Rt Hon Winston Peters

Grey Power Public Meeting

Mt Albert War Memorial Hall

773 New North Road, Mt Albert

2pm, 9th June 2023

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you for your invitation to speak with you today.

Many of you will remember acutely the New Zealand that used to be in comparison to what we have become today. For reasons best known to themselves, some critics consider any reference to the past and a better yesteryear, as pandering to nostalgia.

The reason why they take that view is they know that the country that their policies have created is seriously inferior to the country that former generations achieved.

All around New Zealand there is a growing anxiety, old and young, country and city, about where our nation is heading. In nearly every measurement of international comparison, our country sadly is in decline.

Whether it be the ability of individuals and families to cope with the rising costs of living, the escalating cost of housing, proper access to a first world health system, the promise of a world leading education system, first would wages, or personal security in our homes and on our streets, a growing number of New Zealanders are seriously worried and have every right to be.

It is common for politicians at every election to say that present day problems are at the crossroads. Hitherto, that has been an exaggeration, but in 2023 it most certainly is not an overstatement. This is the most critical election that any of us have ever faced. This country is at an inflection point. That is, a point in our history that sees us either turn adverse developments around or continuing straight to the third world.

In former times, any politician who referred to New Zealand as having third world features would be laughed off the stage. But no one is laughing now – are they? Not even those who are trying to defend the economic and social decline or their role in it. The best they can do is make ridiculous statements like “we are punching above our weight” or “we are doing better than other countries” whilst never mentioning all of those countries, many without our resource base, who are doing so much better than we are.

Law and Order

A significant majority of New Zealanders are alarmed at New Zealand’s rising cost of living. A large majority of New Zealanders have real worries about the decline of law and order and growing crime. Today most kiwis worry about the rising tide of separatist policies arising from direct attacks on our democracy and the introduction, unmandated, unelected, of co-government by stealth.

On nearly every measurement of law and order in New Zealand today the situation is much worse than it once was.

• Total crime is up 33%,
• Violent offending is up 42%,
• Sexual offending is up 16%,
• Theft offences are up 49%,
• Ram Raids, mostly committed by youth, were up 465% last year.
• Supermarkets alone are reporting a 36% increase in serious crime within their stores in the last year alone.

Michael Hill Jewellers have 88 stores in Canada and one has been broken into, 165 stores in Australia and one broken into. They have 36 shops in New Zealand and 44 break-ins. They have even had to close their Takapuna Store, which has been open since 1983, as it had become their most ram-raided store.

This madness is not going to end until there is an acceptance in all sides of parliament, that this lawlessness is symptomatic of a growing disrespect for law in our society. That many of the educational and institutional tolerances advocated by so many so-called ‘reformers’ is simply not working, as many of us said it would not.

We have many more front-line police, 1800 in fact, that New Zealand First brought in, but that won’t work when serious young criminals get a slap over the wrist with a wet bus ticket and are back offending the next day. Or where gang members can contemptuously own our streets in their hundreds, breaking the law whilst doing so knowing there are rarely any real consequences.

We need police to enforce the law, but we also need a judicial system that holds these offenders to account. There is no security of our future if we continue with the madness of this ‘catch and release’ excuse for a policy that has crept into our justice system over the last decade.

There are no rights without responsibilities. So what has happened to ‘personal responsibility’?

There was once a time not so long ago when attacking a police officer was rare. Today, our growing criminal population ignore them, disrespect their authority, and even view them as targets for violence. How do we expect to have a working justice system when police can no longer properly enforce the law?

Enforcing the law means both catching the criminals and prosecuting them.

The pendulum has swung way too far towards the rights and considerations of the criminal and has left the community and victims a distant second. If you have any doubts about that, take a look at some of the grossly inadequate sentences for some of the most violent and vile crimes now plaguing our society.

The result? The prison population has dropped nearly thirty percent – but at what social cost? What kind of mindless ‘measurement of success’ is that?

The only way this madness is going to end, is by:

• Police enforcing the law and stopping this ‘catch and release’ policy,
• Courts holding the offenders properly to account with harsher sentences,
• Prisons keeping these violent criminals off our streets.

That means some serious policy changes that will reflect what all New Zealanders with any common sense know we need in our courts system. The time for sociological experimentation being run by highly paid academics sitting behind their desks and wringing their hands needs to be over.

Victims and community need to come first - not the offenders.

