So is Winston Peters ready to step back on to the hustings?.
He showed every sign of it when he fronted on the Andrew Bolt show on Australia’s Sky TV channel this week. As the interview ended the egregious Bolt wished him well in his campaign.
Bolt had invited Peters to appear on his prime-time talk-show, clearly agitated by the Ardern government’s moves towards implementing co-governance.
It was a theme Peters relished, and, belying his 77 years, he gave a fair thrashing to what he called “manifestations of Labour’s race-based co-governance agenda”. He said the policy will lead New Zealand to “become a separatist state”.
Peters reads polls as closely as anyone. And if he didn’t, his acute political sense would tell him there is a mountain of disenchantment with the current regime and neither National nor ACT are fully tuned into it.
National and Act are marginally ahead of Labour-Green, with the latter boosted by Te Pāti Māori and the MMP overhang. After the John Key-Māori Party deal, there won’t be a second pact with National, at least until there has been one with Labour.
If Peters once again corrals voters dissatisfied with the right or left coalitions, he’s on track to choose the Prime Minister again.
In thrashing Ardern’s co-governance policy, it might seem that in his role as kingmaker he would anoint Christopher Luxon, for the same reasons he backed Ardern in 2017.
His experiences after saving Jim Bolger in 1996 and Helen Clark in 2005 made him wary of propping up a declining status quo. Better to chance it with something new.
That’s Matthew Hooton’s view, who notes that – for Labour’s part – Ardern and her strategists developed the same loathing of working with Peters and his circle that National acquired a generation earlier. Reversing 2017, Peters would face frosty 2023 Labour negotiators but a desperate National.
If Peters’ Ardern experiment didn’t work out either, he can blame Covid. In late 2019, NZ First was hanging in there, securely over 4% , with reasonable expectations of again holding the balance of power. After the lockdown, NZ First crashed to the ones and twos and never looked credible again.
Hooton also contends that – learning from Donald Trump – Peters plans to be 2023’s social media king. Narrow targeting through social media makes sense given that Peters needs only one in 20 voters, and can more easily win them over if he is less open to mainstream critique.
The remaining 19 voters and the mainstream media can loathe and belittle him as much as they like. It makes no difference to Peters under MMP, the system he campaigned for after the Royal Commission in 1986.
With his rant on the Robert Bolt show, Peters has already underlined his direction.
He will go vote-hunting by attacking co-governance, the Brown Table and their “sickly white liberal” enablers.
But there are plenty of other targets, not least in urban areas like West Auckland where house-owners will be suffering from the iniquities of rising mortgage costs coupled with the inroads of inflation into pay packets.
Rather the rabble-rouser of previous campaigns Peters could easily appear in the frame of the elder statesman coming to the rescue of a country facing mortal danger.
He knows the defence forces have been neglected by the Ardern government. Russia’s attack on the Ukraine and China’s aggressive stance in the Pacific suggest Peters would find some resonance with a call to arms.
Meanwhile Point of Order will be closely monitoring Peters’ next moves to inject his own brand of energy into the next round of electioneering.
Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton
Peters reads polls as closely as anyone. And if he didn’t, his acute political sense would tell him there is a mountain of disenchantment with the current regime and neither National nor ACT are fully tuned into it.
National and Act are marginally ahead of Labour-Green, with the latter boosted by Te Pāti Māori and the MMP overhang. After the John Key-Māori Party deal, there won’t be a second pact with National, at least until there has been one with Labour.
If Peters once again corrals voters dissatisfied with the right or left coalitions, he’s on track to choose the Prime Minister again.
In thrashing Ardern’s co-governance policy, it might seem that in his role as kingmaker he would anoint Christopher Luxon, for the same reasons he backed Ardern in 2017.
His experiences after saving Jim Bolger in 1996 and Helen Clark in 2005 made him wary of propping up a declining status quo. Better to chance it with something new.
That’s Matthew Hooton’s view, who notes that – for Labour’s part – Ardern and her strategists developed the same loathing of working with Peters and his circle that National acquired a generation earlier. Reversing 2017, Peters would face frosty 2023 Labour negotiators but a desperate National.
If Peters’ Ardern experiment didn’t work out either, he can blame Covid. In late 2019, NZ First was hanging in there, securely over 4% , with reasonable expectations of again holding the balance of power. After the lockdown, NZ First crashed to the ones and twos and never looked credible again.
Hooton also contends that – learning from Donald Trump – Peters plans to be 2023’s social media king. Narrow targeting through social media makes sense given that Peters needs only one in 20 voters, and can more easily win them over if he is less open to mainstream critique.
The remaining 19 voters and the mainstream media can loathe and belittle him as much as they like. It makes no difference to Peters under MMP, the system he campaigned for after the Royal Commission in 1986.
With his rant on the Robert Bolt show, Peters has already underlined his direction.
He will go vote-hunting by attacking co-governance, the Brown Table and their “sickly white liberal” enablers.
But there are plenty of other targets, not least in urban areas like West Auckland where house-owners will be suffering from the iniquities of rising mortgage costs coupled with the inroads of inflation into pay packets.
Rather the rabble-rouser of previous campaigns Peters could easily appear in the frame of the elder statesman coming to the rescue of a country facing mortal danger.
He knows the defence forces have been neglected by the Ardern government. Russia’s attack on the Ukraine and China’s aggressive stance in the Pacific suggest Peters would find some resonance with a call to arms.
Meanwhile Point of Order will be closely monitoring Peters’ next moves to inject his own brand of energy into the next round of electioneering.
Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton
4 comments:
Yeah... Nah. Winston could possibly be king-maker again, but until he rules out Labour, which he won't - because such should undermine his leverage, general suspicion and distrust might be the undoing of a repeat of his phoenix trick. Act are reading the room way better than National, who have their Covid mask covering their eyes, as well as apparently suffering from a degenerative disease affecting their spine. But then, twelve months is a very long time in politics.
I think it's Andrew Bolt
Please do not refer to Ukraine with the article ‘the’ Ukraine. The article denotes a region of a nation, such as the Waikato. Ukraine is a sovereign state whose peoples have fought long and hard, and continue to do so. The article ‘the’ , in reference to Ukraine, reflects back to Soviet times. Insensitive. Thanks.
Peters, the charlatan, who, in a spiteful fit of pique against the National party, enthroned a known communist as PM in return for the baubles of office he craves so much, by so doing earned the vilification of all sensible NZ-ers and lost any credibility he ever had.
No sensible person will pay heed to anything he says.
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