Public Meeting
Distinction Hotel
Hamilton

Mr. President, Members of the New Zealand First Party Board, Ministers and Members of Parliament, delegates of New Zealand First nationwide, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for being here this afternoon.

Over this weekend New Zealand First has held its 31st Convention and has been a time to reflect on our past, our present, and our future.

Today’s public meeting is the culmination of this weekend’s event.

We begin today with a genuine sentiment of gratitude to those members who began a political party 31 years ago, under a First Past the Post electoral system and were successful in entering Parliament as a new party called ‘New Zealand First’.

Over the decades so many of those members remain steadfast to see New Zealand First grow against enormous odds, and with a speed unparalleled in this country to become the most powerful and influential new political party in modern New Zealand history.

We salute you here today as the next generation, together with a former one, taking this party forward to new levels of success.

This has required on your part enormous sacrifice of time, commitment, true grit and courage, often weathering a storm of abuse and utterly unmeritorious attack after attack from those who saw the advent of New Zealand First as the greatest challenge to their combination of blind ideology and social elitism. We, from the very beginning, were for one country, one people, one law, one flag, regardless of gender, race, or religion. We were on a mission to bring equality to all those living legally in our country, regardless of when they arrived here.

And today we meet as a political movement in revival with boundless prospects ahead of us, strong, visionary whilst being driven by this most elusive quality in politics – ‘Plain Common Sense’.

Down through the decades from the last century to this, one enduring quality above all has kept us central to New Zealand politics.

Time after time you have been prepared to go the extra hour and the extra kilometre to make up for a lack of financial resources by individual effort, and work.

When we first formed as a party in 1993 the two old parties conspired to ban us from public advertising for our campaign. In short, it was so bad, that the penalty for us doing so, or just doing what the other parties were doing, was a fine of $100,000 on each and every occasion. That deceitful bias has been a uniquely unwelcome opponent to NZ First’s political fortunes from the beginning until the present. But it never deterred you, it never depressed you and never stopped your work.

There have been thousands and thousands of examples of your sacrifices that come to mind.

One is of an elderly couple in 1993 delivering our campaign leaflets, on foot, door to door, in the city of Christchurch, the wife going down one side of the street and her husband delivering pamphlets on the other side.

The husband’s feet were gathering blisters so he took his shoes off, and kept delivering our campaign material. Her name was Molly Hinton. His name was Jack; Jack Hinton, the Victoria Cross recipient.

Its countless stories like that, that have been an inspiration to our members, to press on no matter what adversity, so that we stand here today stronger than we have ever been.

We’ve been knocked down. But we’ve got up again. Over, and over, and over again.

There have been so many battles but none so despicably mounted as that in April 2020 when the Serious Fraud Office launched an inquiry in to New Zealand First, saying it would be over before the election. We stopped them at the edge of a court action on 29 September 2020, but abusing tax payers money they yet mounted a case at the High Court where they, and their supporters, were roundly defeated for a second time. Where they appealed to the Court of Appeal they were smashed for a third time.

Some may say that’s old history, but it’s not. Its relevant.

It cost you New Zealand taxpayers $4.2 million for their action. It cost us, personally, and you, hundreds of thousands of dollars in our rightful defense.

We’ve never been given a cent back, have never received an apology from anyone, and our press release announcing our victory for a third time saw not one media outlet print a word of our press statement.

Since when has the verdict of history been that of the loser.

Together with you we did the impossible in 2023 and we came back.

Since our beginning we have compiled an unequaled record of political success.

Here are just some of them.

