Winston and the use of the N-word

Nazi is such an epically evil brand that almost 80 years after that German party’s demise it just has to be uttered once and it is – according to the New Zealand media – the most important thing to come out of an hour-long speech. Allude to Nazism, if ever so briefly, and it eclipses everything else.

If Godwin’s Law is that the longer a dialogue continues it will eventually get round to comparisons with the Nazis then Godwin’s Law by proxy is that the first thing to be reported on by the news media, no matter how long the dialogue, will be the bit about comparisons with the Nazis. It has been this way for 80 years. Winston Churchill was comparing the British Labour Party to Nazis while the blood in the Führerbunker was still wet. His namesake Winston Peters was comparing the Maori Party to Nazis in his State of the Nation speech at the weekend. And then as now the media have dutifully headlined the news-bait spook word. Then as now everyone in polite society is presumed to be aghast at the invocation of the boogey man. As Olivier’s unrepentant, sneering Nazi character says to Hoffman in ‘Marathon Man’ in the end scene: “You’re all so predictable!” (followed by a hoiking great spit in the direction of his face).

Winston Peters has such good timing I checked out of curiosity – his State of The Nation speech was one hour… exactly. On the button. From the moment he got to the lectern and the awful Chumbawumba music stopped to the moment he delivered his punch line slogan and the awful Chumbawumba music began again was precisely one hour and Winston filled it all with his Trumpian mix of script and digression like it was thirty years ago. A swaggering, hostile sortie of missives and invective, a denunciation of social misfits, delivered without missing a beatnik. Hard to believe the guy’s nearing eighty. How many other leaders could deliver down to the second like that? None have this capacity, but Winston does, and he does it with ease.

As far as State of The Nation speeches go, Winston is incapable of giving anything other than an opposition-style speech. He is firmly establishment and conservative but realises the tension necessary for political traction comes from challenging – thus he casts himself as a populist reactionary. This is his stock and trade – no matter whether he is in or out of government or in or out of parliament – a pin-striped suit, a coiffed hair-do, homilies from the 1950s and a barrage of insults against the media. While Winston has never changed his audience may have.

The event at Palmerston North was clearly overflowing. From the responses you may have thought he was chucking out meat packs from the back of a ute to party members, but I believe him when he says the 600+ were mainly public. The crowd at his Opotiki election meeting I went to (and wrote about here on The Daily Blog) were very much members of the public and he got a similar strongly positive response. The difference in audience from the 2020 campaign could be discerned from gauging what landed and what didn’t. The Covid points and pharmaceutical repeal met with great applause.

Watching various commentary following Winston’s speech that wasn’t from the Nazi-fixated mainstream media it seems clear that he has successfully attracted a sizeable number of Covid anti-vaccine, anti-mandate “truthers”. By sizeable I mean somewhere between one and two percent of the voting population – enough that if he keeps faith with them to the next election they could get NZ First over the 5% line again without the normal sub-5 decline they have previously been prone to.

The audience (and voter bloc) situation was probably best summed up by a ‘Counterspin’ bunny, Samantha Edwards, on Vinny Eastwood’s show (I’ve kept in the beginning ramble to give a flavour of where things are at in that dimension):

 “That’s how these things are done. They don’t come in and are going, ah, ‘We want to cull you! Come over here so we can cull you!’ – they do these things subtly. […] The truth is they don’t know what we are up against. For example […] I was at Winston’s State of the Nation […] yesterday and – good people. My goodness you could hear the hope in the room. It was like a religious experience, you know, it was like Church. Because he was giving them so much hope, and when he says ‘no more Covid-19 mandates’ everyone cheers the loudest so you know this room is full of hundreds of people who are aware of that – who know the danger of that; but all the other stuff they’re not aware of it […] and so they are gravitating to the voice that’s giving them that hope.”

They have gravitated, across the flat plane of the Earth, criss-crossed by chem trails, to the voice of hope.

‘Hope’ was the word she used, but that was a vacant blonde take on the matter. ‘Hate’ and ‘fear’ are more applicable for the buttons he was pushing. She may have sensed hope, and there was an element of relief that the would-be colonial calvary was on the way to defeat the would-be Te Kooti’s of Te Pati Maori, but the reversal of liberal permissiveness Winston was cataloguing was not hopeful. His tone makes it clear the motivation is resentment. That said, if he can extend that feeling of salvation from the Covid enraged for the whole term his chances for re-election look promising.

Winston swivelled to attack the media just before halfway. His point on the Public Interest Journalism Fund having a mandatory Treaty ideology was well made. Positions are so entrenched however that concessions are impossible. The media and the Left are blind to the damage the Treaty ideology prerequisite has done to the perception of bias when it comes to the PIJF. Even Willie Jackson was shocked the officials had recommended such an overt politicisation (but went along with it anyway, I mean whaddyagonnado?).

The remedies appeared more like revenge for the most part – putting a stop to things, making things shittier for minorities, turning back the clock, applying “the handbreak” gleefully. The crowd was fully engaged by the end. The unmistakable voices of the women kept chiming in: “yes” after each threat, “yes”. He was going to get the whole darn NZ First slate of coalition promises through too, no matter what. He got two more pages of stuff out of the Nats than Rimmer did, so there’s more to manage. The cynic would say this is a set up for breaking the coalition at the first moment the rest of the Cabinet tries to stymie NZ First – keep a hardline, refuse to compromise, then play victim.

I thought it interesting that there were only four (maybe five) microphones on the stand. Was it a media boycott or is that all the media that remain in 2024? Winston addressed the crisis in media with some hope – at least it sounded like hope, he wasn’t specific at all – but funding might be forthcoming if they do their jobs properly. He can’t even offer hope without it being in the form of a menacing Muldoonist taunt.

Reviewing the coverage Winston’s SOTN it may be that rather than his rhetoric being extreme it is that journalists, and time, has moved on while he has stayed the same. Sure he has been completely consistent in everything he has said since the 1970s, but that’s the problem. Those things are just, increasingly, unacceptable forms of public discourse and the media will frame his words and sentiment in a contemporary context, not as he would prefer on an NZBC newsreel.

Winston said virtually nothing on the other two legs of the governing trifecta. We would expect nothing less – it was all about him and always will be. So when he was interviewed on The Platform with Sean Plunket on Monday about it he refused to answer if Luxon ‘was a good leader’ only saying when pressed that he was easier to deal with than previous leaders. So Luxon is not a good leader then – and a push-over to boot – glad Luxon’s deputy isn’t out of step with everyone else’s thinking on this issue.