To borrow a phrase from his namesake Winston Churchill, Winston Peters is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
I haven’t got the space (or inclination) to carry out a biographical study of one of Parliament’s longest-serving members. Such biographies delve into not only the subject’s achievements but also their psyche, and that, in this case, would be a mysterious place indeed.
There’s no question Peters has an impressive range of talents, but his actual achievements have always fallen well short of those innate and well-honed abilities. He’s whip-smart, for a start.
His oratorical skills can shift from the technical to the populist in the blink of an eye. Those who’ve been around him will tell you he has a great sense of humour.
He can hold a room or a large crowd with his charm and wit, and performs with competence in foreign affairs. He knows how to get his point across through the media while simultaneously bashing the media. On so many fronts, he can run rings around anyone in Parliament, including his current coalition partners.
But those talents belie a hollow brittleness to Peters, which has sabotaged his ability to actually achieve anything of note.
David Lange joked in his valedictory speech that Peters wasn’t present because he’d been detained by a full-length mirror. But is that vanity the flip side of an insecurity?
It should be remembered that Peters started his political career as a young lawyer who recognised Māori were still losing land to crown actions before he stood for the Northern Māori seat in 1975.
He fought with others from Ngāti Wai to retain coastal land in a campaign that was one of one of the catalysts for the Māori Land March and his association with Dame Whina Cooper.
But somewhere along the way, he realised that instead of fighting for Māori, there was more of a political career in appealing to Pākehā fears of Māori. It’s a trick he keeps pulling out of the hat.
Peters grew up in my father’s generation and many from that generation can painfully remember being beaten at the Native Schools for speaking their mother tongue. But it wasn’t just physical punishment.
Many Māori imbibed the view that the only way to get ahead was to forget you were Māori. “Hori” became the derogatory term for being culturally or socially Māori.
Anything negative associated with being Māori, such as poverty, how you spoke or your clothes or lack of shoes, could be mocked as Hori.
Even the Māori Women’s Welfare League, of which Dame Whina was the founding president, fell into this trap. The league lobbied to ban the publication of a photo essay by Ans Westra in a school journal that showed a rural Māori whānau going about their day. The kids looked perfectly happy but the poverty that the images portrayed wasn’t the way the league wanted Māori to be perceived.
This internalised self-loathing does more damage than any insults from a Pākehā racist. Whether deliberate or not, Peters has a track record of positioning himself as the safe, civilised Māori who can protect Pākehā New Zealand from the unwashed, lazy, uneducated Horis, the radical activists, the incompetent corporate iwi leaders, or any other version of Māori that he conjures up.
And it’s worked, for him, at least. His latest iteration is barking on about woke ideology, which he further denounced in a state of the nation address that captured everything from climate-change mitigation to water fluoridation.
Early in his career, Peters targeted Labour MP Koro Wētere regarding a scandal that was more hype than substance. But Wētere later took great delight in humiliating Peters in the House when he answered one of Peters’ questions in Māori without providing a translation. Peters could only sit there stewing.
I know of one retired Māori public servant who says when they spotted Peters around Parliament, they’d loudly greet him with a “kia ora”, just to wind him up. Peters would studiously ignore them and keep walking.
Peters will either studiously ignore this column or deploy his usual means of defence – attack. There will be some grouchy insults that he’ll sling, embellished with pompous adjectives such as “manifestly” and “demonstrably” to try to sound authoritative.
It’s disappointing that he doesn’t exert the same energy attacking the issues that matter, particularly those that affect Māori.
There are many issues facing Māori, such as having one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. Or the inequalities in health, incarceration and housing. When have you heard Peters speak up on these with any sustained outrage?
The shame is he had the talent and position to bridge gaps and speak across boundaries and be a leader that led. Instead, he has made his career pretending to fight against division while carefully cultivating divisions, just to maintain his profile.
He’s still detained by the full-length mirror.
