OPINION
Mark Freeman
Deputy prime minister and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has reiterated his commitment to replace the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid.
On Thursday, around 100 people turned out for a rally on the steps of parliament organised by NZDSOS to commemorate the start of the Covid pandemic, the rollout of the injections and the protests at parliament. Dr Matt Shelton handed Mr Peters and New Zealand First MP Tanya Unkovich a letter to parliament calling for the end to the injections and a widening of the scope of the parliamentary Covid inquiry.
In his 2023 election campaign, Mr Peters promised to replace the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid – with its narrow terms of reference – with a new 12-month inquiry into the pandemic. He also promised to compensate people who were mandated out of their jobs and those who were vaccine injured.
“What I promised in Whangarei we will deliver on,” he told the crowd on Thursday. “Please don’t say, ‘You haven’t done this and therefore you’ve broken your word.’ No, sunshine, I won’t break my word; I’ll keep it.”
Mr Peters said that in the early part of 2020 he believed in the vaccine. “Later in the piece, in 2020, I started hearing statements that deeply alarmed me, such as ‘This has this outcome, and we know exactly in a scientific medical way what the outcomes will be.’ That’s when I became alarmed.”
Anyone who challenged the official narrative was labelled as disloyal, unpatriotic, a deceiver and a liar, he said. He told the crowd he was called a “traitor” for talking to the protesters on parliament’s grounds and designated a “terrorist” by Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard.
It was a tragedy that so many people went along with the official narrative, he said. This included the 120 members of parliament, who “signed a pact” not to talk to the protesters. Mr Peters said that was the first time in his experience that MPs had refused to talk to those who disagreed with them, a situation he described as “shattering”.
