by Cam Slater on the BFD

Winston Peters at Freedom Village outside Parliament in Wellington in February.

So, he finally did it; something he has done in no election since MMP began. He finally said that for which many of you have been crying out for decades. He’s finally given you a reason to vote for him. He’s explicitly said, in no uncertain terms, that he will not work with the Labour Party after the next election.

For the first time since MMP began, the former Deputy Prime Minister and New Zealand First leader has emphatically ruled out working with a major party.

He has hinted at it in the past. But he has not unequivocally ruled out a major party, until now in an interview with the Weekend Herald.

“No one gets to lie to me twice,” he says this week.

“We are not going to go with the Labour Party, this present Labour Party crowd, because they can’t be trusted.

“You don’t get a second time to lie to me, or my party, and they did.”

Peters says when he was Deputy Prime Minister in New Zealand First’s coalition with Labour, he was kept in the dark over the commissioning of He Puapua, and what the Three Waters reforms looked like and described it as a “secret agenda”.

To double-check whether there was any wriggle room in his position on Labour, he is asked if he is ruling out working with a Jacinda Ardern-led government.

“Most definitely,” he says and he reflects on his previous two stints in government, first with National and with the fifth Labour government, which he described as trusted relationships.

“When I shook hands with Jim Bolger and Helen Clark, ask them whether I could be trusted. When I shake someone’s hand, and they deliberately mislead me and my caucus, who are a critical part of a coalition, they don’t get a second chance to do that again.

“I regret that. It’s sad that it has happened but those are the facts and they cannot deny it.

“You can take that as there is no way this present Labour crowd will ever be in a coalition with New Zealand First because they lied to us last time. We trusted them.” —NZ Herald

There are no weasel words, no escape clauses, despite what many have claimed. He has said, emphatically, that he will not work with anyone present in the current Labour Party.

The words “Jacinda Ardern-led Government” were not uttered by him, but by a journalist.

So, this is the first time ever Winston Peters has said that he won’t work with a particular party. Leaving the option open of going with a party that seeks to end democracy, to end free speech and to remove the concept of taxation with representation is a bridge too far, even for Winston. None of his past coalition partners ever put the country at such risk.

He’s just given those of you who hanker for a centre-right government, but don’t want to vote for the quislings currently in the parliament who clapped and cheered while Ardern rode roughshod over our rights, a good reason to vote for NZ First at the next election.

It is now up to the voters to deal the cards with which the parties play. A stronger NZ First will mitigate the fascist tendencies of National and ACT.

It’s a fascinating choice NZ First has made: Winston regards the Labour brand as so toxic that he’s willing to forego any soft Labour voters in order to make a play for voters whose other choices are too fragmented to pass the threshold. It’s now a choice of various shades of WEF, vaccine mandate parties and NZ First.

If you are like me and other commentators who are looking on in disbelief as Christopher Luxon emulates Jacinda Ardern, playing dress up, toadying to Maori interests and being as woke as he can possibly be, then you now have an alternative that won’t result in a Labour/Green/Maori government. Luxon likes to paint himself as someone who worked his way to the top. The fact is he came from a wealthy family and went to an exclusive school, from which he was able to make the right connections. The job is nothing more than a notch in his CV. Key was similar. Very few politicians are in parliament because they care about the country, and globalists never actually do – and, make no mistake, Luxon is a hard-core globalist.

Christopher Luxon playing dress up at McDonalds.

Remember that both ACT and National assisted Ardern in trampling our rights. The only difference between those two parties’ positions and Ardern’s was that they said they’d be more efficient fascists. Remember, too, that only Winston Peters, as leader of a party that can actually make it into parliament, bothered to go and listen to protestors and hear their concerns. All others, including David Seymour and Christopher Luxon, sat behind Mallard’s wall quivering in fear as police set about bashing protestors.

Winston Peters just declared utu on the Labour Party because they lied to him and to the voters of this country. He’s going after the 400,000 former National Party voters who voted Labour at the last election and who might not be enamoured with Christopher Luxon.

And he’s targetting both National and Labour’s core voters. He’s planning to change NZ First from a minor party to a major party. It’s a bold move. And he at least needs to be bigger than ACT, so that he can negotiate coalition arrangements that won’t see our country being sold out to the globalists and the sinister World Economic Forum.

The rest is up to you: the voters.

The problem for Winston is that he is the person who installed Comrade Jacinda as PM back in 2017 and there are plenty who won’t forgive him for that.  David Seymour gained a lot of kudos among libertarians when he stood against Jacinda’s gun grab in 2019, the only MP who did.  However, he badly smudged his record over covidiocy which makes people wary, although his predecessor in Epsom, Rodney Hide publicly rebuked him for that.  —Eds