Rt Hon Winston Peters

Public Meeting

Napier War Memorial Centre, 48 Marine Parade, Napier

1pm, 2nd July 2023

“15 October. New World In The Morning?”

Good afternoon, thank you for being at this War Memorial Centre and for the chance to speak to you today.

As Winston Churchill said, “A nation who forgets its past, has no future.”

We are in the heat of a political campaign where to recalibrate Henry Ford some parties are campaigning on what they haven’t done, and others are campaigning on what they are going to do.

But before any party makes political promises to you in this campaign, about how they are going to pick your province up alongside the rest of New Zealand, please ask ‘what have they budgeted to fix up Hawkes Bay and areas so damaged by the Auckland weather event and by Cyclone Gabrielle’.

It is estimated that we need between eight and fourteen billion dollars to fix up the damage. So, keep that figure in mind when all other promises are being made. Don’t become like Christchurch, still not rebuilt after twelve long years.

Hawkes Bay, like other provinces, is an engine room of our economy, a fact so widely recognised during the Covid years, and so quickly forgotten afterwards.

Currently, as some of us said it would, New Zealand is in an economic recession, spending much more than we are earning, in fact a massive one thousand million dollars more per week, than before Covid. And taxation is up fifty four percent. The question you’re probably asking is ‘what on earth are they doing with all this money, and how am I going to pay for it?’

It is probable that you think there is something surreal, incredible, unbelievable, about the campaign promises currently being made by so many. And you’re right. That sort of political climate occurs when politicians are allowed to get away with the most preposterous claims that have no connection to reality, before, now, or in the future.

It is starkly sad, but have you heard of the Labour Party goal of ‘zero suicides’? Or heard of their target of ‘zero road deaths’? Or ‘zero smoking by 2025’?

There was a time in New Zealand politics when such ‘aspirations’ were laughable. But today, they are government policy. With not a hope in Hades of them ever being achieved.

The ‘zero suicide’ target was set alongside $1.8 billion to go towards mental health and has secured only five hospital beds. All of this happened of course when New Zealanders voted or legalising ‘assisted deaths’ in a referendum. Of course, mental health deserves serious political focus, but making bloated promises whilst delivering minimal outcomes is actually contempt for the tax paying public.

Setting ‘zero road deaths’, and then presiding over a huge jump in road fatalities, including the doubling of deaths from drunk driving, tells us all how disconnected with reality too many politicians are.

These road death figures will only change for the better when the police are told to enforce our road safety laws – including catching and punishing drunk drivers. The laws will clearly not work if we have police unable to do their jobs, enforce the law, creating road breath tests, stopping drunk drivers from being behind the wheel, and properly punishing them when they are.

And if the government has a serious goal of being ‘smokefree’ by 2025, then why are billions of dollars in smoke tax revenue in their forward budgets? These tax revenue figures from tobacco sales make a lie of the government’s promise, but they carry on as if New Zealanders are stupid.

All this is happening whilst both our education and health systems are in crisis, and we are losing many of our young who are voting with their feet to go to overseas.

We learnt this week that whilst bringing in a staggering 100,000 immigrants this year alone, in the last eight months we haven’t been successful in securing one overseas trained doctor. And it’s likely that the educational or teaching recruitment that we need is not much better.

New Zealand has always needed focused immigration to fill some of the gaps in our economy and society. But 100,000 immigrants in one year without the infrastructure, homes, hospitals, or schools, is just a nightmare that you in the Hawkes Bay will be paying for.

Seventy percent of this number will be going directly to Auckland. And it’s likely that the people you need to bolster your economy will not be coming here – that’s what an unfocussed mess New Zealand’s immigration policy is.

This is a Labour Party city. The Hawkes Bay is a Labour Party province now. However, one thing is certain, the present Labour government has totally forgotten the kiwi working woman, man, and family.

The evidence? Well, fifteen months ago, Labour promised a Groceries Commissioner within three months. Today, fifteen months later, they are still advertising for one.

Back in 2020, Labour promised they were “forcing competition on supermarkets to make sure you’re paying a fair price for your weekly shop.” And then said, “we will continue working to make sure you pay a fair price at the till”, it’s in this three-year-old pamphlet. Yet it was only a few days ago, and with the wheels falling off the government everywhere, they announced an inquiry into supermarket prices.

