Winston Peters continued his ‘war on woke’ at his state of the nation last Sunday
Rarely have we had a week in which something that is never going to happen has been so overly litigated.
The something in question was Green MP Tamatha Paul’s vague musing about abolishing the police force, followed by her multi-choice pop quiz on whether someone wouldfeel more intimidated running into a gang member or a police officer in a dark alley.
It sparked that pre-election game of trying to sully your rival by association with their political bedmates.
All sides knew the abolition of police was never going to happen under any future Labour Government, but National had to pretend it might, for the sake of being able to claim this was what the future might look like if Labour were in power with the Greens after the next election.
National’s efforts consisted of pushing out critiques on social media, doing interviews and using questions in Parliament to highlight Paul’s comments and point out there was no path for Labour to get into power that didn’t involve the Greens. The aim was not to have a go at the Greens but to have a go at Labour.
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith issued press releases to note that while Labour leader Chris Hipkins might have described Paul’s comments as stupid, Labour was clearly soft on crime because it had not voted for many of National’s tough-on-crime bills.
It helped that it coincided with the week in which the coalition’s tougher sentencing laws passed into law — which Labour voted against.
All Paul could do was look frustrated while trying to explain the wider context of her comments, such as it was. She learned the hard way that mere anecdotes do not withstand much scrutiny without anything else to back them up.
This whole scaremongering about the bedmates palaver is one of the features of MMP, equally deployed by both National and Labour — and the smaller parties on each side — in their contest to secure the centre vote.
National claims a Labour Government will give way to “la la land” ideas from its putative bedmates, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Labour claims National is being held to ransom by its bedmates, Act and NZ First. Labour has to take some care with the NZ First bit of this in case it ends up back with them again.
The smaller parties admittedly make this fairly easy for them, by coming up with utterances and policies that will never happen.
That is their job: they represent the 5% to 15% — not the majority. And the more out-there policy statements are only really aimed at 0% to 2%.
Many exist solely to appease a particular, and small, voter base rather than because a party has any intention of implementing them.
For National, this is a bit more problematic than for Labour at the moment, given its awkward top-and-tailing coalition with Act and NZ First, so some of those things do indeed get flirted with.
They can be quite distracting from the issues National is trying to focus on.
NZ First’s Winston Peters has made it quite clear he has every intention of stepping up his efforts in this regard as he eases out of the Deputy Prime Minister role and more often into his more rambunctious role of NZ First leader. That is also a very different Peters from the Foreign Minister who just returned from dealing with US President Donald Trump’s tariffs war.
Last Sunday, Peters’ contribution to the genre landed in his state of the nation speech declaring a war on woke.
It was followed up on Friday in the form of the Epistle of St Peters to his flock: the Anti-Woke.
That was an email to supporters and a begging letter, a request for donations. It was clearly based on the theory that the bigger the head of rage you can build up, the bigger the donations will be.
On and on it went, this tirade against all things decreed woke. There was plentiful use of bold bits, underlined bits and red print.
The long-dead He Puapua was exhumed once more. There was the proud declaration that NZ First was “the only nationalist party”.
There was the declaration that Hipkins was not sneering at Peters, “he is sneering at you” (both bolded and underlined, that one). One link joined to a site “join us in the resistance against those whose minds are so open their brains have fallen out”.
All of this stuff makes life that bit trickier for PM Christopher Luxon, who is drawn into answering questions on such matters as diversity criteria, wokeness and whether or not police should be abolished.
Politics is a job of trying to emphasise the good and distract from the bad. The other bit of the job is trying to force your opponents to get distracted onto the bad — and away from the good.
There was ‘good’ this week — the announcement of Resource Management Act reforms, the passing of sentencing reforms, and announcements on housing. On Thursday came the news the Government had well exceeded on one metric of National’s election campaign promises: cutting spending on consultants and contractors.
We are also now in the thick of pre-Budget season. Ministers are in the throes of their final one-on-one meetings with Finance Minister Nicola Willis. Thus far, the only one we know has had good news on that front is Defence Minister Judith Collins, but the pre-Budget announcements will soon start flowing.
Just as Peters is preparing for his 2026 election, National should be, and that means not getting distracted by the more ridiculous things the smaller parties throw up.
In case there was any doubt, the Ipsos survey out earlier this month provided a handy list of the things the ministers should be focusing on — though they are so obvious, it didn’t need to spell them out.
In this order, the issues voters said were of concern were: the cost of living, health, the economy, housing and law and order.
The need for the Government to focus on those things was emphasised because those same voters were clearly not impressed so far. It got the lowest score for Government performance since Ipsos started tracking it in 2017.
The worst news for the coalition in that poll was in the graphs, which asked which party voters thought was best equipped to deal with various issues.
On the cost of living (usually an advantage to National), National’s lead had narrowed rom a 16-point lead in February 2024 to just 4 percentage points.
The second bad news graph was health, on which National had gone from being slightly ahead in early 2024 to being 13 points below Labour.
The survey showed that really started going awry between May and August last year.
That period included the announcement that the planned rebuild of Dunedin Hospital was being halted and reviewed, the sacking of the board of Health NZ and appointment of a commissioner, and the political mistake of not including promised cancer drug funding in the Budget (a mistake that had to be hastily but messily patched up afterwards once the politicians realised it was a mistake).
The figures have not recovered since — and we head into winter, a notoriously bad time for health.
Nowhere in that survey is there a suggestion voters think engaging in political games over a backbench MP’s nonsensical musings is important.
