Winston Peters enters a fugue state after hearing the word \u2018cunts\u2019.<\/p>\n
Peters has a point. New Zealand\u2019s parliament often resembles the sandpit on a particularly out-of-control day at kindy. There are screams, insults, rude gestures and the occasional dust-up<\/a>. If there\u2019s one thing to nitpick in his post though, it\u2019s the timeline. This decay isn\u2019t new. It\u2019s been setting in for years now, and one MP in particular has been at the heart of the decline.<\/p>\n Van Velden isn\u2019t the first to quote other people\u2019s insulting epithets in the House. Nor is she the only one to use an offensive and derogatory term. This MP once grilled former prime minister John Key in the House on whether he\u2019d called footballer David Beckham \u201cthick as batshit\u201d<\/a>. In 2024, he was ordered to withdraw his statement, and later called out by the IHC<\/a>, after accusing Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer of making a \u201cretard comment\u201d in parliament. The same year he was criticised for lowering parliamentary standards and failing to meet expectations of decorum after instructing Labour and Green MPs not to \u201cshout like a sick idiot\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n This MP\u2019s most venomous and decorum-compromising barbs are usually delivered directly, in the form of personal insults. In 2012, he was kicked out of the House for calling National MP Gerry Brownlee an \u201cilliterate woodwork teacher\u201d<\/a>. Brownlee has been a regular target. In 2018, the MP told speaker Lockwood Smith to \u201cthrow fatty out<\/a>\u201d after Brownlee interjected in a debate.<\/p>\n Other National MPs have found themselves on the receiving end of the MP\u2019s rancour. He repeatedly mocked Simon Bridges\u2019 New Zealand accent in parliamentary exchanges, feigning confusion about an industry called \u201cmoining\u201d<\/a> while answering a question on oil and gas exploration in 2018, and telling the National leader he\u2019ll answer questions on China but not \u201cChoyna\u201d in 2019<\/a>. The MP also called Brownlee, Chris Finlayson, and M\u0101ori Party co-leader Marama Fox an \u201cunsightly trio of drama queens<\/a>\u201d after voting against Treaty settlements in 2018.<\/p>\n But no single politician has been savaged as much as David Seymour. In 2020, the MP called the Act leader a \u201cpolitical cuckold\u201d during a testy exchange<\/a> in parliament. It was a toned down reimagining of earlier work. The MP referred to Seymour as a \u201ccuckolded puppet\u201d<\/a> in the House in 2017. He\u2019s called Seymour a cuck so many times some news organisations have stopped counting individual incidents, with The Guardian simply saying it has happened \u201cmany times\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is all to say nothing about the allegations of xenophobia. He joked that \u201ctwo wongs don\u2019t make a white<\/a>\u201d during a campaign launch. He told Green MPs Lawrence Xu-Nan and Francisco Hernandez they should \u201cshow some gratitude\u201d for being in New Zealand. He inexplicably complained there were too many delicious Asian restaurants on Dominion Rd<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last week, the MP stood before reporters and told them that Labour leader Chris Hipkins is a \u201csausage eater who doesn\u2019t know what a woman is\u201d. Reporters pressed the MP on those comments, given he\u2019d just been outspoken about parliament\u2019s declining standards of civility.<\/p>\n In response, Winston Peters clarified that he meant Hipkins was a \u201csausage roll eater\u201d. His quest to restore parliament to its previous standards of decency and respect continues apace.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winston Peters is right about parliament\u2019s declining standards of decorum. But the rot didn\u2019t set in last week.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[492,42,43,24637,135,40,38,41,39,123306,136],"class_list":["post-219866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-comments-enabled","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-parliament","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-tourism-fiji-summer","tag-winston-peters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}