• We were the only party whose founders staunchly and successfully campaigned for MMP.
• And we were the only party that successfully campaigned for a threshold of 5% and have never changed that threshold when so many other parties wanted to.
• Over the years our frugality with tax payers money spent on political parties has been unequalled. We are as careful spending taxpayers’ money as we are on spending our own.
• We are the only party that addressed the disparity of payment between primary and secondary school teachers. We brought in pay parity for teachers based on qualifications.
• We’re the party that brought in free medicine for children under secondary school age
• We’re the party that brought in free doctors’ visits for elderly people
• That brought in hearing aid subsidy for people needing hearing aids.
• That first advocated and successfully for energy rebates for Gold Card holders.
• New Zealand First is the party of the Gold Card with tens of thousands of benefits which means elderly retirement money is going further.
• It is your party that legislated for superannuation to go no lower than 66% of the average weekly wage.
• We are the party of the Provincial Growth Fund with hundreds of provincial growth projects, without failure, except where there were red tape planning delays. It is the Regional Infrastructure Fund now, and all over New Zealand regional leaders are saluting it.
• And for the third time we have addressed the issue of police numbers, when others talked a big game, but never delivered.
• It is New Zealand First that has fought for and increased the minimum wage.
• It is New Zealand First that has successfully stopped critical New Zealand asset sales to foreign ownership.
• It is our party that has introduced a dramatic improvement to pharmaceutical funding.
• As you have just heard from Denis Maga from First Union, it is New Zealand First that has fought to address the critical funding to St John.
• It is New Zealand First that has ensured a full, independent, second phase of the Covid 19 inquiry.
• We are the party that has stood up for fairness and safety of women in sports.
• It is New Zealand First who has helped ensure the repealing of the Therapeutic Products Act.
• It is out party that is addressing the issue of migrant exploitation.
• We have always had an immigration policy that is based on bringing in people that we need, and not just the wholesale immigration of people who need us.
• On this issue of immigration it is our policy that parallels other, wise nations, that seeks to bring in those with essential skills, and train our own New Zealanders in those skills.
• In the Māori world, in terms of practical common-sense assistance, we have done more than all the other modern parties put together.
  • One could go on for hours, but ask yourself, who gave back Mt Hikurangi, who settled the West Coast leases, or the Central North Island 14 Iwi settlement, who put the Māori Women’s Welfare League on an independent footing, and who found desperately needed money for the Māori Wardens.
  • And it is New Zealand First that inspired the proper settlement of the Foreshore and Seabed issue in the Act we had passed, while in opposition, in 2004.
  • And it was New Zealand First that first funded Kapa Haka, and that cultural inspiration, in the same way that the National Orchestra was being funded.
  • All over this country there are hundreds and hundreds of examples of New Zealand First’s policies of assistance to Māori, not based on wasteful consumption, but rather infrastructure that will be around for the next fifty years.
• We have never believed that you can build a reputation on what you’re going to do, but what you have already done. Compare our record with any new political party and all the rest, all together, pale into insignificance.

This morning on Q+A, there was a segment on the Marine and Coastal Areas Amendment Bill, before Parliament now. The programme had hardly started when they threw in this lie, that the amendment would take away access to customary title to the foreshore and seabed.

That is false.

We have always opposed the Marine and Coastal Areas 2011 Act, because, contrary to its claim not to, it yet does give exclusive use and occupancy to maritime areas without unbroken connection back to 1840.

Just recently, there were two critical decisions, one for the Eastern Bay of Plenty and then the Wairarapa Coast, and hundreds of claims are being lodged because of that misguided legislation.

The Waitangi Tribunal has also tried to intervene, because it says the government has failed to consult.

That again is false. We should be reminded that in 2004 all coastal tribes were consulted and agreed to the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

So why are we dealing with this unholy mess today.

Unity from Equality

The great American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s kept ‘their eyes on the prize’. They lamented the failure of separatism and set their goal of access for their people to the best institutions regardless of colour or gender.

Martin Luther King was a man of great determination and purpose, he spent his life trying to bring life and purpose to a large number of people in the United States. His efforts and those of others has always been an inspiration. Remember his wise advice, “we must learn to live to together as brothers, or perish together as fools”.

For probably the most important time in the history of our country, we need to stand united in thought, word and deed, about our future.

If we don’t, we are like a ship heading to the rocks. We must work together to restore New Zealand where everybody has a chance to survive and thrive, if they make the effort to. In someways, and sadly, our most endangered species is people.

Arguing and political posturing is expensive, it’s time to stop that, and begin greater cooperation.

Throughout out system and not just in politics we seem to have forgotten that we can achieve great things, by putting personal and political differences aside. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

Contrast Martin Luther King’s drive for his people to access the best institutions, with our universities tumbling down the world rankings, whilst insisting on compulsory Treaty courses and ‘Tikinga’ becoming a compulsory part of a law degree.

