GRAHAM ADAMS: Media talks up Winston Peters’ rise

The path to election glory has traps.

NZ First’s prospects at the election after a run of good polling are being talked up by increasingly enthusiastic commentators. But if a week is a long time in politics, more than six months is an eternity. And there are traps aplenty for the party to navigate before November 7.

Listening to the media, however, you might think the continuing rise of Winston Peters and NZ First is unstoppable.

Podcaster and veteran newsman Duncan Garner has predicted NZ First could hit 20 per cent of the party vote while Danyl McLauchlan wrote in the Listener that if it can replicate the 13.6 per cent it won in the latest Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll, Peters “will be the de facto, if not actual, prime minister”.

The 1News-Verian poll result released on Sunday night should have been a dampener, showing NZ First static at 10 per cent — and substantially lower than the Talbot Mills poll last week, which put the party on 15 per cent. Nevertheless, 1News’ bulletin showed a clip of Peters saying: “I told you we were going to turn your polls into confetti” — as if his party had leaped again.

Despite the media’s bullishness, potential setbacks await. The most obvious is the perennial problem of whether Peters can be trusted not to disappoint his voters and go with Labour.

His supporters often doggedly resist acknowledging his long history of dashing voters’ expectations — and argue “This time is different!” — but the record is clear.

In 1996, he went with National after implying during the campaign he’d support Labour and that voters should “put Jim Bolger in opposition where he belongs”.

In 2005, after signalling he would not go into government with either National or Labour and would eschew the “baubles of office”, he became Helen Clark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister for Racing.

In 2017, he decided to make the progressive Jacinda Ardern Prime Minister despite Labour winning only 36.8 per cent of the party vote, and spurned the conservative Bill English, who won 44.4 per cent. Many of his former supporters have still not forgiven him.

This election season he repeatedly said he wouldn’t support Labour as long as it was led by Chris Hipkins. In other words, he had no reservations about supporting Labour; only its current leader presented a problem.

More recently, Peters has occasionally declared he wouldn’t go with Labour at all, but it is obvious from comments on social media a lot of people don’t believe him. And little wonder. On Monday, he wouldn’t give the NZ Herald’s Ryan Bridge a direct answer when asked whether he’d rule out a deal with Labour or even whether his “strong preference” would be “to stick with the current coalition”.

It is also becoming obvious that if NZ First lifts its vote to the mid-teens, a Labour-NZ First coalition might be viable without any help from the Greens or TPM — raising the prospect of Peters being able to bargain to become Prime Minister, for at least some of the next term. That opportunity might be irresistible to the 81-year-old as a last hurrah after 50 years in politics.

Ironically, the higher NZ First rises in the polls, the more chatter there will be about Peters siding with Labour, which could scare away a significant chunk of his current supporters.

NZ First’s electoral success will also partly turn on the public’s view of how effective it has been in opposing Maorification and Treatyism during this term — and how much trust voters should place in its promises for the next term.

The party had a significant win in having the government clarify section 58 of the Marine and Coastal Area Act to make it more difficult for activist judges to grant customary marine title to iwi — as well as a crowd-pleaser with its bill to make English an official language (no matter how inconsequential that may turn out to be).

However, the significance of Peters’ coalition agreement to review Treaty clauses in legislation remains impossible to guess. It appears Cabinet has agreed to reduce Treaty obligations in selected laws to the lowest requirement — ie, to “take into account” — but the details are still being withheld from the public.

Seymour damned the review with faint praise as a “useful exercise” but said it “does not remove the idea that there are Treaty principles”. And major legislation — including Treaty settlement laws and the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 — lie outside its scope.

Peters, of course, had scoffed at Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill — which aimed to have Parliament define them rather than leaving it to judges — on the grounds that “there are no principles to the Treaty of Waitangi”.

Alongside Luxon, he made sure the bill died at the second reading. But while Peters was contemptuous of it, Māori nationalists took it very seriously. It sparked a nationwide debate about the role of the Treaty in law and policy, and brought thousands of protesters on a hikoi to Wellington as well as a flood of submissions to the select committee. It became very evident then that Seymour is the politician Māori activists fear as their greatest threat, not Peters.

He has also gone very quiet on a promise to amend the Waitangi Tribunal legislation to restore its original intent that was also part of NZ First’s coalition agreement.

With National appearing to be reluctant to initiate opposition to co-governance and Maorification, the pre-election debate on the topic is largely between Act and NZ First. They are both fishing in the same pool for votes.

In the past week, Act has gained first-mover advantage by lodging a member’s bill to ensure “unelected members of council committees and subcommittees would no longer have voting rights, and would not count toward quorum”. Many councils — including in the Far North, Auckland, Hastings, New Plymouth, Tasman, Kāpiti Coast, Wellington and Invercargill — have appointed unelected representatives to council committees, governance structures, or formal co-governance arrangements.