As Lenard Cohen famously once sang “Hallelujah!!”

This inquiry will be as useless as the restricted terms Banking Inquiry. Both initiatives are last electoral gasps, designed to deceive you into believing they are doing something, and the banks and supermarkets are certainly not shaking at the knees.

The banking inquiry is only into retail or personal banking. It’s an inquiry you have when you’re not having an inquiry.

The cost of living is already devastating to so many New Zealanders. And it’s getting worse. Watch as food prices keep going up. Rates, insurance, and energy prices keep going up. And high interest rates stay up. An inquiry will do nothing about that.

Hawkes Bay is not Auckland, but you have heard of “Auckland Light Rail”. When Cyclone Gabrielle damage needs to be fixed now, Labour is still arguing for its hopeless light rail in Auckland, now heading towards $30 billion.

New Zealand First stopped the light rail pet project and its gross waste of money when we were in government, and we will stop it again. We will spend some of that money helping fix up the Hawkes Bay.

Last week it emerged that the government’s recent housing programme is way below target completions. All this shows is that you have got Ministers who don’t know what they are doing.

And this includes Labour and Green Party members who want to introduce a wealth tax where homeowners will be paying $25,000 a year on assessed capital gains, whether their house has been sold or not.

There are a lot of people in this room, not wealthy, who will simply go broke with this tax.

Caring for Seniors

Ladies and gentlemen when the economy is in trouble, the other parties have gone straight for the young and seniors. New Zealand First has not. We brought in free doctors visits for under 14 year olds, took the minimum wage to where it is today, our target, not Labour’s, we gave pay parity to primary school teachers, supported apprenticeships, and the employment of young New Zealanders first.

For decades the other parties have attacked seniors in this country. They say we can’t afford retirement at 65 years, when the percentage of super cost in New Zealand will not reach the levels of some other first world countries until over forty years’ time.

And super affordability is about one key factor – running a high performing economy, not a third world one. Those who believe the super age should be moved are admitting they have no plan for a high performing economy, like for example Japan, where the retirement age is 60.

The other parties have all argued for moving the retirement age up, and supported a surtax on superannuants with savings, and reducing the super from 65% of the net average wage to 60%, and taxing capital gains on retired people’s homes every year – which is the Green Party’s policy.

Only one party has looked after seniors over the last three decades. And that party irrefutably is New Zealand First and we are proud of it.

Urgent Priorities

In the last few years, the government has hired 15,000 new public servants. Anyone here notice any improvements as a result?

This money should have been spent on our health and education systems, not 15,000 new public servants, many of whom are engaged purely in spin and propaganda.

In our education sector, politicians extoll the virtues of education on one hand while taking away the funding to make it work on the other. New Zealand First is going to seriously increase education spending - but ‘for education not indoctrination’.

And we aim to pay our medical specialists, including nurses, competitive wages with other first world economies, like we once did.

We are going to get rid of the billions of dollars of waste on ‘nice to have projects’ and spend it on ‘must have projects’.

When we start doing that, and incentivising taxes, to grow our productivity, our wealth, and exports, and IT capacity, then the sooner we will start balancing the nation’s books again, currently in their worst state since 1972.

We have got to be clever with the work we are doing and develop a culture of innovation, not with more hours worked, but smarter hours at work.

Covid Truth

And New Zealand First is going to ensure there is an honest inquiry into the Covid years. We want you to know the truth about the limitations of the Covid vaccine and the economic and social costs of months and months of lockdowns.

I am not anti-vaccine, but pro-truth. I am triple vaccinated. But people should have been told the truth about the possible side effects, so they could make an informed choice, and not been the victims of bullying, sadistic, gas lighting from the ‘podium of truth’, and those who went along with the government’s claim of having ‘the full science’.

Law and Order

Safety and security are of major concern for many New Zealanders today. Too many of our cities and towns and communities simply don’t feel safe.

And daily reports of court decisions are cause for growing alarm. Because of concern for the offender - not the victim. In fact, every week there are appalling cases of people damaged for life, with virtually no consequences for the offender – such as nine months home detention. Where is the justice and accountability in that?

