Winston Peters is the stuff of legend in the New Zealand Government. He’s the only diplomat that’s ever been invited to North Korea. He’s also the longest-serving MP, entering Parliament in 1979 - before the rise of neoliberalism or the inception of the internet - during a time of massive political upheaval on the world stage. The Kingmaker. Now, as the often-controversial MP makes a renewed bid for prominence, questions of political upheaval are again circulating across the globe.
Winston joined us early in the morning (by our standards) and sat comfortably in the office. He was quick with banter and quick with his answers - sometimes rattling off a response word-for-word from a past interview. When his answers weren’t the old faithful option, though, they were still quick and genuinely-Winston. Love him or hate him, he speaks his mind in the way that some more populist figures only claim to.
We began by talking about the media at large, who he said were operating “in la la land” at times. Winston argued that, even 30 years ago, he believed that we were starting to lose the tenets of investigative journalism “because we failed to give them the space and the money to do their job properly.” Will he commit to funding better journalism pathways? Where is the line between government-funded and government-puppet media? We didn’t get time to ask because we quickly moved on to neoliberalism.
The fourth Labour Government in 1984 came into power and promptly “threw their manifesto in the rubbish bin and pulled out the secret agenda called ‘Rogernomics and neoliberalism’.” Pushing for universities to be self-sufficient financially is something that Winston saw as evidence of the failed “neoliberal experiment”. He said that this may have worked overseas, with the Australian GDP rising “35, maybe 36 per cent, real terms” greater than New Zealand. “It's all the proof I need that what they were talking about was rubbish then. And it's rubbish now.”
The conversation shifted to immigration, and Winston made it clear that he was not anti-immigrant. “I'm proud to say my party's view is that if you arrived here yesterday, legally, you've got… the same rights as a New Zealander. No different than if somebody's ancestry goes back 800, 900 years. That's our policy. That's our standard.” Even Māori, he said, were immigrants.
“We did not start here. We started in Hawaii or, in our case, in the Cook Islands. So we're all immigrants in that context.” His immigration strategy is to “bring people here who we need, not who need us.” According to Winston, “every Asian political leader agrees… that's why I can't be accused of being anti-immigrant. You find one Asian leader [that] doesn't agree with me.”
And he still hasn’t forgotten the Peter Thiel controversy: citizenship granted secretly to an American billionaire by John Key’s Government. “What has he done for this country?” asked Winston. “Nothing.” Winston couldn’t believe people had stopped talking about this “ridiculous” situation. “You're the only person who's ever asked that question recently, which shows you how dementedly corrupt the media are.”
Finally, in the closing minutes, the conversation steered towards the hottest topic of the day: crackpots. Politically radical, actively disruptive members of the public who feel unrepresented by any major party. You know the ones. Winston had courted controversy by walking through the Parliament protests, then gained favour of Freedom NZ protesters. But recently, those same protesters disrupted his campaign event in Nelson. He would go on to say that this was confusing.
But before all that, he was talking to us in our office. Winston said that the media, because they “had the stupidity to believe in the podium of truth,” wound up deciding to “gaslight” and “denigrate” the vaccine sceptics. Winston said his grandparents were struck down “like lightning” in the Spanish Flu, citing a death rate of 9:1. So he was “alarmed” when he saw Covid spreading, and said that he was double vaxxed. But he insisted that “fundamentally, people did die from taking this vaccine. That's no doubt. It is medically proven. It's irrefutable.”
He said that there were always a few crackpots and he couldn’t speak for everyone, but that “there is a fundamental thing in medicine called ‘informed consent’. And no one can be signing up an informed consent document [if] they haven't been informed. And that was my belief.”
And then finally, in the closing seconds, we got to the topic of students: “I just wanna leave you one thought,” he proclaimed. “We're gonna build an economy that students can graduate in and be proud of, stay in this country and get paid properly for.”
It’s Reputation time for Winston. Look what you made him do.