Winston Peters is confident New Zealand will once return to Parliament after October’s election, despite being dumped by voters three years ago.
“I’ve been preparing for this election all my life, and we’re gonna make a comeback,” Peters told teaonews.co.nz days after the party’s campaign launch in Auckland.
Political polls in 2023 have NZ First sitting near 3 per cent, not enough to return to Parliament but Peters is adamant that, after ‘packed halls’ across Aotearoa, voters are showing a mood for change.
“The Greens had their launch, they got 100 [people]. We have our launch, we got over 500 and immediate criticism, isn’t that unbelievable? Criticising that the audience wasn’t big enough. the ACT party in Tauranga, they got 200, and we had 735.
“These are comparisons you’re not hearing from the mainstream media. But we know how tough and biased this game is and how prejudiced, certain mainstream media are.”
New Zealand First is pledging to “Take back our country” from what Peters says are ‘elite Māori’ who are obsessed with their own projects.
“So much of our prior social and economic life has been surreptitiously and covertly under the table under the radar, without any electoral mandate, or any public statement being taken away from us.
“And you can see it and it’s done a lot of it in the name of Māori, so to speak, without any concern for the essentials that Māori need. And I have watched over the years, while this industry has built while ordinary Maori have fallen by the wayside, of neglect.”
He says his party will focus on four key areas that affect all New Zealanders, including Māori – housing, health, education and wages.
“Māori are screaming out for that in their mass numbers out there but their so-called self-appointed leadership is not. When have I heard all these Māori leaders, so-called, talking about that? No, no, they’re obsessed with these projects of their own.
“I want to take things to where they should be where the mass majority of forgotten Māori are no longer left out of Wellington’s deliberations.”
The right opportunities
The party celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and for much of that 30 years immigration has been a pillar of its policies. Peters says it is about ensuring New Zealand rangatahi get the right opportunities to benefit from their investment in Aotearoa.
“As the OECD has pointed out, we’re not getting the right people here. And more importantly, we’re not training our own people first. And when we do train them, they’re leaving in an exodus or avalanche to offshore countries where after 18 years of the taxpayers in New Zealand training them, some other country is going to get the benefit. That’s why we’re insisting on paying these people first-world wages.
“No one is prepared to have the guts to say what’s going on here. But we do. And we’re not anti-immigrant. We are for the right immigrant which we’ve needed for hundreds of years, but not where we are just going to have more mouths to try and bolster our economy by consumption, rather than wealth creation in exports.
“We’re going to bring people here who we need, not who need us. That is the reason we funded the biggest mussel farm in the world in Ōpōtiki.”
A total of $20m was invested into the Ōpōtiki region through the Provincial Growth Fund, championed by New Zealand First when it was in coalition with Labour between 2017 and 2020.
In December 2019, Whakatohea Mussels employed 13 people. In October 2022, that had risen to 191 staff. Peters is promising more of the same if returned to parliament and to the government benches.
“This is the kind of stuff going forward, we’ll do that over and over again. But all the rest spend all their time spending public money talking about what they’d like to do, which doesn’t touch the ordinary Māori out there, waiting desperately to be able to buy a house the way their parents once were able to.”
