It comes as National leader Christopher Luxon and Peters hold their talks in Wellington this week, alongside their senior colleagues and chiefs of staff.
Those talks seem set to carry on into the weekend and possibly next week.
Peters’ negotiations group includes his colleague Shane Jones and Peters’ likely chief of staff Darroch Ball.
Jones and National MP Chris Bishop were also spotted having coffee together at the Bolton Hotel, near Parliament, on Wednesday afternoon.
It is understood the formal talks are being held at different locations in an attempt to foil the media, and mostly on the Parliamentary precinct.
Luxon has not made any public comments on the progress of the talks since Monday morning, ahead of the main talks with NZ First beginning.
Those happened on Tuesday after Peters had dined with Luxon on the Monday night and met with the NZ First caucus on Tuesday.
It’s understood Peters has still not made contact with Act leader David Seymour, despite saying earlier this week that he intended to do so after Seymour made repeated efforts to contact him.
National and Act have kept up some communication over the past couple of days, but Seymour has been in Auckland and most of National’s time has been spent trying to hammer out a deal with NZ First. Luxon has said he would like to get all three parties together for the final stages of talks.
Act is yet to be told details of what was being negotiated with NZ First. Seymour has made it clear he expected to see those details before finalising and signing Act’s deal.
Both Act and NZ First will likely require the support of the other to ensure their initiatives pass into law, and it is expected they will be asked to agree in advance to do so ahead of any deals being inked. That could put further spokes into the wheels of the progress of the talks, if one party baulks at measures offered to the other.
There is some caution about the way the 2017 talks were held, in which the Greens and NZ First were kept blind on the details of each other’s agreements but expected to support them once legislation came up. It resulted in the Greens having to support the waka jumping law, something they had staunchly opposed.
On Monday, Luxon said there would have to be trade-offs for all three parties, but there was a lot of common ground. All three also had “bespoke” policies that had to be considered. Seymour has already indicated one potential trade-off: saying he would be okay to be in Cabinet alongside Winston Peters, after saying he did not want that during the campaign.
There is speculation National’s tax cuts package is one sticking point - or at least the foreign buyers’ tax it plans to introduce to pay for it.
On Waatea Radio this week, Shane Jones said NZ First was opposed to repealing the current ban on foreign buyers - something it had supported back in 2017. National’s policy would only allow those who were buying properties worth more than $2 million back into the market, which it has argued would not impact on more affordable housing.
After the final election results came out last Friday, all three leaders said they were hopeful the talks would move at pace.
Luxon is hoping to make it to the Apec summit in San Francisco next week - that would require being sworn in as Prime Minister in time to leave on Wednesday. Peters is understood to be eyeing up the role of foreign minister again, and would likely accompany Luxon if that was the case. However, all have also said the talks cannot be rushed too much.
Peters told NBR he was confident about talks, but couldn’t rule out walking away if it did pan out.
“Well, [you] walk into negotiations on the basis that you might lose. You might not go there in the end,” he said.
“You go there with the right purpose but if you want to be true to yourself and the people who voted for you, you’ve got to have that view as well that this may not happen.
“We’ll do the best we can to make sure it happens, if we can.”
Seymour has also not totally ruled out going to the cross benches, although it is his preference to have a full coalition - even if that includes Peters.
In the interview with NBR, Peters said it should take less than two weeks to wrap up talks. Peters said the time it was taking it was long, saying the final election results were not known until last Friday and Act and National had had a head start over talks with NZ First.
It was not clear until Friday that NZ First would be needed to get a majority, although it was considered more than likely, given National often loses a seat or two on the special votes.
