Audrey Young: Winston Peters deserves some claim to relative stability

The grin on New Zealand First leader Winston Peters' face today showed who he thought would benefit from all the action on the left of politics. Photo / Dean Purcell

The winners and losers in the fallout from the Metiria Turei admission of welfare fraud have ebbed and flowed.

Labour were the losers, then the winners after it led to the election of Jacinda Ardern as leader.

Greens were the winners with its surge in the polls and now are the losers following the divisions between left (otherwise known as the environmentalists) and the ultra-left (known as the social justice warriors) being finally exposed with the resignation of two left MPs.

To the list of winners and losers can now be added Winston Peters and James Shaw respectively.

The grin on Winston Peters' face today showed who he thought would benefit from all the action on the left of politics - and he has some cause.

New Zealand First has its share of wacky policies but to still be a force in politics after 38 years and still be leading his own party after 24 years, amid the current chaos, he has some right to some claim of stability.

Shaw, however, has manacled himself to Turei in a way that gives no refuge to the Green Party supporters who didn't support Turei but didn't want to go as far as Kennedy Graham and David Clendon and resign.

In his defence of Turei, he has been as outlandish as her.

He insists that she has begun some amazing conversation about poverty that New Zealand has never had before (where was he in 2013 and 2014?).

He says that her offending was a "minor indiscretion" and that she was forced to do it to feed her baby, implying that she had no choice.

And most outlandishly, he claims that Turei is now being attacked because she has become an advocate for the marginalised in society.

That is an attack on anyone who has issues with the way Turei has conducted herself since making her admission on July 16, including his two former colleagues.

On Monday night he got quite carried away: "Frankly I am kind of over the level of interrogation that she has received for what was minor events that occurred 25 years ago, well before she became a Member of Parliament."

The Greens' ultra-left wing can have no issue with Shaw's defence of Turei.
It has been unstinting, comprehensive and heroic but has wounded himself in the process.