Rt Hon Winston Peters

Public Meeting

Marlborough Events Centre

Blenheim

1.00pm

28 May 2023

Good afternoon and thank you for taking the time to be here.

Blenheim is at the heart of the Marlborough region and an important contributor to New Zealand’s wealth. We salute you for it.

Today we launch the NZ First candidate Jamie Arbuckle, the highest polling local councillor, in whom like you we have great confidence. We are also down here to look at your new library, financed like so many other regional projects, by the Provincial Growth Fund. All manner of needed projects all around New Zealand were financed by the PGF and New Zealand First is proud of that investment in our long term future.

We meet just over a week after Budget Day and with time to properly reflect on whether it helps you or hinders you. Soon after the Budget was Wednesday's Reserve Bank interest rate increase by 25 basis points.

It means the Reserve Bank Governor put up the interest rates, yet again, to control inflation. All of you who have borrowings, a mortgage, or an overdraft, are going to be paying more, and for longer. And for many it will be the last straw to break the financial camel’s back.

What was astonishing by the Governor of the Reserve Bank’s decision to raise the OCR, is that at no time did he say anything about the government’s spending. Increased unjustified government expenditure is an inflation driver.

As a result of the decisions of the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Reserve Bank, interest rates are going to go up again, and stay higher for longer. These interest rate rises will further drive up the cost of living and hundreds of thousands of families stretched out financially like a shanghai will go on suffering.

This was not a budget to address New Zealand's present circumstances but designed purely to win votes at the next election. One of the saddest things about the Budget was the lack of transparency about New Zealand’s substantial debt burden. We just need one more blip on the international horizon and this country will have hit the debt ceiling on any increased borrowing. Remember, all of this borrowing requires repayment and because you and future generations will be doing that, you are entitled to know exactly what is going on.

Suffice to say you can read all the financial analysis from the so called experts, but the simple fact is we are much more in debt than we once were, with less capacity to pay it back than we once had, and as every household knows if you spend more than you are earning, and don’t win lotto, then you will go broke.

Put aside all of the political assurances that aren't worth the air they pass on, and one is driven to the conclusion that the present government simply doesn’t know what it is doing.

If you doubt that, what happened to the $1.9 billion they spent on mental health? Or the $29 billion and rising that their Auckland Light Rail commitments entail? Or the countless other projects that were promised to you without there being any sound financial analysis on whether they would stack up into the future?

We live in worrying times. There are simply too many people in government without any understanding or experience in business, and it is seriously showing. It is one of the reasons why New Zealand has fallen so far from its once privileged position as a world leading economy, once the envy of nearly every country on earth.

And we have tried everything from neoliberal Rogernomics and Ruthanomics, to policies of ‘kindness’, many of which have been consigned to the Prime Minister's ‘bonfire’ four months ago.

Everytime anyone questions what’s going on, a host of fellow traveller cheerleaders mindlessly claim that we are “punching above our weight” – or “doing better than other countries”. All whilst leaving out comparisons with Singapore and Norway that have gone roaring past us in economic and social performance.

This country has been the victim of political extremists, experimenting without any evidence of practical performance, with the lives of the mass majority of New Zealanders.

And alarmingly in the recent budget, health expenditure has actually been cut, as has the funding for our Police, at a time when this country’s health service delivery is in serious decline and crime is rampant on too many of our country’s streets.

And at a time when there is a massive infrastructure deficit in Housing, Roading, Education, just to name a few, and when we know we have to help those people seriously damaged by Cyclone Gabrielle, and other weather disasters around the country, this government has without any notice to you quietly decided to “Give the Fan a Full Load”.

Against their past commitments to introduce focussed immigration policy, they have without warning opened the floodgates of immigration. New Zealand is now on its way to a net increase in immigration of over 100,000 this year alone. That’s an extra 100,000 people coming in from abroad to a population of 5.1 million. In comparison all sorts of alarm bells are being rung in the UK because they are taking on an extra 600,000 for a population of 67.1 million. That means, our net immigration is on track to being more than twice as high as the UK this year. We have real cause for alarm as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, as you know anyone who questions the merits of mass immigration is immediately accused of being a xenophobe. As though you have no right to question what is going on here.

