NZ First: Winston Peters has a lot of thoughts about Labour - Thomas Coughlan

THREE KEY FACTS

Winston Peters has a lot of thoughts about the Labour Party.

He mentioned them 30 times in his state of the nation Speech on Sunday — more than he mentioned NZ First, the party he leads.

“I’m not here to talk about the other party,” Peters told journalists afterwards, saying he was only there to talk about NZ First.

The content of the speech would suggest otherwise.

The reason for singling Labour out would appear obvious. While NZ First is polling quite well (it spent most of the 2017-2020 term below the 5% threshold after forming a government with Labour), Peters will not be immune to more detailed polling of voter sentiment, which found that New Zealanders rate this Government’s performance more negatively than any Government going back to 2017 and more New Zealanders think the country is on the wrong track than the right one.

Voters feel grim. Polling suggests the economy is responsible.

Whose fault is the grim economy?

Labour’s, according to Peters.

The dire state of the economy, which slipped into recession last year, is the fault of former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and his Minister of Finance Grant Robertson who, in Peters’ telling, fibbed about the state of the economy before the country went to the polls in 2023.

Peters is fond of Muldoon-era inflections, and he used one, “a litany of lies” (nicked from Judge Peter Mahon who conducted the Royal Commission on the Erebus crash) to describe Hipkins’ and Robertson’s gloss on the economy in 2023.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that claim from Hipkins and Robertson made about the economy back then, was an outright litany of lies,” Peters said, referring to a press release gloating over better-than-expected figures in Treasury’s Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update.

Robertson and Hipkins’ claim might have retrospectively been proven to have been wrong (the economy was not as strong as the election-year forecasts believed it to be), but the suggestion of an “outright litany of lies” is ridiculous.

Hipkins’ and Robertson’s remarks, cited by Peters, referred to a set of pretty good forecasts, but those numbers were put together independently by Treasury (the Public Finance Act is clear — the forecasts themselves are Treasury’s business, the Finance Minister is responsible for tabling them in the House).

Treasury’s forecasts were good and, like any sensible political party during an election campaign, Labour crowed about them. Their remarks were a fair reflection of what Treasury’s numbers showed.

Peters is in the right ballpark — Treasury’s 2023 forecasts were unrealistically rosy, but that’s the fault of Treasury’s forecasting, not Labour’s press statement about them.

It is possible to spare a bit of pity for the coalition.

Peters is on stronger ground when he claimed that “six months after the last election, nearly every economic outcome was the responsibility of the previous Government. That’s a fact”.

It’s not quite a fact, but it’s probably fair to say that six months after the election, almost exactly the time the Government reported its first Budget, economic malaise was more the fault of the Labour Government than the coalition — and “nearly every” might be a stretch (Ukraine, Covid, the cyclone, the Reserve Bank ... there’s a veritable sushi train of blame, should you choose to look for it.)

Finance Minister Nicola Willis referred to it when publishing Treasury’s most recent numbers at the end of last year. Under Labour, most of the revisions to Treasury’s forecasts were to the upside — each forecast suggesting the economy was stronger than previously thought. The coalition has endured the opposite luck, with each forecast revision stripping out more and more money from the economy.

Some of this is the fault of whoever is in charge — most of it isn’t. It’s just the luck of one lot to be in Government during the feast times, and the other to be in Government during the famine.

And if Peters is really serious about dubious claims made on the election, he’s yet to furnish solid evidence of the $20b figure attached to a “hole” in the Government’s books. There was a “hole” by one definition, but the $20b figure has never been substantiated.

Peters didn’t stop there.

He said Labour attempted to hide the He Puapua report from him (Labour sources differ on the extent to which Peters was alerted to the report — he sat on the Cabinet Committee responsible for commissioning it).

“It was hidden from me - that’s how devious and duplicitous Labour was,” Peters said.

Asked if Labour lied about He Puapua, Peters said, “they lied to everybody.”

The big question then.

In elections past, we might have said NZ First was in the kingmaker position, with the power to pick his favourite Chris, and crown him Prime Minister.

But Peters upended that tradition prior to the 2023 election, ruling Labour out of contention well before polling day (Peters was proud of this and brought it up in his speech, citing “their disastrous running of the economy” and once again claiming Labour told “barefaced lies”).

Would he rule them out again this time?

“We’re not wasting our time with the present bunch of unreformed losers,” Peters said to that.

The Herald, pressed Peters, “so while Labour is…”

“… a bunch of unreformed losers, the answer is no,” Peters said, finishing the Herald’s question.

That seems pretty clear, for Peters. The speech seemed more about reminding voters, who are tempted to revert back to Labour, that the grass might not be any greener (or in the case of Labour’s likely coalition partners, rather too Green for many NZ First supporters’ liking).

Then again, it’s worth paying attention whenever Peters qualifies a statement.

It’s unlikely but not impossible that in 2026, Peters is able to explain why, by his definition, Labour has ceased to be “a bunch of unreformed losers”, and how that allows him to enter coalition talks with both sides of the House — with predictable benefits for NZ First, of course.