Act is making the running on this issue after Davina Smolders brought it to national attention. She is an Act-aligned councillor on the Far North District Council who initially objected to more iwi members sitting on committees than elected representatives.

The stoush has already drawn comment from both NZ First and National and looks like it will help fulfil Seymour’s promise to not let the momentum he built with his Treaty principles campaign die.

Unfortunately for NZ First, deputy leader Shane Jones criticised Smolders’ stance opposing co-governance as “perverse” and “pathetic”.

He walked back his comments the next day after a deluge of criticism, describing it is an issue for locals to sort out rather than asking for government help as she had done. But he tacitly supported the push for iwi influence by implying she was a “mischief maker”.

Peters chipped in too, saying NZ First supported Cameron Luxton’s member’s bill, but didn’t offer his support to Smolders either.

Local Government minister Simon Watts said he was “a bit uncomfortable” with the situation in the Far North and open to changing the law but showed no sign of realising how important the issue is to National’s base. He told Heather du Plessis Allan on Newstalk ZB he thought he might be able to take a proposal to Cabinet within a month.

As part of his 2026 campaign, Peters has promised a referendum on abolishing the Māori seats. However, he had also made the pledge a bottom line in 2017 but Labour had ruled it out even before he entered coalition talks with Ardern.

In fact, Peters putting Ardern into office has led to a damaging criticism of NZ First — that it isn’t the socially conservative party he claims it is. As NZ Herald columnist Jonathan Ayling observed earlier this month, Peters “made Dame Jacinda Ardern the Prime Minister instead of Sir Bill English. You know, an actual social conservative.”

Ayling found his claim that the party is socially conservative “laughable”, writing: “Let’s not forget Peters’ role when abortion was liberalised and decriminalised, when euthanasia passed with the backing of NZ First MPs, and when the initial Covid response, including the lockdowns, was directed from the highest levels of government. Peters was not a spectator to any of this. He was the Deputy Prime Minister.”

In a clarification, Ayling wrote on Facebook that while Peters ultimately voted against the liberalisation of the abortion laws in 2020, “his role (along with other NZ First MPs) in supporting the legislation till third reading was critical to it passing.”

The column — titled “Winston Peters is no social conservative, nor is NZ First” — clearly stung. Peters described Ayling as a “mouth breather” and his column as “verbal diarrhoea”.

He also implied Ayling was a “pasty incel loser” coming out of his “mother’s basement”, who drinks “soy lattes” — as well as being a “four-flusher” (apparently referring to a poker player who exaggerates his hand).

They were extraordinary insults to level at someone like Ayling, who is a father of young children and runs a vineyard with his wife. He was also the very eloquent and energetic CEO of the Free Speech Union for more than four years.

It is true that Peters half-heartedly walked back his insults by qualifying his earlier statements with: “Assuming Mr Ayling is neither a four-flushing moron nor a half-wit dunce…” while leaving open the possibility that he was indeed both.

Peters obviously believed Ayling had misrepresented his position on conservative issues but the vitriolic nature of his denunciation was surprising, not least because the column sits behind the Herald paywall, which limits its reach. Why draw attention to it?

Peters’ intemperate response is perhaps best explained by the fact he’s chasing the religious vote, especially among the Pasifika community. He wants to persuade his target audience that he understands not only their financial concerns but also their Christian beliefs.

As political analyst Grant Duncan wrote on his Substack: “The recruitment of Alfred Ngaro [by NZ First] 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.”

Consequently, Peters is sensitive to anyone challenging his claim to be socially conservative (or reminding voters that he was an integral part of Ardern’s progressive government).

And Ayling is far from being a random observer. In fact, he could be described as a “religious influencer”, who is not only a social conservative himself but has an audience among various church congregations.

He is steeped in the intricacies of both the euthanasia and abortion debates. As the Baptist website noted: “Jonathan [Ayling]… has postgraduate degrees in both politics and theology and spent much of his time in Parliament working as an advisor opposing legislation legalising euthanasia, cannabis, and abortion reform. He now travels widely, speaking at churches across several denominations.”

So when Ayling says Peters is not a true conservative on contentious issues such as abortion and euthanasia, his influence spreads beyond Herald readers to the Christian flock. That makes him much more dangerous to Peters’ ambitions than he might at first appear.

Peters’ popularity has always rested in large part on his ability as an actor who can “play many parts, seeming to be all things to all people simultaneously”, as Danyl McLauchlan put it.

That approach can work brilliantly, but only until the contradictions become apparent. As a wag quipped on social media: “The best way to damage Winston Peters’ electoral prospects is to introduce his supporters to each other.”

Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore.