Winston rides into town
NZ First leader Winston Peters addresses a crowd of several hundred people at the Great Lake Centre on Saturday. Photo: Dan Hutchinson
It’s been 48 years since Winston Peters first entered Parliament and he sticks around because he wants young people to have the same opportunities that he did.
By Dan Hutchinson
Peters was in Taupō on Saturday for a public meeting that filled most of the main theatre at the Great Lake Centre.
Taupō & Tūrangi News caught up with him after his speech to ask what makes him tick after 48 years in national politics, and whether he thought things had improved in that time or gotten worse.
“I think I'm more driven than enjoy it," Peters says.
"I want young people to have a decent country to go into the future like I had."
He says his political views are not nostalgic.
“It's not completely nostalgia. Every great sporting team I know, when they're having a team talk, talks about their past great victories and they want to repeat them. And so it should be for a country. There's nothing nostalgic about that."
Peters grew up in a family of 11 children in a rural area, riding a horse to school. From there, he went on to law school, earned double degrees, and ran his own law practice.
"That's, you know, not everybody's cup of tea, but various variations of that theme is about opportunity. And we've got an obligation to ensure that today's young people have the same chance. In New Zealand, that is, though. That's the real point."
Peters is a big fan of roadshow style politics and criticises other politicians for “grabbing a kayak” or “holding a starfish” to generate a good video or TV segment.
"This is all jack-up. How can they get away with it? And now the rest of us are grinding it out in meetings. In the end, we think it'll pay off."
He says the face-to-face format is "the essence of politics”.
The speech itself was wide-ranging, taking aim at his political rivals, with dire warnings of a four-party coalition of the left.
Those parties were variously described as "communists, Marxists, separatists, and worst of all, globalists."
Of local relevance is Waikato Regional Council's Plan Change 1, which he described as a "bureaucratic death sentence for farmers and growers" affecting more than 4,500 farms.
"Cleaner rivers do not come from bankrupting farmers.”
He reiterated a desire for a formal inquiry into Covid-19 vaccine injuries, claiming 311,000 teenagers received a second vaccine dose despite advice against it.
He pledged to re-establish a New Zealand-owned bank, break up the power company oligopoly, and split the supermarket duopoly to bring prices down for consumers.
To address falling birth rates, NZ First is proposing $5,000 per child per year for each of the first three years of a child's life.
He announced the Party’s intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, arguing that New Zealand accounts for just 0.17% of global emissions while China, India, Russia, and the United States together account for 60%.
"Nothing we can do can help, and we're going to fail anyway no matter what.”
He closed with a firm rejection of ‘Aotearoa’ as the country's official title, saying the country is called New Zealand.