Ladies and gentlemen, the first responsibility of politicians is to maintain the safety and security of all New Zealanders. Many in parliament today have forgotten that. New Zealand First most certainly has not.

Cost of Living

In 2020 the Labour Party promised to “provide greater economic security, now and into the future”. They said this will require four stages in their plan:

1. “Keeping debt down”
2. “Backing businesses to drive the recovery”
3. “Moving people of the benefit and into jobs”
4. “Continue action on supermarkets”

Labour has not kept debt down. In last year’s budget the Finance Minister promised no increase in expenditure. He said there was no more money. In this year’s budget he forgot last year’s words and seriously increased the debt again. We’re going broke.

New Zealand First policy is to question all aspects of government spending and eliminate those hopeless policies such as $30 billion on light rail in Auckland, described by former Finance Minister Sir Michael Cullen as “past its used by date”, and every added woke expenditure that is not focussed on productivity, enduring infrastructure, added value or import substitution.

Labour doesn’t have any policy to back New Zealand businesses to drive the recovery. That’s obvious. Our balance of payments deficit, that’s import costs over export earnings, has simply increased to the worst levels since 1972. That means we are spending more than we are earning.

In this campaign, we will lay out policies to grow this country’s wealth offshore and at home.

If Labour have been “moving people off the benefit and on to jobs” why has the Job Seeker Benefit numbers risen to 62,000 people? Beneficiaries need a hand up, not a handout. There needs to be expectations of getting off the dole and back to work – and if they can’t find a job we will give them one as part of their social contract with you the New Zealand taxpayer. Some might call that working for the dole – New Zealand First calls it working for the country.

And on the promise to “continue action on supermarkets” there was no action at the time Labour made that promise. And there has been no action since. As you, who buy at those supermarkets, all know.

New Zealand First will have a full-scale urgent investigation of supermarket costs with particular reference to their Australian comparisons on costs to consumers.

Record Immigration

Ladies and gentlemen, Labour campaigned on a more focussed immigration policy. So did New Zealand First but we have always meant it and delivered. The OECD has long been criticising New Zealand for not having a sound immigration policy. The OECD has questioned why we have brought in so many unskilled immigrants.

This year, unheralded, unadvised, unmandated, and unknown to you, the Labour Party has opened the floodgates of immigration to the highest levels in our country’s history. They’re bringing in 100,000 immigrants into New Zealand this year alone. That is twice the rate of immigration into the UK, and voluntarily more than any other country in the world.

This is their economic policy solution to New Zealand’s present problems. Mass immigration to inflate demand where there is no supply. It is economic lunacy and unless they are stopped, right here, right now, you, your children, and your grandchildren are going to pay for it long into our future.

This mass immigration policy means that our social and economic decline will only get worse.

When we have a massive housing, health, education, and infrastructure problem, they have just mindlessly increased the problem with greater unmanageable demand. Where has common sense gone? And for those who shout xenophobe or racist, go and tell that to kiwis struggling to afford a house, struggling to get health care, or proper schooling, and first world wages.

Do not underestimate the damage this is doing to our country and to our future generations. It is already here and happening. People struggling without critical infrastructure. Here we are in the so called ‘city of sails’ which has now become the ‘city of snails’, with orange road cones everywhere, and gridlock hour on hour.

Separatism/Democracy/Co-government

We have been discussing issues which now a mass majority of New Zealanders are concerned about. But if that’s not bad enough, the Labour government has been covertly introducing and encouraging policies which they never campaigned on during the last election.

They are introducing policies of separatism, blatantly rewriting history, reinterpreting laws in favour of their racially jingoistic jargon that would even shock Māori scholars of a former age. There is a policy of co-government being put in place that is not based on fact, history, or sound law. It is solely based on separatism.

We all know that for us to have a democracy there has to be one person one vote, and every vote of equal value. That most basic principle of democracy is being jettisoned by Labour and their fellow cultural travellers, the Greens, and the Māori Party.

They want a country where Māori have half the say on everything. The ordinary Māori have not asked for this. A small self-appointed elite group of Māori are pushing their separatist cause using the number of Māori in New Zealand as some sort of justification.

You never hear them talking about affordable housing for Māori, health access for Māori, education for Māori, or first world wages for Māori. No, it’s always their pet causes dreamt up in some university sociological department and covertly being rammed down your throat.