Just yesterday a number of Black Power members in Hawera were sentenced to a few months home detention after beating a middle-aged man senseless, and stabbed him, hit him with a tyre iron, unprovoked, just for wearing the wrong colour when waiting for his McDonalds order.

Thirteen Black Power members were charged with a range of offences including injuring with intent and assault. They all received bumper discounts to their sentences – with most getting a holiday with a few months home detention.

And this week, an 18- and 20-year-old were discharged without conviction after shooting arrows into a bull and steer, with both animals suffering miserably and dying.

This is the state of our judicial system. Too often, no accountability, no justice, no deterrent, no real punishment. Is there any wonder our crime stats have gone through the roof?

Offending will not stop at the current levels until it is faced with the serious intention and resource from central government, that crime will be punished.

New Zealand First means to end the mindless excuses blaming everything on colonisation, racism, poverty, bad upbringings, and creating a culture of offenders being the ‘victims of society’. We are going to focus on bringing justice for the real victims of crime.

The law needs to be enforced by police and backed up by courts with sentences that will send these offenders a message – we are not going to put up with it anymore. And New Zealand First is going to designate all gangs as terrorist organisations under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2022.

If Queensland and Western Australia can do this, why can’t we? And let’s not give any credence to the argument that somehow this is against their ‘constitutional rights’. We say the rights of law-abiding citizens come first. And to have ‘constitutional rights’ there must be ‘constitutional obligations’, and many including gang members are flouting our laws right in front of the police. They are running amok and are at the centre of the drug dealing that is so destructive to our social fabric. This cannot go on any longer.

New Zealand First is going to make it clear to the gangs that they have no future in their present membership. We are going to put them to work, in the same way that we all have to. Receiving benefits comes with responsibilities, and where they will no longer take with one hand and ignore the law with the other.

It is called a social contract.

The Rise of Racist Policies You Were Never Warned About

The Labour government has been secretly working on socially re-engineering our whole society. They justify this as arising from commitments to the United Nations that National, Māori Party, Act, and John Key made.

They signed up to UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration for Rights of Indigenous People) when Helen Clark and I as Foreign Minister in 2007 would not, because it subverted the sovereignty of our law.

Yet three years later, those parties signed up for that, and to an unelected Māori voice to the Auckland Super City, and replaced New Zealand First’s Foreshore and Seabed legislation with their Marine and Coastal Areas Act - which now sees over six hundred claims for New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed. And the taxpayer is contributing up to $300,000 for each claim.

Ordinary Māori never asked for this, and now the Māori wing of the Labour Party is in a race to the bottom with the Māori Party – and other parties support them.

The mass majority of Māori are by Labour’s own definition, on the general roll with the rest of us. Despite spending millions of dollars in the latest enrollment process, ordinary Māori have voted with their feet, and want to be part of a single franchise with the 95% of remaining New Zealanders.

Co-Government, How Did We Get It?

You have all heard of the Three Waters, now Ten Waters, which will see your water being controlled by ten bodies, fifty percent of whom must be local unelected Māori, but requiring a 75% decision proviso, which means local unelected Māori can veto any and every proposal.

Chris Hipkins said it is ‘not co-governance and never has been’. The Minister in charge Kieran McAnulty says it is, defended it, and said ‘Māori have a special interest in water’. Like you don’t?

How can any of this be fair?

And now they are forcing all departments, and every quasi-governmental group, into complying with their version of Treaty of Waitangi revisionism.

· They are changing local government with Māori Wards.

· Setting up a Māori Health Authority with veto rights over the health system.

· Giving Māori control over all aspects of water.

· Replacing English names whether appropriate or not.

· Changing our country’s name.

· Re-naming all government departments.

· Giving the Waitangi Tribunal superior legal status to parliament.

· Want the compulsory teaching of Māori to year ten.

· Want the primary school curriculum to be 25% Māori in three years time.

· Want Māori control of the DOC estate.

· And much, much, more – which they are secretly working on.

These policies were prepared by Labour in secret. There is no historic justification for them, which is why they have set out to re-write and reconstruct history.