Or real estate agents being denied a license renewal because they didn’t complete a new compulsory Treaty course.

Standards in Politics

Whether in parliament, or at the United Nations Security Council, manners matter. Respect for institutions is showing respect for their foundations and practices forged over centuries. Those standards are to be cherished and preserved, not trashed on the daily basis that we are seeing today.

People coming into parliament with T shirts on, sandals, and even bare feet.

We had parliamentary standards all the way until the last Labour government allowed them to change, and for the very worst.

If one looks at parliament today there are so many Members of Parliament, from particular parties, that simply have no idea what it is to experience poverty and hardship. And their opinions and speeches show that. Who think that repeating sociology lessons will improve things. You will recognize them, using multi-vowel word salads, and waving their hands around like an Italian chef.

They’ve graduated from university classrooms, straight into parliamentary internships, then serving as Ministerial Advisors before becoming MPs, then as Cabinet Ministers and even as Prime Ministers.

The leadership and make-up of the former worker’s party, Labour, has changed for the worse – except those on their left are even worse. They are disconnected from working people. They do not understand the struggles of working men and women, or their aspirations. Instead, they are driven by ideologies and theories, learned at university, that prove unworkable in our real world.

If you look at parliamentarians like Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk you have to ask – how would they recognize their party and the rise of the professional class of politicians that have taken over the former workers party.

Worse, Labour today is middle-class elite, and don’t trust the people, so they don’t tell the people what they’re up do, as the country found out after we left government in 2020.

Neither Labour nor its supporters in the media have faced up to Labour’s 2023 election result. It was the strongest repudiation of a government since 1975. Think about that. Labour suffered its biggest defeat for 50 years. But have you heard its current or past leader once explain why they faced such an historic toweling, what their contribution to their massive defeat was, or what they were sorry for. No. They still think it’s the voter’s fault.

Labour Leader Chris Hipkins’ view that the government’s coalition agreements are ‘racist and anti-Māori’ shows, not only how myopic and out of touch his thinking is, but it puts in neon lights just how siloed his party is in their obsessive echo-chamber.

Labour now relies on ideological soundbites as a basis of their policy making - which when given even a cursory glance are totally bereft of any facts.

They have become the ‘party of moral outrage’ – obsessed with accusations, ‘gotcha politics’, woke ideology, and opposing anything that happens to float by. In former PM David Lange’s words “they would rather self-flagellate over the last failure, than celebrate a thousand successes”. And when a new policy is announced to help a group of needy people, they rush to the boundary of that group to publicise the people that missed out.

There is nothing that the government is implementing that should come as a surprise to Hipkins. Everything was not only campaigned on, it was in our respective election manifestos and in our coalition agreements last year. Perhaps he is just surprised that a government is actually delivering on its promises.

The spiritual home of the Labour Party is the West Coast – the site of the miners’ strike in 1908 which led to the Labour Party in 1916, that used to represent the workers of New Zealand – the gold miners, the coal miners, the labourers, the foresters, the fisheries, the hard working blue-collar battlers of our country. The catch cry was ‘a fair day’s pay, for a fair day’s work’. They represented those workers in the very industries which have now become anathema to who and what the Labour Party represents today.

If a political party today frothed at the mouth every chance they got about the coalition government being ‘racist, anti-Māori, colonisers, white supremacists, exterminators of Māori’, you could place any member of the Labour, Green, or Māori Party caucus at that podium and you wouldn’t know which was which. Who do Labour now represent? It seems they don’t even know themselves.

The Labour Party has decided their entire re-election strategy will be acting like a recently divorced partner – standing back and asking “don’t you miss me yet?” The lack of self-awareness is astounding.

The fact is, the last three years of the Labour government oversaw a deteriorating economy, deteriorating education and health systems, worsening law and order on our streets, massively increased debt, record immigration, crumbling infrastructure, a cost-of-living crisis, and a hugely divided society. That is not ideology – that is a fact.

The woke agenda of the left has crept in like a cancer that has spread so deep into their divisive thinking it has become their sole focus.

