New Zealand First Convention
Rt. Hon Winston
Peters
2pm Sunday 23rd 2023
Mt Smart
Stadium
Eastern Lounge

Ladies and
Gentlemen. Thank you for being here, at New Zealand
First’s campaign launch.

81 days before Election
Day, 69 days before Early Voting begins and 64 days before
Overseas Voting starts, we meet here on a mission to save
our country.

No doubt you’re thinking to yourself
‘what’s in it for me?’. Given the other party slogans
already out there, and one in particular, that is a very
good question.

This election must be about the
economy. Because every issue inevitably comes back to what
we must do and how we pay for it. And there’s the rub,
because so many of the political promises of other parties
being made have no chance of ever being kept.

Why?
Well, if those parties have never delivered what they
campaigned on in better times, they certainly won’t
deliver on them in troubled times.

Remember Henry
Ford’s words – ‘You can’t build a reputation on what
you’re going to do’. Henry Ford built cars that ordinary
people could afford. Right? All manner of politicians today
are promising you a faster horse.

The critical issues
for this election are our economy and cost of living crisis,
our broken health system, our lack of law and order, our
failing education system, and the cost of housing and
rentals.

But if these five areas of crisis are not
enough already, our very democracy is at risk from a rising
tide of racism and separatism, that has given birth to
secret social engineering that you were never warned about
and most certainly never agreed to.

What’s the
evidence for this? It’s the Prime Minister’s bonfire
after he got the job - but the bonfire was for the paper
back copies of Labour’s books, whilst they are saving the
hard bound copies for after the election.

Vehicle
Change

It is clear that a great majority of New
Zealanders, including many Labour voters, don’t want more
of the same. They are hard up against it, with rising costs
everywhere, and no money left over after buying the
essentials.

This majority rightfully expect to have a
voice, yet Wellington is clearly not listening. New
Zealanders are sick of all the changing definitions of
economic and personal income security, and a vacuous goal of
‘wellbeing’, whatever that means. They know that they
are forgotten New Zealanders slogging it out in difficult
jobs and they ask – “where is the promise, where is the
hope, where is the commitment that if we work, save, and be
good citizens then tomorrow will be better for
us”.

And remember many of New Zealand’s present
day well off started as workers. Very few of them inherited
their wealth, and malignant envy is no way to level up
society. There must be rewards for sweat, tears, sacrifice,
and savings. Many of us, and them, do remember from personal
experience what poverty smells, tastes, and feels
like.

Our country’s economic and social malaise did
not happen overnight, but it’s got dramatically worse in
just 33 months.

Too many of our young have no memory
of when our country was a world leader, in health and
education, and house ownership, and personal income the envy
of nearly every other country. Let’s be honest, we have
not delivered for them what our parents delivered for
us.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t change
direction we are certain to end up where we are going -
down. So, be careful about the promises politicians make in
this campaign, and ask this question – if their policies
work, then why didn’t they work the last time they had
power? Remember, ‘if you’re in the desert a mirage can
be fatal’.

The next government must have real
answers for problems economic and social, and not some
ideological experiment where you and our country are the
guinea pigs. Please ask, when and where did their policies
ever work?

New Zealand has not paid its way since
1972. We must have policies in 2023 to grow, earn, and pay
our way in to the future. Not overnight because that is
impossible but improving year on year as other first world
nations, once way behind us, now way ahead of us, have
done.

New Zealand’s Gifted Inheritance

We
have the resources, and we work the second longest hours in
the OECD, so it can’t be the worker’s fault. The fault
line of failure leads to Wellington, and we are going to
have to fix that right here, right now.

How few
commentators said a year ago that New Zealand is heading for
a recession? Less than the fingers on one hand. Not strange
really because most of these touted experts work for banks,
foreign owned banks - and fake confidence is the reason for
their existence.

Today many commentators say we are
‘broke’. But what they never say is we’re broke of
ideas and polices to fix this country’s economy, and
dramatically improve our national income and social
performance. And what some of these experts don’t like, is
being reminded that when we were number one in the world
most of the politicians then had never been to university.
They gaslight such success as “nostalgia”.

Longing
for a past that they say is no longer possible. Well, we say
it is possible again - but not with your
policies.

That’s why when we look abroad, we see
countries that have modernised following the script that
once made us a world leader. Once poor countries like
Singapore, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland and an Island
called Taiwan, transformed their economies to become wealth
creators, maximising added value before exporting,
maximising IT to assist wealth creation, providing great
health systems and educating their people to the max, and
knowing they could only get there with high wage economies -
as we once did.

And they all have three more
features:

• They have taxation policies that assist
  businesses and workers, not unfairly hinder
  them,
• They have disciplined populations, many with a
  police ratio to population less than ours, but far less
  crime, and
• They regard their people as human capital
  where expenditure is necessary investment, not wasteful
  cost.

And so did we once, when Parliament was
full of practical people, not university union politicians
who wouldn’t know a real worker if they fell over one, and
don’t know how to fill out a simple ‘profit and loss’
account, or ‘pecuniary interest form’.

