“Let’s give power back to the people” was Winston’s new populist slogan as he sets his sights on voters who feel alienated from Labour and alarmed by Labour’s potential coalition partners.
Winston Peters’ recent set-piece speech made a pitch to blue-collar workers who feel abandoned by Labour. By bringing Alfred Ngaro – a conservative former National MP – onto his team, Peters has his eye on Pacific communities in South and West Auckland.
Winston’s speech was framed by political history – and, as he approaches the age of 81, with more than 50 years’ experience in politics, he’s qualified to lecture on the subject.
He went over some history of the neoliberal reforms in New Zealand under past Labour and National governments. His anti-neoliberal narrative could have come from someone on the Left, like George Monbiot writing for The Guardian. What was Winston up to?
First, though, here’s some background on the return of NZ First as a force in New Zealand politics, and how that reflects the rise of populism abroad.
In 2020, NZ First were dumped from parliament having won only 2.6% of the vote. That was punishment for going into coalition with Ardern in 2017. For most of the 2020–23 term, NZ First was polling below 5%, and journalists were assuming that Peters wouldn’t be back. I tried to warn them.
It was only about one month before early voting opened in 2023 that NZ First’s polling figures rose consistently over 5%. They ended up winning 6.1% and the lad from Whananaki was back. The polls weren’t “lying”, but a pre-election assumption that there’d be a cosy two-party National/ACT coalition turned out to have been premature.
NZ First is polling at around 10% or more. Peters is now on campaign, rolling out policies, and is hard to keep up with. NZ First could become the third largest party in the next parliament, ahead of the Greens and ACT.
Such maverick populism is proving to be effective elsewhere. In South Australia, weekend before last, Labor romped home to win, but the centre-right Liberal Party was beaten into third place by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Election analyst Antony Green commented that “when One Nation has finished its search and destroy mission against the Liberal and National parties, there are signs that Labor will be vulnerable to a similar campaign”.
In a by-election last month, UK Labour lost what used to be one of their ultra-safe seats, Gorton and Denton. The Labour candidate came third behind Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin. The Green candidate won. Some readers will know Goodwin from Substack as a one-man rhetorical weapon-system with sights on immigration and how it’s changing the demographics of the UK.
Populists have been beating traditional mainstream parties on the left and the right lately. The old two-party red/blue pendulum seems to be winding down. That kind of politics collapsed in Italy more than 30 years ago, and later in France. It’s ready to fall in the UK, and Australia is now looking shaky.
Love them or loath them, Pauline Hanson, Nigel Farage, Winston Peters are now change agents in Anglosphere politics. In Europe, add to that list Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, Alice Weidel…. Meanwhile Donald Trump is not doing so well: 56% of Americans disapprove of his performance, the attack on Iran is working out badly, and he’ll be a lame duck after November’s mid-term elections.
Why did Peters attack neoliberalism?
Winston Peters’ speech in Tauranga was remarkable for its frequent references to neoliberalism. And there’s no such thing as a silly question:
Formed in 1993, NZ First represented conservative reaction against the radical neoliberal policy changes implemented by Labour and National between 1984 and 1996. A particular cause was a superannuation surcharge (a 25% surtax on other incomes) introduced by Labour in 1985 – which was deeply unpopular with older folk. When Jim Bolger’s National government didn’t remove it as promised, Winston Peters was given a constituency that was destined to grow in size as baby-boomers reached retirement. He’s positioned himself as the protector of universal superannuation and its age of eligibility (65) ever since.
The surcharge was discontinued in 1998. That same year, a National/NZ First coalition broke up acrimoniously over a proposal to sell Wellington Airport.
Any party needing to form a government with the support of NZ First can forget about proposals to trim NZ Super or to sell state assets – or to loosen up immigration rules. The migration provisions in the FTA with India are disputed at the moment by NZ First.
Looking back over four decades, Peters argued that New Zealanders “became the victim of the totally unfettered market, straight out of the Milton Friedman textbook”, with assets sales, privatisations, open borders, etc. He said that neoliberalism is “an ideology that has been proven to be an abject failure”, and that NZ First “never subscribed to that ideology”.
He went through a list of past policies to illustrate this “abject failure”. KiwiRail: sold, asset-stripped and then bought back. Air NZ: sold, bailed out and then partially bought back. Bank of NZ, power generators, meat company, forests, and so on. He got stuck into Fonterra for selling consumer brands, turning itself into a commodity price taker, not a price maker, then telling the government to butt out of its business, and yet always depending on governments for its monopoly.
His critique of neoliberalism was on point, although academics can quibble over details.
Winston had to throw something in about the findings of the Covid Inquiry. According to the Inquiry’s second report, some technical advice “against requiring two doses for 12–17-year olds, was not provided to Ministers”. Cock-up or cover-up? It’s a developing controversy, with new revelations in last Friday’s NZ Herald, but Winston’s anti-mandate support-base needed some red meat. To add sauce to that, he resurrected a comment by a Labour MP that the anti-mandate protest in 2022 had an underlying “river of filth”.
So, what does Winston stand for?
