This article was first published by RNZ.
New Zealand First’s annual convention continues on Sunday after a guest speaker railed against “race-based” policies, and members voted on a range of policy remits.
Winston Peters opened the event in his usual style on Saturday, criticising the media, political opponents and those with whom he disagreed.
The guest of honour was Northern Territories National Party Senator Jacinta Price, who highlighted the two trans-Tasman votes of 14 October 2023: New Zealand’s general election and Australia’s rejection of the Voice to Parliament proposal.
The Voice would have been a formal body for Australia’s Indigenous people to give advice on laws, but this was rejected by 60 percent of Australian voters. Price - who has Warlpiri heritage - was a key figure in the campaign against the proposal.
Price praised both results as the Anzac spirit leading the way for a conservative cause.
“New Zealanders voted for a coalition government that would take them on a road toward unity, and Australians voted against an entrenched voice and attitude of separatism,” she said.
“It assumed that all indigenous people were disadvantaged purely because of their heritage. How racist can you get?”
She said it meant indigenous people were treated differently and encouraged to depend on welfare rather than to become economically independent. She said it had affected her family.
“My family not only shared the success of the referendum night, but they also experienced the demands of a relentless campaign, the threats, risks and the toll it took, both emotionally and physically.”
Her speech pushed nationalist themes, naming Hamas, Hezbollah, China, Russia and Iran as “threats lurking on the horizon of the West” and suggesting recruitment to New Zealand and Australia’s armed forces was down because of “our children simply not believing in their country enough to want to defend it”.
She later told reporters that Australian states were looking into the possibility of treaties with indigenous groups, like New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, but she thought Australia had moved past that.
NZ First’s second-ranked MP Shane Jones soon gave his own speech. Laughter rang out in the hall as he referred to Jacinta Price, saying “I looked at the name and I said thank Lord, it’s spelt with a ‘t’ and not a bloody ‘d’”.
He said her comments reminded that western democracies faced “profound forces ... where facts are now overwhelmed by feelings and if you belong to the woke tribe, I’m not allowed to hurt your feelings”.
“If you don’t want to be known as a he or a she, then your feelings trump the foundation, influences and values that lie at the heart of a party like ours. I say to them, bugger you.”
Applause and cheers rang out, and he moved on to “climate alarmism”.
“The moment that you talk about a host of other problems, and somehow you’re not showing enough deference or religious obeyance to the climate god, then somehow you are to be cancelled. You’re to be written out of the script as a denialist.
“Unless your nation is generating an eco DOM economic dividend every single year, we won’t have the money to pay for climate change adaptation.”
He railed against “the Labour government and the Green klingons” for allowing the closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery in 2022, and the ban on oil and gas exploration.
“Before you argue about redistributing wealth or carving up the pie, focus on the generation of the wealth. Make the wealth before you bicker as to how you’re going to divide it or spend it,” he said.
He made frequent references during the day to his statement in December that “if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddie,” explaining on Saturday he did not mean “we were going to commit species extinction”, just that “we must have trade-offs, and we need to make those trade-offs on the basis of science, economic rationalism, and open debate”.
He then spent about five minutes on an attack against Te Pāti Māori’s co-leaders, saying they had “sold their own people out”.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer - her name raising groans from the audience - was “trotting over, off overseas and dissing the nation that we belong to”, while “one co-leader is told ‘are you The Lone Ranger or Tonto with that hat on’,” a clear reference to Rawiri Waititi.
He concluded by saying he and Peters had spent their three years outside Parliament between 2020 and 2023 doing “homework” to ensure New Zealand First could curb the “excesses of our fellow travellers” and never bow down “and be cancelled or censored for having feelings, attitudes, objectives, goals, opinions and aims that do not suit the elite media-orientated, woke, green-riddled munchkins”.
During the day, the party’s MPs also each gave short speeches, and members voted on 18 remits to take forward to the next election.
Remits passed on day one proposed that NZ First should:
- Investigate reform of the banking sector to increase competitiveness and to allow New Zealand owned banks to claw back ownership of banking deposits and assets.
- Investigate the development of a “New Zealand Future Fund” of up to $100b to invest solely in a multi-decade infrastructure build, to ensure our future infrastructure security and to enable future economic growth and social enablement.
- Advocate for a repeal of the Labour Government’s 2021 Health (Fluoridation of Drinking Water) Amendment Act 2021 (2021 44) so that decision making for fluoridation is returned to local councils in order to conduct fair local referendum.
- Investigate repealing of the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Act 2023.
- Investigate adopting a policy to deport those on migrant visas when they commit crimes including migrant exploitation.
- Investigate automatic name suppression for police officers pending a full inquiry into a fatal incident.
- Investigate the establishment of an Independent Judicial Rulings Authority.
- Consider a policy that DOC’s concessions should not be subject to an iwi veto.
- Investigate legislation for greater ratepayer control over local authorities by ensuring local binding polls are held to gain approval for any major non-essential capital expenditure greater than $10 million.
- Consider a policy that the important national railway system is always connected with at least two rail-enabled interisland ferries between North and South Islands.
- Investigate the establishment of Special Economic Zones in New Zealand.
- Review reinstating the lower daily fixed charge for electricity users.
- Introduce a sustainable immigration policy focusing on immigration levels of required new skilled and productive migrants per year as reflected in the OECD reports over recent years.
A further 24 remits are set down for debate on Sunday, with Winston Peters’ speech closing out the day.
- RNZ