Rt. Hon Winston Peters

Leader NZ First

Public Meeting

PIA Events Centre

55 Ward Street, Pukekohe

1pm August 20, 2023

Good afternoon. Thank you for the chance to speak with you today.

And many thanks to our local New Zealand First team who have put this meeting together.

We are 43 days from early voting beginning on 2nd October. And overseas voting will have begun many days before that. It has been wisely said that elections are about the economy. However, in this election there is something new and of grave concern. That is, an all-out attack on this country’s constitution and democracy. And it’s all happening under the radar without any consultation or permission from you.

This election campaign needs to expose what has been happening in all sectors of government, in a secret endeavour to reshape our form of government, our rights and freedoms, our history, and our values to align with the views of ideological extremists.

The Economy

Labour started in earnest 34 months ago to squander our country’s wealth and have taken us very deep into debt.

When New Zealand First left the government in 2020 so did spending restraint. In Budget 2023, now free of COVID 19, but not the excuses, what did we all see?

Crown revenue had grown 20% in under 3 years to over $123 billion, while spending in this non Covid affected year has exploded by 36% to now stand at over $155 billion.

When New Zealand First was the adult at the Cabinet table, Budget 2020 had forecast that in 2023, spending would be back under control. If we had been there to hold the Minister of Finance’s feet to the fire, spending would be over $24 billion less than what he is spending now.

This is not an economics lesson but how can politicians be making so many promises of spending when they can’t answer the most simple question, ‘so where is the money coming from?’.

What have we got from this Labour’s waste on so many pet projects?

Light rail plans in Auckland, now over $30 billion, ballooning out over 500% and nothing started yet. And now three tunnels, two under the Waitemata Harbour, and one on the North Shore all to be linked up to Labour’s fantasy light rail.

But as you know it is not only Labour making these promises, with other parties announcing eye watering plans with no idea how to pay for it. One announced a four-lane highway from Warkworth to Whangarei. On the cost blow-out for Puhoi to Warkworth, and delays, it’s going to take a staggering 89 more years to get to Whangarei.

Remember Transmission Gully in Wellington was behind schedule when it went broke. In government we bailed it out. But it seems they’ve learnt nothing and are back making more promises.

Tax revenue is down, spending is way up, and on 12 September the PREFU is out with a four-year forecast fiscal hole of $20 billion. So how can politicians promise so much but not how they are going to pay for it?

That said, this is not the time for ‘slash and burn’ by economic extremists who don’t seem to understand that deficits accompanied by wealth creation and rapid export expansion is one thing, and deficits focused on consumption is a dangerous prescription.

Parliament has political parties with crackpot ideas discredited decades ago. The Greens focus on environmental policies, has been replaced by cultural and social Marxists.

The Greens started 51 years ago, under Values Party, claiming the world’s population the world’s population would outstrip food supply.

The 1970’s Club of Rome, now long dead and replaced with the World Economic Forum, like the Greens now, argue for ‘degrowth’.

The WEF has been asking ‘what would a post - economic – growth world look like?’. It would be a disaster of chaos and lawlessness, and personal economic ruin.

The Greens moved from the environment to Marxism, yet sees them with so much media coverage with woeful ideas, claiming they care more for the environment than we do. And some of their MP’s only arrived in our country yesterday. Preaching to people whose DNA in this country goes back hundreds of years.

Without growth there is no innovation or investment, no scientific or medical advances, and no chance to take people out of poverty. And their language is ‘six-vowel word salads’ used to justify their agendas - like ‘sustainability’, or ‘net zero’. Their solution stopping population growth.

And like the Maori Party they argue for ‘critical race theory and inclusion’, and are ‘social-justice warriors’, talking about ‘intersectionality’ whatever that means. And worst, they are utterly against merit, because merit is the incentive for progress, advancement, and growth. Thus, it is they frighten innocent youth that there is no future for them unless their whacko policies prevail.

What we saw in the 2021 unjustified lockdowns, is a snapshot of how our economy would be if the Greens and the Maori Party ever got control – paying people not to work, and subsidising businesses not to operate.

Our country desperately needs policies that are pro-growth, pro-innovation, pro-IT, pro-wealth creation, pro-added value, and pro-exports. And when we get them, New Zealand’s recovery will begin.

Dealing with climate change and our obligations internationally, will come from innovation and new science applied across many fields, including dramatic progress in farm animal methane reduction, by breeding and diet change. Already great advances confront extremists who want to shut down our food production, and signal a disaster for our economy.

Cost of Living

Many of you have friends overseas. It is alarming how many of these people tell us just how high our cost of living has become in comparison to where they live. And the government has literally done nothing about it. They appointed a ‘Groceries Commissioner’ twelve months after they promised to have one in place. This Commissioner, without powers, will have no effect.