His speech promoted a socially conservative and economically nationalist programme. This would mean rebuilding and conserving the country’s assets and giving capitalism “a human face”, as he put it. His nationalism is also about cultural heritage and identity. He talked about being proud of New Zealand’s history, including “our colonial heritage, traditions and values”, and proud of our (or his own) Maori background. That meant “one people, one flag and one law” and “a colour-blind state”.
Later that week, he was in Christchurch promising to raise $15 million towards rebuilding the earthquake-damaged cathedral, recognising its importance as part of the city’s heritage – or, one might add, its colonial Church of England heritage.
A choice piece of populism was his statement that “politics is meant to be a dialogue between the people (the masters) and their servants (the politicians)”. He turned his sights onto Labour leader Chris Hipkins for giving a state-of-the-nation speech to a select business audience, rather than a community hall.
He announced a major policy to unbundle the electricity generators from the retailers, addressing people’s concerns about electricity prices for households and businesses. This policy has been discussed more fully by Bryce Edwards, but I’ll add that it’s awkwardly “neoliberal”, as it dis-aggregates anti-competitive vertical integration. Mind you, just because it’s neoliberal doesn’t mean it won’t work, and Peters says he’s a pragmatist, after all. I’ll leave it to experts on electricity markets to argue the merits.
Peters obligingly revealed NZ First’s electoral strategy. Labour, he said, “has deserted the blue-collar workers”, and it now represents the professional-managerial class. Long-time Labour voters now feel “abandoned” by what he called a “far-left” turn towards social justice and ideological crusades from overseas, resulting in “moral outrage and political inertia” – or lots of “calling out” but no useful action.
NZ First, he said, would welcome former Labour voters who feel abandoned. He also raised the spectre of Labour having to work with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, if they’re in a position to form the next government. The Greens, according to Peters, don’t talk about the environment anymore, while the Maori Party are “anti-everything that makes it possible for them to sit in parliament”.
He ended with some slogans: “Energy security is national security”. “Let’s give power back to the people”. “We’re going to take our country back”.
What’s Winston’s game-plan?
Winston’s strategy is textbook nationalist populism. Traditional mainstream parties, he says, have failed to serve the people – a point designed to elicit initial agreement. In particular, the left-wing socially progressive parties have lost touch, he argues, with the concerns of ordinary common-sense hard-working folk. The plan is that disillusioned former Labour voters – fed up with, if not pushed aside by, identity politics and Tiriti obsession – will migrate across to NZ First, joining conservatives who are already there. Labour is the target because Winston would rather leave National alone for the time being.
Is his plan working? Going by the trends in polls over the last 12 months, NZ First has gained support, but that’s mostly at the expense of their coalition partners, National and ACT. Meanwhile, Labour also steadily gained, so it doesn’t look like Labour has lost support to NZ First – yet.
To see Winston’s modus operandi, then, rewind to early 2022 when he “walked among the protestors” like a prophet in a pin-striped suit. He cannily sought, and won, support from a newly created minority who felt abandoned and ostracised by lockdown and vaccine-mandate policies. This strategy, backed by town-hall meetings in 2023, sufficed to return him to the House, from which the Speaker had temporarily trespassed him the year before. Now – lo and behold! – he’s the foreign minister. Only Winston could’ve pulled that off.
His next targets are those long-suffering, hard-working battlers who’ve voted for Labour but have been alienated by the fallout of the pandemic policies and by minority-group social-justice activism. He made particular mention of “men using women’s toilets”, for instance, which was bound to arouse the “common sense” of a conservatively-minded audience. Winston was telling us his game-plan, loud and clear.
The wily old fox mounted a critique of neoliberalism to get the attention of those former Labour voters who are old enough to remember the days of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia – and who are also old enough to be worried about their Super. Winston promises not to sell public assets and (although he didn’t raise it in this recent speech) to defend their pensions. Your Gold Card’s in the mail, folks.
The recruitment of Alfred Ngaro signifies that Pacific voters are a particular target. In 2005, Auckland’s Pacific communities boosted turnout and gave Labour, under Helen Clark, a narrow win over National. They were voting with their economic interests, but against their Christian conservatism. NZ First is now combining social conservatism with concern for the economic struggles of blue-collar workers, aiming to draw that constituency away from Labour.
Conclusion
Politics Happens won’t make predictions, but the successes of similar parties using similar tactics overseas suggests that Peters is on to something. These populists are now capable of humbling the traditional big-tent parties on the left and on the right. There’s no reason to think that New Zealand is any less “ripe” for this kind of political shift than other democracies. In a proportional system, the effect is greater party fragmentation.
Nonetheless, there are signs that Labour is awake to it, as they’ve made themselves into a smaller target by shutting up about controversial topics such as co-governance. But the Labour leader is still the Chris Hipkins who was recently in office with Jacinda Ardern, and therefore he’s still an easy target. And Winston doesn’t forget. Labour is vulnerable: their leader has suffered reputational damage recently, and, unlike NZ First, they’re not announcing new policies.
Can New Zealand First poach enough voters from Labour to become parliament’s third largest party and then to out-gun ACT in the post-election coalition negotiations in November?
This article was first published at Politics Happens – HERE.