As though you have no right to ask the obvious questions:

· How many more houses will they need, right here, right now?

· What will be the likely increased health demands?

· What will be the likely increased education demands for schools, classrooms, and teachers?

· And how many more cars will be on Auckland’s congested roads? Because about seventy percent of these migrants will be going there.

· What will be the likely increased infrastructure demand for roading, transport, electricity, sewerage, water?

· What will be the likely cost to ensure law and order?

· How many more police will we need?

· And what will be the increased welfare bill now at an all time record already?

New Zealand has always needed immigration when it is focussed on skills we need, not just more mouths to feed.

This government is going down the same path of previous governments who thought they could mask their failure to grow our wealth offshore by having more people onshore – some sort of quick fix which never worked back then and wont work now. This is Einstein's definition of madness “doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

· How will this mass immigration fix the overall labour shortage?

· Or boost economic growth?

· Or raise our productivity growth record?

It is not doing that in the UK, has not done it in New Zealand’s past, and most certainly won’t do it now.

The vast majority of these new immigrants will be going to Auckland where the grid locks on our roads and lack of infrastructure is growing everyday. Auckland cant pay for it so who do you think is going to? When you are in the bathroom in the morning, take a look in the mirror - that’s who will be paying for it all.

The weather disasters earlier this year notably in the Auckland, Hawkes Bay and East Coast, means there is about $16 billion dollars required to fix the lives, incomes, and areas of those affected.

These people should surely be our priority; most have lived all their lives in New Zealand, as have their parents before them. However with this mass immigration and their financial needs then it is certain that our own people are going to be neglected. There will simply not be the money to properly help them.

In this campaign, for the 2023 election, please ask the politicians who appear before you, what is your plan on immigration? And do you intend to carry on with the wholesale introduction of people from offshore for whom there is no housing, health, education, or other infrastructure?

The Minister of Finance is engaged in record spending against last year's promise not to do so. And how many commentators let him get away with the fiction that he “found the money down the back of the couch”?

Wise countries plan their immigration on people they need, not on people who need them. And we should be no different.

You will not find one politician in Asia, who thinks this is a smart policy. But Labour proposes to do it anyway, as governments have done in the past – bringing in too many people without plans or money for their needs.

This is Labour's idea of how to grow the economy. But what they are not telling you is that your share of the economy, now to be shared by many more people, will be less not more. As every household knows, if your income stays the same and yet you have more mouths to feed, then you are individually and collectively worse off. How come your political leaders can't understand that simple equation?

Mass immigration without housing, health, education and the infrastructure preparation, simply means we are all going to be worse off. And soon drop out of the first world which we are now fast doing already.

The truth of this is the reason why so many of the ideological architects of this policy now want to change the way we measure our economic performance and social delivery and focus your attention instead on “their measurements on the quality of life”. Their objectives are a distraction, a detour, or a roadblock, from plain common sense analysis.

Labour has simply lost its way and the only evidence you need of that is the new Prime Minister Hipkins putting the Labour Party’s policies of the last five years onto the ‘bonfire’. He is saying that the policies he was so intricately involved in preparing and defending can't be trusted, but by some illogical miracle, he and his colleagues can be trusted now – in election year.

No one appreciates a history lesson, but New Zealand once was a country economically and socially at the top of the world. And in the lifetime of some of the people in this room. The difference is of course, that we got to be one of the world's greatest democracies and economies delivering sound social policies when we had members of parliament who had a real connection with life outside of it. They were not student union politicians without any business and trade experience, but practical people who lived through a great depression and war, giving them a real sense of commitment and service in parliament.