New Zealand First’s policies will bring real competition back to this country. Not pointless inquires, where the terms of reference, whether supermarkets or banking, mean that the ‘watchdog’ is toothless.

Health

Health expenditure should is an investment. Health policy driven by practical solutions will return us a world leading health service. However, health has been the victim of ideology beginning with National’s experiment in 1991 which failed, and then Labour’s democratising health services with 21 different health boards - some members elected, and others appointed by government.

21 Health Boards, for a population the size of Sydney was another experimental disaster which still hasn’t been fixed.

Today the failure of experimentation sees a crisis of health waiting lists, emergency department waiting times, and with ambulance services hours outside emergency departments instead of offloading patients quickly and getting back out on the street to do their job.

And we have a serious shortage of specialists and nurses everywhere.

· This means recruiting specialists and nurses is the priority. That is New Zealand First policy.

· And New Zealand First will invest in New Generation Rapid Diagnostics. This groundbreaking medical technology has just become available overseas but not here. Instead of waiting 3-5 days for diagnostic laboratory results the patient will have to only wait up to 35 minutes. We can cut our annual diagnostic budget by half whilst seriously improving our health monitoring systems.

· And we are going to get rid of PHARMAC with its inferior performance and woeful modern pharmaceutical purchases. Its current budget is $1.2 billion, or less than a third of what Australia spends. So we are going to get a new service for pharmaceuticals, and provide an extra $1.3 billion to its budget, and start getting us back to first world health standards. That is New Zealand First policy.

Five weeks ago, the latest report on Te Whatu Ora, was withheld because the report exposed massive failures. Why does our health service have a name that the great majority of New Zealanders don’t understand. Or expose them to ridicule. Te Whatu Ora means “Satisfied Eye”.

You see what’s happening here? The health delivery to New Zealanders, Maori or Non-Maori, doesn’t matter to these social engineers, the name of the service does. And also, under this new name, essential services in health are being prioritised on the basis of race.

And they have another tier, equal in importance, called “Te Aka Whai Ora”. Aka means ‘creeping vine’. Whai means ‘string game’ or ‘chase up’. And Ora means ‘satisfied.

Ladies and gentlemen we are not satisfied, and since when did Māori health turn into a string game? Only when Labour turned the Treaty into a creeping ideological vine smothering the tree of democracy. This is another form of co-government based on race.

No ordinary Māori asked for this, so why would a bunch of elitist social engineers in Wellington do this? We’re going to restore the English name to our health service, and set out to regain first world health to all New Zealanders based on need not race – and both Non-Māori and Māori will be much better off for it. That is New Zealand First policy.

Education

In 1989 the then Minister of Education Prime Minister David Lange, introduced a policy called ‘Tomorrows Schools’. Our slide from being one of the best education countries in the world to now one of the worst performing education systems in the English-speaking systems in the world, dates from that time.

Our education system is in serious trouble with 60,000 truant pupils in any given day. New Zealand First’s policies intend to correct that. Not by dreaming up something new, but by implementing those same policies that took us to the top of the education world. And it begins by remembering that education in this country has been compulsory since 1877.

Taxpayers are paying for education whilst businesses, society, and workers, are suffering from truancy, and low performance standards.

To fix our economy, we have to first fix our education system, and workers incomes, and business profits. They go hand in hand.

What is most alarming, is the science curriculum will no longer include physics, chemistry, or biology, but will include sexual and gender education which is in some primary school curriculums.

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’?

Not only are they being taught about sexuality and gender, the entire system must now “integrate gender content into the curriculum”. Our schools have no right, role, or place teaching our young kids this kind of sociologically driven doctrine.

This is not education. This is indoctrination.

New Zealand First is going to go back to education and stop this woke elitist indoctrination being sponsored by an inner cabal and their political and cultural fellow travelers.

Law and Order

The first duty of any government or politician is the safety and security of their country and their people. New Zealanders want to feel safe in their homes, on their streets, and in their community and any offender that threatens that must be held to account.

Labour inherited National’s ‘catch and warn’ policy and replaced it with their ‘catch and release’. Instead of enforcing the law they have allowed it to be diluted.

Daily there are alarming reports of violent thugs committing crimes, ram raids, assaults, and thefts. There have been over 400 ramraids in our country over just the past six months. That is more than two every day.

Labour’s law-and-order strategy is to empty the prisons, put offenders first, and put the community and victims last.

The social costs have been devastating to small businesses, communities, and law-abiding kiwis who no longer feel safe.

Ladies and gentlemen be careful in this election. You have heard the other parties. Given their past record on policing and ‘catch and warn’ and ‘catch and release’ and their lack of investment in police resources, do you actually think they will do anything? They shut rural police stations everywhere, allowed frontline police numbers to decline, and froze the police budget.

Only one party has a record of investing in our police – and you’re looking at it. Ask any police officer who got them the numbers – not once, but twice.

Law and order is not a slogan - but critical for our society and we want law and order back.