The key aspect of Hipkins’ view is what he’s not saying. It has been clear for some time that the Labour Party had a forlorn choice – attempt to move to the centre to hopelessly try to regain their votes, or push further towards the woke, cultural, and Marxist left. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which path they have chosen. But that ‘siloed-left’ is occupied by the Māori Party and the Greens with the exact same messaging, the exact same ideology, the exact same rhetoric.

Hipkins’ view shows just how far the Labour Party has descended away from its roots, and just how they have abandoned the very people and industries who formed their party over a hundred years ago.

Their focus now is on issues such as race and drumming up racial rhetoric that only serves to divide our country and ignores the vast majority of New Zealanders who just want a functioning health system, a top class education for their kids, first world wages, and an affordable home. That’s what all New Zealanders want – Māori and non-Māori.

Delivering those four things has always been the focus of New Zealand First, and is the focus for this coalition government – a government with a record number of Māori in Cabinet, and where parliament has the largest representation of Māori.

To call our government ‘anti-Māori and racist’ shows just how shallow and impotent the once great Labour Party of Savage, Fraser, and Kirk has become.

New Zealand First can proudly claim to represent working people.

Who raised the minimum wage twice during the past twenty years? We did.

Who recruited more police to keep working people safe? We did.

Who recognized that working people need support in the later years, and reward for contributing their taxes through their working life? We did.

Who has kept the age of eligibility for superannuation safe from the predations of the other parties? Only we have.

Funding New Zealand’s Rebuild

In the last election campaign, one party understood how seriously our economic decline had quickly become.

There was so much wasteful spending, mainly on consumption, and skyrocketing national debt.

And the latest economic figures out this week underscore how right we were.

Which means that if we are to make a recovery, we desperately need international investment.

And we will not get international investment if we cannot answer the simple question “why invest in New Zealand?”

Our failure to answer that question comes from the paralysis of blind ideology, that begins with the belief that the tax system should be neutral, and not pick winners.

All over the world successful countries know better than that. And their economic record is proof. Singapore, Ireland, and now Croatia, and small population Iceland, and the Nordic countries; have climbed to the top of the economic performance ladder whilst we have been on a constant slide.

New Zealand First policy is to answer the question – “why invest in New Zealand?”

We have to attract international investment, the same way these countries have done. By taxation incentivisation.

In a remit at our convention yesterday we voted for a New Zealand Future Fund.

To Investigate the development of a “New Zealand Future Fund” of up to $100 Billion to invest solely in a multi-decade infrastructure build, to ensure our future infrastructure security and to enable future economic growth and social enablement.

But we want these investment funds ring-fenced from politicians and political interference. Where the fund is solely used to invest in the future of New Zealand economic infrastructure. And where those investments are in our national interest, and not offshore globalised ownership.

$100 billion is a small sum to expect – if our policies are right.

So it is New Zealand First policy to look at those successful small nations and introduce policies that mirror their plans.

And let’s face it if an international investor comes to New Zealand to start a wealth creating export driven enterprise, where there was nothing before that, then what have we got to lose.

New Zealand First understands the “Deficit Myth”. If we borrow to spend on wealth creation, rapid export growth, and resilient production, then we will be on the same track as other successful small nations, and dare we say it, the same track we were once on, when we were number one in the world.

It is when you borrow to spend on consumption that so much economic damage is done to a nation, as with a home.

Conclusion

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are not so arrogant to think that we are always right, but we will keep on trying for you and our country. We have never claimed to be the ‘podium of truth’.

Under out policies democracy will prevail.

Under our polices equality will prevail.

Under our polices plain common sense will prevail.

We are going to go on promoting polices based on need, not race or privilege.

We are going to go on supporting the rule of law, where everyone is equal before it.

We support the right of free speech and 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.

We are the party who saw with great clarity what was sadly happening to our country, rose up, and campaigned to stop it.

In our view a worker is someone who works hard for their job and for their country – we are the party who represents the true hardworking kiwi battlers.

To our members here today, when you go home from this meeting please thank your wives your husbands and your children, for the sacrifices you have all made to be part of a great political movement.

As we promised WE ARE TAKING BACK OUR COUNTRY.

© Scoop Media