Today we have too many CV politicians whose education comes solely from a textbook coupled with a massive army of spin doctors whose job it is to guild the political lily and tell you that black is white and white is black. Watch them on television waving their hands about trying to assure you that there is “nothing to see here”, or that the government is considering these matters “but they have to go through a process". And how often have you heard them announce plans with no essential details or analysis to back them up.

That’s why for a month we had a cycle way planned over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. This wacky idea was dumped but by then it had cost taxpayers $52 million. Or the $29 billion and rising cost of light rail in Auckland – a dream that has all the levitation of a lead balloon. Who came up with these ideas? Labour did. So why is the Minister of Transport still there?

You have cause enough for alarm already. But something even more sinister is now in our country. It is the idea of a small elite, that New Zealand should not have one government, but effectively two. One based on one race, the other based on the rest of us. And that there should be two standards of democracy so that it is no longer going to be one person, one vote, and each vote of the same value, but one race having a vote of far greater value than all the rest.

We even had a Maori Party politician recently thinking he was clever saying that people had two votes. So he said that votes of different value was a fact already. He couldn’t even intellectually grasp that MMP is where you have, alongside all others on the electoral roll, one vote for a constituent MP, and then alongside all others, one vote for the political party of your choice. And the cacophony of journalists interviewing him never even pointed out to him the fallacy of his claim - or didn’t they understand it themselves?

If these people are allowed to prevail in politics then the mass majority of New Zealanders, possibly as high as 98% are simply going to be worse off. And that includes the mass majority with some Maori in their DNA, in whose name and trumped up numbers, a group of elite Maori and their fellow travellers are making these outrageous demands.

They're demanding nigh on a billion dollars extra a year alone for policies where race decides the expenditure whilst at the same time utterly ignoring the four critical things that Maori want from Invercargill to Kaitaia – that is:

· A safe affordable house

· Quick access to a good health system

· Wide access to educational training

· First world jobs

These four things that Maori want is what everyone in New Zealand wants. But these essential needs barely cross the minds of these radicals.

Willie Jackson said this last week following the budget “we’ve got the 'by Maori', 'for Maori' Budget. But let's not forget most Maori are not attached to our Maori organisations.”

To paraphrase President Lincoln, they are “of the people”, but they are not “for the people”.

These elitists in the Maori world survive with their unreasonable demands because very few are prepared to challenge the ethnic construction behind their demands.

In 1975 to be on the Maori roll one had to be half Maori or more. Since the Labour law change in 1975 that requirement has been diluted so that all you have to do to get on the Maori roll is to recite a Maori ancestor. That means, you can claim to be a Maori, if you are just 1/8th or 1/64th Maori. Or at its ‘impurest’ just 1/512th.

And here are the facts. The mass majority of Maori, by the very definition that these Maori radicals and fellow travellers demand, are not on the Maori Electoral roll but the General Electoral role. The ordinary Maori has been utterly ignored and is not served by this Maori elite. Willie Jackson after last Thursday's budget just admitted that.

Moreover, when people claim that Maori are 17% of the population, they are simply involving themselves in ethnic luddite nonsense. By the 1975 definition, Maori are not even 7% of the population.

But yesterday MP Debbie Narawa Packer claimed that one in five, or twentry percent, of people in New Zealand are Maori.

In the New Zealand First Party, we've had a greater percentage of people in parliament over the last thirty years of Maori or Pacific extraction than any other political party. But we in New Zealand First regard ourselves, whatever our background, as New Zealanders First and foremost. In short, we don’t rat on our “other heritage” whatever it might be, whether its English, Irish, Welsh, Scotts, Croatian, or Asian. We encourage our people to be proud of all their heritage, for while it is who you are, it is not what you are.

Ladies and gentlemen, all manner of demands are being made by these radicals and apologists. They want co-government. They want a separate health system. They want a separate legal system. They want a separate education system. They want a separate prison system, to name just a few.

To get there they have to “re-write the Treaty of Waitangi” to conform to their view of history and their wishes.

In doing so, the extremist claims they are making are ridiculous against the canvas of history. They claim the treaty of waitangi was a “Contract of Equality”. There was a clause in the treaty about us all thereafter being equal. But where did this concept of “Contract” come from?