But, we cant just leave it to the police. The fact is in our country lawlessness derives from so many, including our courts, asserting “rights” instead of insisting on personal obligations, responsibilities, and duties. They go hand in hand. Yes people have individual rights, but they also have individual responsibilities. And until our politicians understand that, the rest is cheap political talk.

New Zealand First believes that we have to restore a disciplined society. Our courts need to deliver sentences that put victims and community safety first, not last.

That is New Zealand First policy, past, present, and future.

English as an Official Language

The English language had it’s origins many centuries ago in Germany, then grew in England, and came here with European settlement. It is not a simple language to learn but we have been lucky as a nation to have it. It is to our advantage that the language of commerce worldwide is English.

Notice, ‘Air New Zealand’ is not called ‘Air Aotearoa’ for a reason. They waste passengers time being woke and talking about having a waka in the sky. But they know, from a commercial and brand name perspective, that billions of dollars over the years promoting Air New Zealand would be lost with a name change. So why all this ideological mumbo jumbo pushing to change the name of our country to Aotearoa? It doesn’t make sense to change – and even Air New Zealand knows it.

But Labour’s recent attack is on all government and quasi-government departments, to impose Maori in all of their correspondence, all their documents, all their practices. Even holding back promotions or pay rises if employees don’t take compulsory Māori language courses.

At no time did they tell you they were doing this. These are the new fascists who are now demanding that all real estate agents have to do a Maori induction course or their licence won’t be renewed.

Amazingly, few people know that English is not even an official language of New Zealand. There are currently only two official languages. Māori, and Sign Language.

Being that we are an English-speaking country, it is bizarre that we have to do this, but this is how far this extremism has taken our country.

· New Zealand First is announcing our policy today, to introduce in parliament’s first sitting week, legislation to make English an official language of New Zealand.

Its just commonsense.

Our Democracy Under Attack

Without any consultation with you, political parties have changed the democratic landscape to introduce policies that are undemocratic and elitist.

They have many reasons trying to justify these changes; from “John Key’s aspirational” signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), to Labour/Green/Māori Party’s colonialism, ‘white-cis-men’ privilege, and a total rewrite of history where their fiction is painted as fact.

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.

The great majority of Māori are on the general roll voting with all others.

That’s why our party is called New Zealand First.

You have 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 Iwi Māori, but requiring a 75% decision proviso - which means Iwi Māori can veto any and every proposal.

Chris Hipkins said it is ‘not co-governance and never has been’. Minister Kieran McAnulty says it is. Defends it. And said, ‘Māori have a special interest in water’.

Like you don’t? How can any of this be fair?

And now their version of Treaty revisionism is forcing all departments, and every quasi-governmental group, into compliance.

· They are changing local government with Māori Wards.

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

· Replacing English names whether appropriate or not.

· Changing our country’s name – to a name that comes out of French Polynesia.

· Re-naming all government departments.

· Giving the Waitangi Tribunal superior legal status to parliament.

· Making teaching of Māori compulsory to Year Ten or Form Two.

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

· Moving to Māori control of the DOC estate.

· And much, much, more secretly worked on.

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

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. They ignore these facts:

· 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. Under their description of ‘co-government’ pre 1840 Māori were constantly at war.

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

The National/Act/Māori Party signing up to UNDRIP, and the Labour/Green Parties joining them, in imposing United Nations obligations on New Zealand’s sovereignty, has got to be challenged.

When UNDRIP came to me as Foreign Minister in 2007, I rejected as did the Helen Clark Labour government.

Then the National/Act/Māori Party signed up to UNDRIP in 2010 – that obligated a response from government in 2019 - the starting point and origin of the He Puapua report – which was deceitfully hidden from New Zealand First by Labour, and released publicly a month after the 2020 election.

And those that claim otherwise have been found out by Willie Jackson’s admission that it was deliberately kept from me – the then Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

If New Zealand First had seen that final report then we would have rejected UNDRIP, as we did in 2007.

UNDRIP and He Puapua are race-based preference, imposed on us not by the UN, but by New Zealand politicians from every other party continuing to agree to it. It threatens our constitution and democracy, we must deal to this racism:

· Which is why we are announcing today, that our policy is for New Zealand to formally withdraw from UNDRIP, and its imposed race-based obligations, and restore our country’s constitutional sovereignty and democracy.

· Pulling out of UNDRIP will consign He Puapua to the rubbish bin of racism.

Conclusion

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

If we don’t get this election result right it will be more disaster economically and socially.

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.

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 been a Minister inside of Cabinet. They will need our certainty, our common sense, and our experience.

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.

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

We are a Party that has since our formation 30 years ago, puts 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 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.

We oppose co-government.

We oppose asset ownership like water being race-based.

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 will strive for a parliament to protect our fundamental rights, not threaten them.

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

So, Let’s Take back Our Country.

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