To do this they make the following falsehoods:

• First, that New Zealand was a peaceful paradise before Europeans arrived,
• Second, that the Treaty of Waitangi signed on 6th February 1840, meant that Māori began a ‘partnership’ with Queen Victoria,
• Third, that Māori did not cede sovereignty in the Treaty of Waitangi,
• Fourth, that Māori would continue self-government after the Treaty.

We all know from our Māori ancestors that New Zealand was not a peaceful paradise before Europeans arrived, the feuding and fighting is deeply etched in our tribal history.

No one in the British Empire or the UK was in partnership with the Crown on the 6th of February 1840, and nor were Māori the day after.

Maoridom’s greatest politician with a brilliant legal mind, Sir Apirana Ngata, and other great Māori leaders, all wrote that Māori had ceded sovereignty to the Crown. So why have we got so many jumped-up modern-day soothsayers talking so much intellectual garbage on this matter.

And if Māori had self-government on the 6th of February 1840, given our tribal construct, how many self-governments did we have?

We are having our foreshore, our seabed, our water, and our sky, now claimed on the basis of race. This despite the fact that the mass majority of Māori in whose name these radical elitist Māori are making these claims, have much more non-Māori blood in them than they do Māori blood. On the pre 1975 description of a Māori for electoral purposes, one had to be half Māori or more to be on the Māori electoral roll. Today you can get on that roll if you are just 1/64th Māori.

The mass majority of Māori, by the radical’s own definition, are on the general electoral roll. They have made a conscious choice to be on the same roll as every other New Zealander. They want a united country, not eruptions of separatism everywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, we do not have any future going forward if these race-based polices prevail. They are saying that if you are not Māori then you are inferior, and they are trying to bed that view into our laws everywhere.

And unless sufficient New Zealanders of all backgrounds and creeds make a stand to challenge this malignant development, then our country will become unrecognisable, and on a certain path to the third world and South Pacific apartheid.

New Zealand First will restore our foreshore and seabed legislation, restore a single franchise at the local government level and dustbin the He Puapua report where it belongs.

On this issue there is only one political party you can trust. We have never deviated from the view of one flag, one law, one country, one people – and putting New Zealanders First.

Superannuation

The Grey Power movement in this country began as a protest against the Labour Party’s attack on the retired people of this country. Remember, its 1984 and Geoffrey Palmer, Labour’s deputy leader said, “anyone who says that Labour is going to change super is spreading rumour with malice”. Well Labour got in and that’s exactly what they did. They introduced a surtax on your super if you had other income. Seniors were enraged and National promised to repeal the surtax “no ifs, not buts, no maybes”. National got in in 1990, and instead of keeping their promise and repealing the surtax, they increased it - to 92 cents in the dollar. Between Labour and National they had dropped superannuation down to just 60% of the net average wage, having both committed it to no less than 65%.

You will remember which party it was that had the surtax repealed, that took super, not back to 65%, but to 66% of the net average wage, advocated for free doctors visits and for energy rebates.

And we brought in the Super Gold Card to make your superannuation go so much further. And hundreds of thousands of seniors have seriously benefited from it.

In troubled economic times, the two major parties have always gone for the old and for the young. And believe it they will do so again.

If you think they can be trusted on this issue, then may we suggest we jog your memory as to what their record is.

Every other party has been on record in the past as wanting to increase the retirement age. New Zealand First on this matter is the only party with the consistent record of defending super and seniors. Remember when they laughed and said all of our supporters will die off? You remember John Key saying it don’t you? Well, your numbers today, over 65-year-olds that is, are over 880,000.

Many parties never supported the Cullen Fund, designed to even out the future rising costs of super, and don’t understand that as a percentage of our GDP super is at a far lower percentage than other comparable countries.

On the matter of super and seniors, we are not asking you to believe our promises during this campaign, we are asking you to remember our unique record.

Conclusion

The economic and social crisis in our country means that none of us can sit out this campaign. The risks of doing so are just too high.

We are asking you to get involved and to make a commitment in the interests of yourself, your family, your community, and your country.

There are parties in parliament whose policies are taking a large part of your heritage and rights away from you. We are asking you to defy these social manipulators and take back control of your life and your country.

MMP means you have two votes. One vote for your local MP of choice, and one vote for your political Party of choice. We are asking you to take out some serious insurance, we are asking you to give your party vote to New Zealand First.

When you do, we will all win, and our country will win too.

© Scoop Media