Matthew Hooton: NZ First celebrates strongest position this century

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THREE KEY FACTS:
Matthew Hooton has more than 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the mayor of Auckland.
OPINION

Record numbers of NZ First delegates head to their
annual conference in Hamilton this weekend with their party in its best shape since 1996.

NZ First is in Government again and Winston Peters is in charge of the country’s foreign policy, leaning towards our traditional English-speaking Five Eyes allies, the rest of Nato, Japan and South Korea, and our Pacific neighbours.
Christopher Luxon’s unusually commodious coalition management means NZ First feels it is achieving greater policy wins than when governing with Jim Bolger, Dame Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark or Dame Jacinda Ardern.
For his part, Peters feels the party is finally being treated with the respect he has always believed it deserves from National, whose ministers report that doing business with NZ First – while still challenging – is less acrimonious than with Act.
That’s partly because, with policies like fast-track infrastructure projects, subsidies for property developers and NZ First’s own regional handouts, National under Luxon is the closest it’s been since the mid-1980s to its interventionist Holyoake and Muldoon heritage to which Peters has always been sympathetic.
Peters’ break with National in 1993 was positioned as about his opposition to Ruth Richardson’s free-market, small-government liberalism, in contrast to the more hands-on economic management he favours.
Nevertheless, Peters can also point to his own decades-long record of fiscal responsibility.
As Bolger’s Treasurer, Peters ran two strong Budget surpluses – and we’d now all be much better off had 92% of us not viscerally rejected his compulsory superannuation savings proposal in the 1997 referendum.
Likewise, the Clark-Peters Government ran three consecutive Budget surpluses in 2006, 2007 and 2008, forecasting a deficit for 2009 only after the global financial crisis and as Peters’ influence waned when he became embroiled in one of the party fundraising scandals that have also featured through his long career.
Expect NZ First to point this weekend to the Ardern-Peters Government running operating surpluses in 2018 and 2019. The first was also a cash surplus, giving that Government the same number of cash surpluses the Key Government ran over nine years – just one, in 2017, NZ Herald columnist Steven Joyce’s year as finance minister.
NZ First strategists argue it was only when Labour won its historic 50% majority in 2020 that Ardern let Grant Robertson go fully wild with the taxpayers’ credit card.
As New Zealand heads to its post-2030 fiscal apocalypse, Peters can argue he was always right about superannuation, just as Labour boasts with some justification it was right from 1972-75.
Yet Peters can also boast he has always been right about immigration, which has tended to lower our per-capita GDP, at least in the short run, while demanding huge new infrastructure for which we haven’t been able to pay.
Over the decades, Peters’ forays into immigration and the wider politics of race have attracted strong criticism, not least from me, with accusations he was cynically appealing to the worst elements of the New Zealand electorate.
In 1996, before forming a coalition with NZ First later that year, Bolger made a comparison in Parliament between “Hitler and the Jews” and Peters’ comments about Asian immigration.
East Asian immigrants haven’t been alone in Peters’ sights; Māori radicals, sickly white liberals, Somalian refugees and Indian taxi drivers have been among those also finding their way into his rhetoric.
But there have always been some limits on how far Peters can go. After all, he was one of the original hated “Treaty lawyers”, successfully representing his own iwi, Ngātiwai, against the Crown in the 1970s.
Just as Peters has impeccable manners in the Pākehā world, he remains a stickler for protocol on the marae, and NZ First has always attracted support from Māori voters.
Recall, for example, that Waikato-Tainui leader Tukoroirangi Morgan – now playing something like the role for the young new Māori Queen, Ngā wai hono i te pō, that Sir Winston Churchill did for the young Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 – served three years as an NZ First MP after NZ First won all the Māori seats.
With Act’s Treaty Principles Bill meaning it is now achieving ascendancy for the votes of the most vicious Kiwi racists – those, to quote Martin Luther King, with “lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification” – NZ First cannot compete in that space even if it wanted to.
Nor, given Peters’ role as Foreign Minister, can NZ First fully align with those who believe the world is controlled by a small cabal of sinister “globalists” at the World Economic Forum and UN – although they will have enjoyed Peters telling the undeniably dysfunctional UN Security Council to pipe down when he was addressing it last month.
Now 31 years old and into its fourth decade, NZ First is inevitably becoming more mainstream and its origin myths less important.
A year since the election, the party’s polling has remained clearly above 5% for the first time since it joined a government.
When it backed the Bolger and Clark Governments, its polling immediately collapsed below the crucial MMP threshold and never recovered. The same happened not long after it signed up with Ardern in 2017. For the first time when in Government, NZ First is polling above its election result and can be confident of re-election in 2026, especially with Peters having more latitude to criticise National when – or is it “if?” – he passes the Deputy Prime Ministership over to Act’s David Seymour next year.
But trying to win votes from National or Act is not a big part of NZ First’s plan anyway.
Party strategists say their focus is on those working-class voters disenfranchised by Labour’s woke identity politics and Willie Jackson’s Māori Caucus, and worried about the far-left takeover of Labour’s Auckland branch and policy apparatus by activists loyal to disgraced former Transport Minister Michael Wood.
These Labour voters are those who were represented in the Clark Government by the likes of John Tamihere, Shane Jones, Trade and Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton and even to an extent Finance Minister Sir Michael Cullen, who would joke about his notoriously difficult relationship with the party’s Women’s Council.
More recently, such voters have been represented by the likes of Ardern’s Trade and Agriculture Minister and West Coast MP Damien O’Connor, her Economic Development and Police Minister and Napier MP Stuart Nash, and even leadership contender and former TAB bookie and Wairarapa MP Kieran McAnulty.
Ten years ago, I was first to reveal that Jones, then a Labour MP, was transitioning to NZ First. It wasn’t a brilliant prediction. I had been told exactly what was going on. Don’t be surprised if there are more of those sorts of defections before the next election.
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