Who has a record on keeping the superannuation eligibility age at 65? (Labour’s policy is to keep the current age.)
Who has seen the evidence – “I’ve seen the documents!” – that back up his view that the India free trade agreement is a raw deal, which will open the immigration floodgates and require New Zealand to invest $33 billion into India? (This is contested.)
Peters is particularly loose when it comes to political opponents.
Yesterday, in Invercargill, he fictionalised Chlöe Swarbrick’s business-ownership experience.
Today, he called Chris Hipkins a liar – unsurprisingly disputed by Hipkins – over what he knew and when about Covid, the vaccine and the risk for under-18s.
“Hundreds of thousands of young people have been damaged,” Peters said. The number of official heart inflammation complaints are actually in the dozens and the cause is often not definitively known.
But this particular spiel triggered one of the biggest cheers from the 600-plus crowd (the hall and the overflow were both at capacity). This indicates a willingness to agree with a claim that goes beyond what available information says.
Another such reaction was after Peters said New Zealand should withdraw from the Paris Agreement and under no circumstances send billions of dollars offshore to offset our emissions.
“Get us out of it!” a lady in the audience literally screamed.
He wasn’t entirely preaching to the converted, however. A young man, during the question-and-answer session, asked Peters why the coalition Government was “pouring fuel on the climate crisis”.
He added: “I hear no discussion about what we are going to do” amid “this denial of reality and denial of science”.
The Peters playbook here is to make the provocateur take their seat and once disarmed – by relinquishing the microphone – they are then eviscerated at a volume they cannot return.
“Greta Thunberg, your friend, said we’d be gone two years ago but we’re still here,” Peters told him amid an increasingly lively crowd.
A man leaves Winston Peters’ public meeting after asking Peters what he will do about the climate crisis. Photo / Derek Cheng
The questioner stripped to his “it’s a climate emergency” T-shirt, shouting back as he exited: “Your Government passed a climate emergency!”
This was also loose with the facts; NZ First was not in Parliament when the Labour Government passed a climate emergency motion in December 2020.
For the record, Peters’ rationale is that New Zealand shouldn’t be slashing emissions – and all the economic pain this would entail – when it is responsible for only a fraction of 1% of total global emissions. Critics say New Zealand, which has one of the highest per-capita emissions in the OECD, should pull its weight.
Peters later told the Herald, when asked about how withdrawing from Paris might impact our trade deals (legal action has already been filed), that there wouldn’t be any repercussions.
“Tony Blair recently came out and said that,” Peters added.
Blair’s 2025 paper did not address how the lack of climate action might impact trade deals, but did say: “Voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know that their impact on global emissions is minimal.”
An undecided voter, trying to discern fact from fiction in real time, might have struggled to make sense of it all.
Complicating matters is when Peters acts in a way that lends himself greater credibility, for example when he refrains from making promises he can’t keep.
Asked what he can do to fix the water infrastructure issue in South Dunedin, he said: “I seriously sympathise [but] it’s a local government problem.”
Asked about justice for the murdered Kahui twins, Peters didn’t say the culprit will be found but deferred to the legal process and the importance of the separation of powers.
New Zealand First Winston Peters speaks during a packed public meeting in Mosgiel. Photo / Derek Cheng
He also lures in his audience with local stories that tug at the heartstrings.
Remember the 35,000-odd people marching in the streets in 2024 after the Government downgraded plans for the new Dunedin Hospital?
Peters asked the crowd who ensured the new hospital in Dunedin? He added that former Labour MP Pete Hodgson would confirm he’d taken a delegation to Peters’ office to plead the case.
“And the rest is history.”
So the Herald called Hodgson, who said that he did, indeed, reach out to Peters after the march.
“We were well received,” he said of Peters, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time.
Hodgson added that he doesn’t know what Peters did after the meeting, but the hospital is being built, including a key floor that Hodgson feared would be taken out of the plans.
“It’s happening as we asked, and no thanks to the Prime Minister.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.