Duncan Greive, on 14 June 2023, attended a political meeting with Grey Power and NZ First and said:
To make it back into Parliament, he (Winston Peters) will likely need to find a way to turn their fury into votes.
Greive, the founder of the left-wing The Spinoff, was surely kidding. He acknowledges people’s anger in his article, but, in his mind, the idea that this wily politician might wield power again in NZ was ruled out. He described his attendance to this meeting in an article titled A Very Strange Afternoon Hanging with NZ First and Grey Power.
The article recalls Peters’s political history and also catalogues the furious concerns of attendees. He gave credit to Peters as a consummate orator and a formidable campaigner, who relates to people with his lovable charisma. He saw how easily Peters touched the raw nerves of his audience. How galling for a left-wing writer to hear just how angry people are with the state of the nation. He had to listen to this well-dressed conservative guy, then witness the old codger signing up more members with “a steady stream of new recruits lining up at the trestle tables”. Greive watched Peters hold their attention for a straight 50 minutes. Can we hear a wail as Greive bashes away on his computer reminding us that Winnie is cunning, stoking hostility, and feeding them line after line of fresh meat to wind them up. But man, is he good!
It is important to highlight Greive recorded that likely the most animated issue of the day were questions on unelected Maori in co-governance. The audience were clearly not happy.
The Spinoff heading continued with Co-governance is the main course:
From there he progressed to a quick interlude bashing the Auckland light rail project, benefit numbers and educational quality and attendance, before he moved onto what functioned as the main course – a long treatise on the treaty, and particularly co-governance. “The Labour government has been covertly, secretly producing and purging policies, which they never campaigned on during the last election,” he said. “They’re producing policies which randomly rewrite history.”
The section lasted for almost 12 minutes, and you could feel the energy in the room shift. Peters knows his audience very well and fed them line after line of fresh meat. He is uniquely well-placed to do this, by virtue of his identity as Maori, and he took care to frame the issue as one of huge concern to a shadowy elite cabal, while ordinary working Maori were more concerned with the cost of living and housing.
He contrasted today’s reality with a story of high school rugby in Dargaville, where he grew up, when Pakeha and Maori faced off on the field, with Croatians making up the numbers of the indigenous side. It spoke to an idealised vision of New Zealand’s past, where there were no race relations problems and everything was worked out over a beer at the RSA. It’s a version of our history that the overwhelmingly Pakeha crowd keenly remembers, and Peters promises a return to it, if only he can wrest the mantle of kingmaker away from Te Pati Maori.
Duncan Greive 14 June 2023
Recently some became aware that Winston Peters is likely the only politician of a small party able to get five per cent of the votes and then might be able to haul the country back to a one person, one vote, democracy. The evil of racial division the Labour Party has dumped onto NZ has been called out by Winston Peters for what it really is: Apartheid. Some from the undecided Freedom Community may see hope there.
The same issues were raised by Winston Peters with another very concerned audience of 700-plus people at Tauranga on 16 July.
In No Punches Pulled, The Political Polls, Sir Bob Jones said concerning Labour’s co-governance policy of wanting two per cent of the population to have equal governmental powers with the other 98 per cent of the population: “the public are understandably seething over this insanity”.
Yes, Kiwis are furious. Seething in fact.
You are right Duncan in thinking that “that general sense of disenfranchisement from society that welled up into the parliamentary protest is more baked in than we might have anticipated”. On this we agree.
Ignore Winnie if you dare.
Listen to the interview of NZ First’s Shane Jones on Reality Check Radio with Cam Slater.