If you want
to know who are the most forgotten people in New Zealand
today, it is the kiwi worker – and New Zealand First has
always cared for them.

New Zealand’s Broken Health
System

When we formed New Zealand First 30 years ago,
one of our founding principles was ‘that expenditure on
health, was an investment’ - our country’s human capital
needed to be healthy, and if sick, medically treated as fast
as possible.

In the next three years we are going to
set up a single health system – where need, not race, is
the priority.

To do that, we’re going to
reprioritise government expenditure, provide funding
increases for primary health care, and reassign wasted
resources to urgently deal with hospitals and waiting
lists.

We are going to stop $29 billion plus on
Auckland Light Rail which will not work, and spend it on
items like Emergency Departments and residential care for
the aged. And we are also going to use savings from wasteful
pet projects to get the specialist medical staff, so that
our medico-patient ratios are again first world, not third
world.

And we know that we will only get essential
frontline staff if we pay them properly – and pay them
properly we will.

And as a remit at our conference
yesterday said, Pharmac was set up so politicians could
dodge being held accountable. New Zealand First believes
that New Zealand has long had inferior first world
pharmaceutical delivery. All first world international
comparisons prove that, we are at the bottom of the OCED for
access to medicines, and the eight plus years delay to get
approvals is simply a national disgrace.

All the other
political parties believe in the Pharmac model, we don’t,
because we don’t believe in fobbing off political
responsibility.

So we are going to take money from
wasteful expenditure, to provide innovative lifesaving
medicines quickly, and provide timely access to patients to
developed high cost treatments.

We are going to
provide the new model an extra $1.3 billion on top of the
present $1.2 billion “existing underbudget”.

New
Zealand First is the “Health Party”.

New
Zealand’s Failing Education System

There is much
going wrong with our education system.

Education
Minister Tinetti was recently crowing about student
attendance rising to 60%. It didn’t occur to her, for that
to happen the best schools must be at least 90% and the
worse schools for attendance at 30%. That’s 60,000 plus
truant pupils in any given day, a tsunami of educational
failure at a personal and national level and billions of
wasted taxpayers’ dollars.

New Zealand First’s
policy is to fix that, as common-sense politicians once did,
as long ago as 1877 when they made education
compulsory.

We will not get back to having a leading
economy without first fixing our education system.

We
were at the very top of the education world once. And we
didn’t get there with some of the stupid education
policies we have today.

But once we have properly
trained our young, we must pay our workforce competitive
incomes to keep them here.

New Zealand taxpayers are
paying a fortune to train too many young people who then go
overseas and benefit, for free, some foreign
economy.

New Zealand First has nothing against an
“OE” (Overseas Experience).

But New Zealand First
is most certainly against “OF” – that is, a skilled
workforce “Overseas Forever”.

New Zealand First is
the “Education Party”.

Taxation – Towards An
Export Power House

It is said that there are only two
things certain in life - “death and taxes”.

If we
look at our once great past, and today’s ‘small country
economic world leaders’, they have one thing in common -
they are export power houses - like New Zealand once was.
Iceland, Norway, Finland, Singapore, and Ireland are small
countries maximising added value before exporting,
maximising IT, maximising education, and ensuring that they
pay their workforce high wages.

And we must again
follow that prescription with taxation policies that assist
that outcome.

That’s why we are going to bring in
tax incentives, to promote added value before exports, IT,
and productivity.

That’s why we are going to ensure
that the tax income brackets are adjusted to inflation. That
is New Zealand First’s policy.

We know we can both
lower taxation on business and give higher wages for
workers, with our polices to rapidly double our Gross
National Product.

And for those that say it can’t be
done, we point to countries like Singapore to refute their
myopic ideological mindset. We will announce details over
the next two months.

In this cost of living crisis, we
are going to Exempt Basic Foods, like fresh food,
vegetables, meat, dairy, and fish, from GST.

We
challenge the tax purists, to explain why other First World
countries can do this, and we can’t.

New Zealand
First is the “Sound Economics Party”.

Law and
Order

Three days ago in Auckland, sadly, two innocent
victims lost their lives, police officers were injured, and
ten others were hospitalised. The offender was shot by the
police - a tragedy for his family.

What’s going
wrong with law and order in this country is best described
by the Police Commissioner’s comment who said that the
offender - ‘had not breached his Home Detention
conditions’.

Ladies and gentlemen, he got hold of a
shotgun and right there was a massive breach. And if we
can’t understand as a country what constitutes illegal
behaviour, then we are destined to see it repeated over and
over again.

But even worse, how did someone sentenced
for choking someone almost to death receive just five months
home detention?

How was he able to get home detention
and access to a firearm if he was assessed as being “a
threat to others”?

Our courts are failing us with
these soft sentences that put community safety last, and
offender’s rights and excuses first.

These judicial
failures need an inquiry - just like all those police
officers who now have to be stood down and questioned just
because they did their job and shot someone who was shooting
at innocent people and them.

We want justice and
common sense returned to our country.

New Zealand
First’s says anyone who is a threat to the safety of our
community shouldn’t be on our streets.