To get to where these politicians are taking us, they deal in lies, including these four claims:

· That European arrival ruined the peaceful paradise of Māori,

· That the Treaty saw Māori begin a partnership with Queen Victoria,

· That the Treaty was not about Māori ceding sovereignty,

· That the Treaty meant Māori ‘self-government’

Stop for a moment and ask yourself, whether you’re Māori or non-Māori, can any of those four statements be remotely true?

· Every Iwi history of the inter-tribal wars makes the ‘Māori Garden of Eden’ a complete myth.

· If no one in Britain or the UK or the whole British Empire was in a partnership with the Crown on the 5th of February 1840, then how could it be constitutionally true that Māori were, two days later?

· The fact is Māori ceded sovereignty to the Crown when they signed the Treaty. The Chiefs back then said so, as did many leading Māori later, including Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Maui Pomare, and Sir Peter Buck. Only today’s elite power-hungry Māori and their cultural fellow travelers deny history and fact.

· All Māori Iwi pre-1840 and well after, were under the control of their ‘Tino Rangatiratanga’. That means their Chief’s word was gospel. If there was back then co-government, which Chief’s word, if different, was gospel?

The elite’s argument does not stand the slightest scrutiny. Under their description of ‘co-government’ pre 1840 Māori were constantly at war.

And every ordinary Māori knows it. And there’s the rub.

Ordinary Māori want safe affordable homes, ready access to health care, educational escalators for their young, and first world wages. That is what all ordinary New Zealanders want, and it’s those four policies that New Zealand First is committed to delivering on – no matter what race you are, what church you are, what gender you are.

That’s why this party is called itself New Zealand First.

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a critical time in our country’s history.

If we don’t get the political outcome right the economic and social outcome will keep being wrong.

Remember, under MMP you have two votes. One for a local electorate political Party candidate, the other for the political Party of your choice; the Party Vote.

New Zealand is at an inflection point and a change in government is critical. That is of course that the change must be for a much better government and not just ‘it’s our turn now’.

There won’t be a “New World in the Morning” on the 15th of October. There are no easy solutions, no shortcuts, but a number of years of hard work and dare it be said some sacrifices.

This is an election where voters want to know who can best help them through the tough times ahead.

And one thing that the last three years have proven is that certainty, common sense, and experience, is critical to good government. On their own the Labour Party has proven to be an utter mess. With Ministers going down like proverbial flies.

New Zealand First is a Party born of ordinary New Zealanders. We understand the economic challenges facing New Zealanders and we don’t have extremist policies on either side of the divide that have never worked in the history of any country.

Ladies and gentlemen, voters don’t believe we can spend our way out of our current crisis. We know we have to earn our way out of it.

In August 2020, I said this “the worst prospect for you is a Red/Green government, or Labour governing alone. The result in our view, given the impractically of so many ideas being floated now, will still be being paid for by your grandchildren.” Those words almost three years ago, just before the last election, have sadly proven to be right.

New Zealand First is the insurance voters need to avoid an ideological lurch in either direction.

We are a Party that has for the past 30 years, since our formation, put New Zealanders First. Certainty, Common Sense, and Experience is desperately needed in New Zealand now, and even more so after this coming election.

Politics is a strange business.

It has the capacity to do so much damage to people. Conversely, it has the capacity to do so much good for people.

It’s with that in mind that I ask you to get ready, to make a commitment today, right here right now, to be unwavering in our work to save our country.

If you do, the future is certain.

Democracy will prevail.

But it is ‘Now or Never’.

We oppose co-governance.

We oppose their three waters take over.

We oppose our country’s name being changed.

We oppose separatism in policy and in law.

We support policies based on need, not race.

We support the rule of law where everyone is equal before it.

We support the right of free speech - and that means we support the right of New Zealanders to say ‘I disagree’ and not be mandated out of existence, not being mandated in to being a second class citizen, and losing their jobs, careers, or their right to make a living.

We support the right of New Zealanders to disagree with government policy and not be punished for it.

And we are never going to work in Parliament with any political party whose policies threaten these fundamental rights.

We are asking for your Party Vote, and with it, together, we will all win.

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