NZ First leader Winston Peters has said a 78-year-old woman must have “memory problems”, after she challenged the party’s record on the cost of living.<\/p>\n
He said the woman – whom he called Wendy – had questioned what NZ First achieved over the last three years with National, saying managing on a single pension was “a joke”.<\/p>\n
The post pointed to higher food and power bills, falling house prices and worsening access to healthcare.<\/p>\n
Peters said the message concluded in capital letters: “WHAT HAS NEW ZEALAND FIRST DONE FOR ME?”<\/p>\n
“I thought to myself, ‘Lady, you’re 78 and you’ve obviously got memory problems’,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.<\/p>\n
Peters responded with a list of policies he credited to his party, including increasing pension payments and scrapping the superannuation surtax.<\/p>\n
“A party called New Zealand First got rid of it, abolished the whole lot, that’s No.1,” he said of the surtax.<\/p>\n
He also cited the Gold Card, hearing-aid support and help with winter power bills.<\/p>\n
Peters said his party had also insisted on keeping the pension age at 65 and argued against means-testing it.<\/p>\n
“Wendy, that’s what I’ve done for you, right? If you’ve got memory problems, that’s why I’m doing it at this meeting – to make sure you’ve got something to vote on.”<\/p>\n
He said other parties would turn on young and old people, when they got into trouble.<\/p>\n
“One party’s been defending the old people of this country, even when its leader was young, thank you very much.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NZ First leader Winston Peters has said a 78-year-old woman must have “memory problems”, after she challenged the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-647197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647197","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=647197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}