the sums then, that’s only $357,142 per job, which makes it alright I suppose. Assuming that all those jobs still exist.

But all of this has never stopped Peters on the hustings, or Shane Jones in a recent video, from boasting about the supposed success of the PGF. It was, as Jones said referring to the $3 billion impost on the taxpayer, something we “took, and then gave the funds to our people”.

I’m pretty sure the workers of New Zealand would have much preferred the levy of $1500 per person that created the PGF pork barrel to have stayed in their own pockets in the first place.

Finally, let’s explore Peters’s record on immigration and immigrants, the one group he loves to bash (when he’s not bashing Maori instead), in pursuit of media coverage to keep him front of mind with his target disgruntled demographic. One last fact check then. Despite all his pre-election, anti-immigrant rhetoric, in the three years after he was anointed as deputy prime minister in 2017, as he ran the government whilst Princess Be-Kind swanned around emoting about this and that, net immigration almost doubled. It went from 55,353 in 2017 to 91,680 per year by March 2020, proving, yet again, that what the Right Honourable Winston Peters promises to win votes, and what he delivers when he gets them are two very different things.

There is much more one could say about Peters’s parliamentary career (several detailed reports are available on the internet for the more masochistic amongst us) but let’s wrap it up by saying simply that it looks like déjà vu all over again. One man, on the back of his 146,000 votes, will now, with a straight face, rabbit on about democracy and the will of the people as he holds 2.7 million other Kiwi voters to ransom.

Small wonder that politicians are considered to be some of our least trusted figures, rating only around twenty per cent on the ‘do you have trust and confidence in these people’ scale. A score which, incredible as it may seem, is even lower than that of NZ journalists!

Winston Peters. You have much, and will presumably have much more, to answer for.