Matthew Hooton: Why I think Winston Peters is unfit for office

OPINION

I believe Winston Peters has now gone too far for any decent person to want him serving in government. If Peters’ caucus won’t remove their leader, then Christopher Luxon has a duty to make clear that there is no place for NZ First in his Government.

Assuming Luxon was genuine when he claimed last month that he didn’t know Peters, he has no such excuse after the NZ First leader’s allegation that Jacinda Ardern’s office had some sort of meaningful prior knowledge of the Christchurch terrorist attack of March 15, 2019.

I am no Ardern fan. I publicly called her a flake the day she became Labour leader and stood by that as recently as last week.

But March 15 was undoubtedly her finest hour, uncomplicated even by subsequent events as her Covid response came to be.

Ardern’s leadership helped prevent any copycat or reprisal attacks. Her refusal to ever utter the terrorist’s name means he and his “manifesto” both now rot.

In my view, Peters’ allegation on Wednesday night that Ardern’s office had prior warning of the atrocity cannot be understood as referring to the emails the terrorist sent to her office and others at 1.32pm, eight minutes before he killed his first victim.

The Prime Minister made that message public in a global press conference the next day.

We waited until today to find out, for the first time, that the Prime Minister's Office received information about the March 15 terrorist attack before the massacre took place. Jacinda Ardern should be called to the hearing and asked to explain this appalling lack of transparency…

— Winston Peters (@winstonpeters) October 25, 2023

The Royal Commission into the attack, led by Sir William Young, a Supreme Court justice since 2010 and a former President of the Court of Appeal, reviewed and published everything that every public-sector body knew in advance about the terrorist.

That included reviewing police and intelligence records, but also details of his every arrival and departure to and from New Zealand since 1999, his having a minor car accident in Whanganui in 2013 in which no other vehicles were involved, and that he went to see a doctor in Dunedin in 2017 complaining of a sore tummy.

Sir William and his team, closely scrutinised by the families of the victims, carefully reviewed what Ardern’s staff did after they received the terrorist’s email, finding that they alerted the relevant authorities just six minutes after the terrorist sent it.

Peters’ tweet, in my view, can only reasonably be read as implying something much more material and infinitely more sinister than that.

After Peters’ 7pm tweet on Wednesday was firmly rebutted by the Prime Minister’s office and condemned as well as praised by the sad souls still addicted to Twitter (now X), Peters doubled down. Soon after 11pm, he tweeted again, now claiming to have a transcript of a call between Ardern and him which would support his allegation.

At the time of writing, he has produced no such transcript.

For those political apologists and feckless media, there is an existing transcript of a phone call made by the Prime Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister at the vital time of a crisis when a terrorist had just massacred innocent people. Not once were we transparently informed of…

— Winston Peters (@winstonpeters) October 25, 2023

Ardern can take comfort that she isn’t the first person Peters has so falsely and contemptibly smeared.

As early as 1996, the courts found in a defamation action that “Mr Peters was at best reckless or even worse he knew the words used were false. Either way he acted maliciously.”

That case concerned one of the false allegations Peters had made over several years for which — to use his own cynical slogan — he provided “not a shred of evidence”.

He has never changed.

After happily selling the Government’s shares in Auckland International Airport as Treasurer in July 1998, he led a performative Cabinet walk-out only weeks later over a similar sale of shares in Wellington Airport.

That forced his sacking and the collapse of the National-NZ First Coalition, in my view allowing him to play martyr.

In 2008, the Spencer Trust scandal disrupted the Clark Government’s final year, with the Privileges Committee finding Peters had knowingly provided false or misleading information to Parliament and the public about an undisclosed $100,000 donation.

Matters concerning donations to the NZ First Foundation, which marred Ardern’s first term, remain before the courts.

Peters’ defenders might say this is all just politics. But suggesting negligence by the former Prime Minister and even implying some kind of collusion between the Government and the terrorist is in an entirely different category.

NZ First insiders are unapologetic. They told me yesterday it’s all about upsetting people like me to draw attention to Peters, and to signal to Luxon that “he better refresh his gantt chart”.

That would suggest to me a despicable new level of cynicism that we have never seen before in New Zealand, even when Peters was launching his most vicious attacks on new immigrants in the 1990s.

We may never know what was going on in Peters’ mind on Wednesday night.

If there is not some other explanation for his late-night tweets, then he is, in my view, at best a moral cretin or, worse, has used the terrible events of March 15 to make some kind of short-term tactical point in coalition negotiations even while knowing that doing so is wrong.

Act lost votes by suggesting during the election campaign they might be unable to offer a Luxon-Peters Government anything more than the barest support on confidence.

Those lost votes were a small price to pay for David Seymour and Brooke van Velden being able to sleep at night.

We will know shortly whether Shane Jones, Jenny Marcroft, and their colleagues likewise want to be people able to look themselves in the mirror.

If the new NZ First caucus does not exercise their power to remove Peters as their leader, then National has some genuine soul-searching to do. If Wednesday night is not enough to make Peters persona non-grata for Luxon, then what could?

National strategists did not reply to questions yesterday about whether Peters’ behaviour would have any effect on Luxon’s attitudes towards their current “relationship building” exercise.

Absent any other explanation for his utterly false comments about the Prime Minister he served as deputy, I cannot see how Peters could again serve as Deputy Prime Minister, Treasurer, Foreign Minister, or in any ministerial role.

It’s no good Luxon and Seymour arguing they need to be the adults in the room and form a Government no matter what.

If the cost of forming a Government is dealing with Peters, then I believe many of the hundreds of thousands of people who voted National or Act will want them to look for other options, even if that includes the pre-election suggestion by National campaign chairman Chris Bishop that, if necessary, new elections could be required.

- Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the mayor of Auckland.