Ladies and
gentlemen, the other parties are shouting ‘law and
order’, much like a drunk person leaning against an
evening lamppost at night – for support not illumination.
All the other parties on the right, had a policy of ‘catch
and warn’, and on the left, have a policy of ‘catch and
release’.

They have a record of having frozen police
budgets, closed over thirty police stations, and cutting
frontline police numbers.

How is that being ‘tough
on crime’?

Only one Party has a record of investing
in our police – New Zealand First. We got a massive
increase in frontline police numbers, not once but twice,
when we were in government. And on law and order we are the
only party whose promises you can trust – not on what we
say but on what we have done.

New Zealand First
will:

1. Designate gangs as terrorist organisations
   – like Western Australia and Queensland;
   and
2. Establish a dedicated gang prison to minimise
   prison recruitment of non gang members.

Most
importantly, to address the causes of crime we have policies
to address real needs – such as enforcing compulsory
education, making housing including public housing
affordable for ordinary families, make health care available
for people who need it, and getting people, who have spent
years on the dole, back to work.

And something else.
Crime, whether its “gang collar, blue collar or white
collar”, we will treat the same. New Zealand First is the
only party that has had the courage over the decades to
expose white collar crime when the rest would
not.

Remember the vitriol that has come our way from
the establishment when we said white collar crime is going
on and we are going to prove to you what is happening –
and prove that to you we did.

New Zealand First is the
“Law and Order Party”.

The Attack On Our
Democracy - Separatism

The first New Zealand election
was in 1854, Māori voting was added in 1867, and women got
the vote in 1893.

As Abraham Lincoln said,
“Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for
the people”. That means one person, one vote, and every
vote of equal value.

Secretly, before 2020 and after,
the Labour, Greens, and Māori Party have launched a
full-scale attack on the essence of
democracy.

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.

Yesterday, in her insightful speech Casey
Costello set out the numerous racist attacks on our
democracy.

And the revisionists agenda is to force all
government and quasi-government agencies into
compliance.

Ordinary Māori never asked for any of
this. Only the elite Māori have.

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 want to take 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. Look at the local Māori history
  here.
• If no one in Britain or the UK or the whole
  British Empire was in 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. Yet 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. And every ordinary Māori knows
it.

New Zealand First is the “One Standard of
Citizenship Party”.

Social
Engineering

Behind closed doors a small unelected
cabal of opinionated virtue signallers want to “integrate
gender content into the curriculum”. They want to stop the
science curriculum being about physics, chemistry, and
biology, but include sexual and gender education. They have
no authority to be doing this. They never ever asked
you.

This election is about stopping them.

The
government has no place in the nation’s bedrooms - so why
are our school children, from age five, now being taught
about ‘relationships, gender, and sexuality’?

New
Zealand First is going to restore education and stop
indoctrination.

New Zealand First is the “Common
Sense Party”.

Caring For Seniors

In our
country are about 890,000 people who are seniors, who
receive Super and enjoy the tens of thousands of shopping
benefits, plus free travel, that comes from the Gold
Card.

When over the years every political party has
attacked seniors and changed the law to harm their incomes,
one party alone has defended seniors.

In past times of
economic difficulty, the seniors have been the first one the
other parties have attacked.

New Zealand First will
makes sure, as in the past, they don’t succeed.

New
Zealand First is the “Standing Up For Seniors
Party”.

Conclusion

In the last two days the
media have gone back to their 30-year-old question –
“who are you going to go with?” How many times must we
tell them that our record means we will never go with
parties that have racist policies. The last Party other
political parties want to talk to before Election Day is New
Zealand First, and the first Party they want to talk to -
the day after.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most
critical election in our lifetime.

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 First is asking for your Party
Vote - to keep them honest.

New Zealand is at an
inflection point and a change in government is critical. But
it must be for a much better government and not just
‘it’s our turn now’. You’re entitled to ask them
“your turn to do exactly what?”

And one thing that
the last three years has proven is that certainty, common
sense, and experience, is critical to good government. On
their own the Labour Party has proven an utter
mess.

And looking across the political divide ask
yourself this question, “Is this their first rodeo?”
Because for many it is. They have never had a Minister
inside of Cabinet. They will need our certainty, our common
sense, and our experience.

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

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

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

It’s with
that in mind that we ask you to get ready, to make a
commitment, right here right now, to save our
country.

If you do, the future is
certain.

Democracy will prevail.

But it is
‘Now or Never’.

We oppose racist
co-government.

We oppose their Three Waters take
over.

We oppose our country’s name being
changed.

We oppose separatism in policy and in
law.

We oppose this insidious woke agenda being driven
by an elite cabal of social and ideological
engineers.

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.

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 those
fundamental rights.

We have watched over the last
three years Labour and its cohorts taking our country away
from us.

That’s why we are asking you to Party Vote
New Zealand First.

We’ve got the polices, the grit,
the experience, and the courage to stop them and rebuild New
Zealand.

We are asking you to join us,
and,

“Let’s Take Back Our
Country”.

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