JM White
Say what you like about Winston Peters. I remember listening to Parliament on the radio in the 1980s when he took on the Fay Richwhite Cook Islands fraud. Corruption had seeped sewer-like throughout the highest institutions in this land. But surely you know the whole sordid story? If you don’t then I suggest you get a hold of Ian Wishart’s book The Paradise Conspiracy.
Peters carried the papers of proof of this fraud in a Corbans winebox. I remember hearing the interjections, the laughter, the outright insults and catcalls from the ‘Honourable’ parliamentarians as they tried to intimidate and drown him out when he stood to speak. Why did they do that? Was it fear, collective guilt, or simple mindless obedience to a leader?
I admired the man for his guts at that time and I do not believe for one minute that the guts it took to do that have disappeared.
For those men and women who can mount ad hominem attacks on Peters, I say that is the full extent of your cur-like behaviour. Do it to his face if you dare. But you won’t, will you?
I know why Winston stood with Labour in 2016. You do too. You remember what John Key, Bill English and Paula Bennett did to him. How many little quislings did those three have on their side in the National Party at the time? Peters is no baby born yesterday. He would have known his chances of being taken seriously and treated properly with dignity and respect in what remained of that ragtag and bobtail freak party were zero.
That trio tried publicly to make him out as some sort of benefit fraudster. What sort of ‘Honourable’ behaviour is that?
Key should talk. His name was in the Panama Papers, and English in my opinion should have stood down from any sort of public service employment for life when he was found to have lied about his place of residence. The Wellington house was in his wife’s name, the children were attending Wellington schools but Bill English tried to make us believe he was living in DIPTON on his tot – and he took the parliamentary perks attached to travelling and maintaining a separate residence in Wellington. How can we forget that behaviour? Yet now we have Sir John and Sir Bill.
As for Paula Bennett – she, along with Key, always boasted about their lowly childhood years spent growing up in a state house. Yes. Then they pulled the ladder up so that no one else should have the same chance. Two dogs in the manger if ever I have seen them. Where are these main chancers now?
What would you have done if you were a political orphan like Peters? Joined the hyenas or joined the snakes? Been ripped to pieces or slowly poisoned?
This country would have done well if Winston Peters had ever been Prime Minister. The fact that he has only ever made Deputy PM is not due to lack of expertise or loyalty. It is due to the combined efforts of both major political parties and the media to keep out a man they know is better than they; a man who has interfered with their get rich quick schemes in the past; a man who wasn’t afraid to take on the wealthy and powerful and who didn’t ever want or need their patronage.
I make no excuses for my partisanship. It will be New Zealand First that gets my vote in 2023 and nothing would please me more than to see the people who love this little country kick out the incumbent and separatist parties. You have by now seen them for what they are.
It is my hope that we – the ‘Rivers of Filth’ upon which the whole edifice of Parliament is built, and without which their political raison d’être would collapse – will finally burst the banks of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee confinement and give us a Prime Minister worth having.