Winston Peters turns a venerable 80 on April 11, but he
showed no sign of retiring as New Zealand’s archetypal
populist during his recent state of
the nation speech. He especially enjoyed the hecklers,
gleefully telling them one by one to get out.
As ever,
his detractors became extras in the Winston Peters show –
something of a trademark in his long political career. As
well as a milestone birthday, 2025 will mark 50 years since
Peters’ first election campaign in 1975.
In that
first attempt, he ran unsuccessfully as the National Party
candidate for the Northern Māori seat. In 1978, he won in
Hunua, but only after a judicial recount. Already we can see
a pattern: a dogged determination to come back and a
lawyer’s litigious streak.
His political instincts
were formed in that era between 1975 and 1984 under prime
minister Robert Muldoon, National’s original, pugnacious
populist. It implanted pride in his nation, economic
protectionism, and a belief in old-fashioned “common
sense” politics.
Those characteristics could also be
his undoing. In 1991, Peters was sacked from Jim Bolger’s
National cabinet for publicly criticising cabinet
colleagues. He was later kicked out of the National caucus
entirely and then vacated his seat.
As his party
website explains in retrospect, he’d questioned “the neoliberal policy
agenda” and paid the price. He formed NZ First in 1993
and won back the seat of Tauranga. Ever since, the party
known mockingly as “Winston First” has been inextricably
identified with its (thus far) one and only
leader.
Coalitions of the willing
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Any mention
of Winston Peters’ name gets a reaction, be it love,
loathing or wry admiration. For the political scientist,
though, his career is remarkable for its many ups and downs,
and for sheer longevity.
In New Zealand’s first
proportional representation election in 1996, NZ First,
still only three years old, won all of the (then five)
Māori electorates. With 13.4% of the party vote (its best
result ever), NZ First gained 17 seats, handing Peters a
kingmaker role in the government formation
negotiations.
The upshot was a National-NZ First
coalition, which broke
up acrimoniously in 1998 after a disagreement about a
proposal to sell Wellington Airport brought existing
tensions between the parties to a head.
At the 1999
election, NZ First lost the five Māori seats and its party
vote plummeted to 4.3%. It got back into parliament only
thanks to Peters holding Tauranga by a fingernail: a mere 63
vote majority.
Dumped by Māori voters, he turned his
attention to New Zealand’s growing retirement generations
and climbed on board the anti-immigration bandwagon. In
2003, Peters launched an attack on “Third World
immigrants” that rattled the National Party’s cage so
hard it felt compelled to launch its own populist
campaign.
Then National leader Don Brash’s infamous
speech
at Orewa in 2004 centred around an alleged “dangerous
drift towards racial separatism”. The country became
polarised around Māori aspirations and the Treaty of
Waitangi, not dissimilar to the effect today of the Treaty
Principles Bill.
Being a populist, Peters is sometimes
mischaracterised as far right. But the more significant
aspect of his career has been his centrist aptitude for
collaborating with either National or Labour, depending on
the political wind.
Between 2005 and 2008, Peters
supported Helen Clark’s Labour-led government, enjoying
the plum job of foreign minister. But in 2008, National’s
John Key categorically refused to work with Peters in
government, and NZ First fell to 4.1% at the
election.
With no local electorate win this time,
Peters was banished to the political wilderness. Many
thought (or hoped) this would spell the end of his career.
But he was back in 2011, aiming to be in opposition against
Key’s National government. He succeeded in this – and
confounded his critics – with a party vote of
6.6%.
COVID and comebacks
The strategy of
seeing out the Key (and successor Bill English) years on the
cross benches worked well, with the 2014 election delivering
a party-vote boost to 8.7%.
Peters’ next big break
came after the 2017 election when he once again played
kingmaker. Although National won the most seats, Peters
chose a coalition with Jacinda Ardern’s Labour, with
support from the Greens.
But NZ First’s voter-base
had been evenly split over supporting a National-led or
Labour-led government. Inevitably, the party would be
punished for choosing to go with either major party. And
indeed, its share dropped from 7.2% in 2017 to 2.6% in the
2020 election – its worst result ever.
Once again,
Peters was cast out into the wilderness, to the undoubted
delight of his many detractors. It was over, surely? As the
2023 election approached, there was considerable doubt about
Peters making yet another comeback.
His party was
polling better than in 2011, however, and in the end romped
home with 6.1% of the vote. Peters used his bargaining power
to become foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the
current National-led coalition.
Some may have wondered
how the wily old fox found his way back into the coop. But
we can trace at least some of the reason back to a stroll
Peters took through the COVID protest camp in parliament
grounds in February 2022.
He said he was there to
listen, whereas the Ardern government’s refusal to talk
with protestors was “just going to make things much
worse”. To make his day, parliament’s speaker Trevor
Mallard had Peters trespassed
from parliament, which only boosted his maverick
reputation – and helped pave the way back to
power.
Not his first
rodeo
Peters courted an anti-vax, anti-globalist
constituency, promising to “defend
freedom” by ending vaccine mandates and holding “a
credible fully independent inquiry into New Zealand’s
COVID-19 response”.
Both things were going to happen
anyway. But Peters won votes that might otherwise have gone
to fringe protest parties, none of which got more than
1.2%.
Like a Pied Piper in a double-breasted pinstripe
suit, he led the disgruntled all the way to the ballot box.
One campaign video featured him in cow-cocky gear, mounting
a horse and boasting “this is not our first rodeo”.
Among the current generation of politicians, only he could
have pulled that off.
Peters possesses a canny
political instinct that combines opportunism with
attention-grabbing rhetoric. He can drum up enough
enthusiasm from target audiences to get his party over (or
back over) the 5% MMP threshold.
His recent
declaration of a “war on woke” shows he’s doing it
again. He zeros in on a political pain-point to energise a
support base and simultaneously enrage opponents. The latter
– along with “the mainstream media” – are used as
props as he campaigns from one provincial community hall to
the next.
At 80, Peters is as well adapted to posting
on Elon Musk’s X as he is to old-school hustings politics.
And he’s showing no sign of calling it a day as he
prepares to hand over the office of deputy prime minister to
ACT’s David Seymour later this year.
As the 2026
election draws nearer, one thing will be certain – you
can’t rule him out. Don’t be surprised if one day we see
an AI-generated Winston Peters telling us this is neither
his first nor his last rodeo.
Grant
Duncan, Teaching Fellow in Politics and
International Relations, University
of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
This
article is republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Read the original
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