The Maori chiefs in 1840 ceded sovereignty to the Crown. The Crown was never in partnership with the people of the UK on the 6th February 1840, or anybody in the UK or New Zealand the day after.

So it's clear, to get their way, these radicals have to convince you that their version of the treaty is right and the views of such Maori scholars such as Sir Apirana Ngata are wrong. That all NZers after the 6th Feb 1840 comprised two groups. Maori and then the rest of us.

Ninety-nine percent of New Zealand doesn’t know what's going on here. They don’t know that the Justice Department is denying promotion to the next pay band unless staff do a Maori language course first. The same goes for the Health Department. And now it's creeping into all other deparments without any public announcement by any Minister that this is happening.

If you're a real estate agent, then you are being told that a module in te reo Maori must be completed by you by the 31st of December. Notice the words “must”. Refuse and when your licence comes up for renewal in January, you could be banned for the next five years.

These people have their livelihoods threatened by a bunch of gaslighting goblins in the civil service seemingly answerable to no one, and who all think they know what you need better than you do.

Recently Casey Costello wrote to a number of Ministers seeking their definition of ‘racisim’.

This was an important inquiry because the government is spending an enormous amount of time and your money on ‘anti racism’ programmes. The Human Rights Commision replied that they didn’t have a single agreed definition, the Race Relations Commissioner did not reply, fourteen ministers simply would not answer the question, three referred it to their ministries, and one discussed the Human Rights Commision definition – even though the Commission stated they didn’t have an agreed definition.

The Ministries and government departments are now riddled with Treaty of Waitangi requirements, all dreamed up by a covert secret inner group of politicians and bureaucrats. They operate on the pandora principle – which simply is, once their extremist interpretations are in place you won't be able to do a thing about it.

Have a look at the comical name for New Zealand Transport Authority – Waka Kotahi. That means a ‘boat on the road’. Air New Zealand now claims that their service is a ‘waka’ or ‘boat’ in the sky. Everywhere there is this imposition of a language which ninety percent plus don’t readily understand.

The purpose of communications is understanding, but these people are using taxpayers' money without any regard to what the mass bulk of the population, which includes the majority with some Maori in them, not understanding what the gaslighting goblins are talking about.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the 1850s there was an “I Know Nothing” Party in the United States. Members of that group were required to say “I know nothing” when asked about specifics of their party by outsiders.

We have that movement in our country now, in government, in government agencies and in the bureaucracy.

When challenged to explain what is their definition of racism which is driving so much of their separatist agenda, they have, as Casey Costello has proven, resorted to claiming to have no knowledge or definition of what racism is.

Ladies and gentlemen, we all have to decide in this campaign whether we believe freedom is worth fighting for, whether truth should prevail over deceit, and whether common sense triumphs over extremism.

We have to decide that this indoctrination, without any mandate from you, but paid for by you, is going to stop.

We have to have the courage to face these social manipulators and politicians down.

On these critical matters for our future social cohesion, please look at the record of politicians and political parties in this campaign.

Only one party has from its outset striven to put our country first and our people first – that believes that whatever our background we are New Zealaders first and foremost.

Joining this cause and fighting for these policies will not be easy, but making a stand never was easy. It requires commitment, courage, and confidence to succeed.

In 1996 New Zealand moved from an election system of First Past the Post to MMP.

We are often asked, “how do we vote to ensure New Zealand First is in Parliament”. In other words, there are people who are still unsure of the way the voting system works.

New Zealand First seeks your Party Vote. It is the Party Vote that will ensure New Zealand First has the greatest number of MPs in Parliament to represent you and make the system honest.

Remember, in MMP, you have two votes. You can vote for the person you wish to represent your electorate with one vote. We are asking for you to give New Zealand First your Party vote.

Ladies and gentlemen we are asking you to join us right here, right now, and when you do, be assured we can win.

And win we will.

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