OPINION
“No one gets to lie to me twice”, said Winston, ruling out going with Labour after the election, in an article written by Audrey Young in the Weekend Herald.
Winston Peters is without a doubt this country’s consummate politician. He possesses the most accurate antennae sensing where the country is politically, at least in terms of where NZ First should sit. He views everything through a NZ First lens, as he should. Winston has a long memory: back to the 1990s where National and Bill English are concerned. You do the dirty on Winston at your peril, as Trevor Mallard and others have discovered.
Last week Winston put a marker of sorts in the sand. I say a marker of sorts because unless you are a blind follower of Winston’s you can never be sure. This marker, if he’s true to his word, is of huge significance. It has the potential to fundamentally change the outcome of the election. If enough people take him at his word, NZ First is a shoo-in next year. Some polls already have him not too far off five per cent.
When Winston puts such a marker in the sand, one immediately goes looking for the wriggle room. Is there any? Let’s look at what he actually said.
No one gets to lie to me twice. We are not going to go with the Labour Party, THIS PRESENT LABOUR PARTY CROWD, they can’t be trusted. You don’t get a second chance to lie to me or my party and they did.
To double-check whether there was any wriggle room in his position on Labour, he is asked if he is ruling out working with a Jacinda Ardern-led government. “Most definitely” is his answer. “We trusted them.” I have highlighted what I consider to be his wriggle room. Before going into that let’s analyse what he’s saying here. Do we really believe he trusted them? If he did I take back the opening compliments I made about him.
It was never about trust; Winston is too clever for that. It was always about a decades-old grudge held against the then-leader of the National Party with whom he only dealt so as to get the optimum out of the childlike leader of the Labour Party. Winston was in fact fulfilling two aims here, both personal. One was extracting utu on English, the other was extricating as much political mileage out of Labour as he could. Having gone with them, in defiance of the party that won the most votes and therefore the voters, he excused himself with the ‘handbrake’ analogy.
That is only technically true. Everything that has happened since has occurred because Winston put them there. Every article written criticising this Government would not have been written had Winston not put them there. Covid is not a factor as, had National been the government they probably, being largely Labour-lite, would have been returned with a similar majority. The big difference is that the country would not be in so deep a fiscal hole as it is now.
So Winston has now supposedly put his shovel in the sand. He has, to all intents and purposes, woken up to the fact that HE may not be trusted. How about a headline ‘No one gets to not trust me twice’? He knows this is his last throw of the political dice. Winston would like us to believe Labour is out of his reckoning. But is it? As I mentioned above his words are “This present Labour Party crowd” and a “Jacinda Ardern led Government”.
Here’s the thing. On present polling at least two dozen of the present crowd will be gone. If the downward slide continues that will include Ardern. She may not have the balls to contest an unwinnable election. Winston knows Labour are history; he has said so more than once. What if the Labour lot change significantly and Robertson is the leader? What then?
As I have said in previous articles there is a lot to like about what Winston says on matters that appeal to the right-wing voter. However, it is that very word ‘trust’, that he says caused him to adopt his present attitude towards Labour, which causes other people to have a problem with him.
The plain sailing option is to ensure National and ACT get elected with a big enough mandate to not need Winston. If Winston is involved, it is dollars to doughnuts there will be problems.
There will be enough problems for a National/ACT coalition to sort out after the election. One more, Winston, will be one too many.