Winston Peters, Oxford Coma

Last week in between haunting the parliaments of Scandinavia like the hybrid Count Dracula and Count Richelieu that he is, Winston Peters delivered a speech in the Oxford Union debate in the affirmative of the proposition ‘This House Believes That the Courts Now Undermine Democracy’. It was so dismal it didn’t even have a title – so it was perhaps less a coherent whole as a collection of Jon Johansson’s thoughts on Winston’s prejudices with a dash of AI. And the result was less like Cicero and more like the Oxford Coma. Superficial, populist cant in the form of drunken shadow boxing. It was a risible effort.

He had it put it on the Beehive website with a disclaimer “[…NB the speech content is for the purposes of contesting the debate and is not an official statement of Government policy.]”. Well then why put this dotard dribble onto the official statements of Government policy website (beehive.govt.nz) under the Foreign Affairs portfolio then if it isn’t? It indicates he delivered this speech as Foreign Affairs Minister. And in this speech – even though he says he claims he isn’t – he criticises the NZ judiciary for its decisions, he criticises the UK judiciary. And he’s published those criticisms on the Beehive website – not the NZ First Party website – making it a government matter.

I mention this posting on the Beehive website not as some pedantic point, but as the same class of political convention infringement that Winston thought was enough to give Phil Goff his marching orders from the London High Commission. Phil’s dismissal was because he made a very mild remark critical of President Trump which he thought was covered by Chatham House rules. What on Earth gave Phil that preposterous impression? He was in Chatham House when he said it! Winston’s judgment – heart-rending apparently (?) – was he had to go for that mistake.

And yet here we have Winston openly having a go, having a go, having a go New Zealand, at the judiciary at the Oxford Union, in front of cameras, and then he’s posting the speech to the government website as Foreign Affairs Minister.

If Phil was wrong to make some opaque reference to Churchill and Trump as a rando at a q+a at Chatham House then why isn’t Winston wrong for making criticisms of the British and New Zealand judiciary from the dispatch box at the Oxford Union? And then posting it to the official government website as Foreign Affairs Minister? Is this not intolerable, rogue behaviour? Behaviour that other politicians and officials would find, as Sir Humphrey might say, too courageous for their career to sustain. Winston’s vanity and Luxon’s inability to exert any control whatsoever over him has led to this poorly executed egotistical indulgence.

What would Winston say to a senior judge that went to the Oxford Union and made the same tenor of remarks about parliamentarians that he made about them? How far does the comity stretch in the other direction I wonder? I cannot imagine that occurring – at least not from an equivalent 80 year old male judge. And what Winston said in that speech (the video hasn’t been posted up at time of writing) is not much more than a corny homage to mythic populism. The way Winston describes democracy leaves the door ajar to authoritarianism – with the “tyranny of the minority” being identified as a menace, but no corresponding tyranny of the majority. Majorly Muldoon. It was a series of piss weak arguments that might elicit a reliable ripple of applause from the Opotiki Senior Citzens’ Hall (last time I was at one of his speeches during the 2023 election), but had little truck with those after a serious treatment of the subject.

Most of what Winston said was pap. I just want to focus on this passage:

While trust in the judiciary remains comparatively high in New Zealand, we do, as we have said, have concerns about judicial overreach. A case in point: the Foreshore and Seabed Act (2004) introduced the requirement for Māori land claimants to have an unbroken relationship with the land. That is, they couldn’t have abandoned their occupation of that land for that right to that same land to remain uninterrupted.

Recent courts weakened that test by introducing a new concept, ‘Tikanga’, an ambiguous concept of Māori lore because ‘Tikanga’ between tribes is different – from tribe-to-tribe-to-tribe. This judicial activism was never the intention of legislators, nor made mention of, and we have been forced to legislate this week to restore the original intent.

Friends, how many court decisions have you observed where the judicial penalty for the offence is at the bottom, not the top end, of the law-makers’ intent. 

All of that passage quoted is a lie – just a series of flat out lies. And he’s saying these lies as NZ Foreign Minister. “Abandoned” is a lie – it’s confiscation by the parliament re-defining something to suit political ends representing white settler and foreign interests. The judges were always going to decide the actual application of the legislation. And the mis-direct in the last sentence. It is just such unworthy, despicable, cretinous muck.

When I talked to the late Claude Edwards, the Whakatohea Iwi leader who took one of the first cases for the foreshore and seabed (which is still going through the courts Re: Edwards) and I questioned what was the point when the parliament can just make up arbitrary rules on it, he said that he trusted the courts because the judiciary cannot help but make decisions based on all the facts and all the other laws – which would mean they would side with customary title and against what the government had intended with the legislation (the then FSA 2004 – now MACA 2011). Claude was wise, he was right. What Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are doing in imposing a monstrous and deliberately unachievable test on Maori – and not on anyone else – is not just racism and colonisation – it is deeply hypocritical. The Treaty guarantees “undisturbed possession” and the Treaty comes prior to the democracy he cites. The sources of law are not limited to or dependent on statutes of the NZ Parliament (as Winston well knows). I would hate to think I was the wise one who was right about the nature of the beast.

Winston’s side lost – and lost democratically in a vote of that House. The young minds, the cream of Britain’s intellectual tradition, thought Winston’s specious self-serving twaddle was exactly that. How humiliating for Winnie, the rabid old mutt. An Anglophile, colonialist, half-cocked, half-pint, half-wit rejected by Home. Tweedle-dee, David Seymour, also made the pilgrimage to the Oxford Union earlier this year – and his side also lost, but with much less fanfare and less humiliation as Rimmer has always had that look of the loser about him that lowers expectations. So, of the three Maori MP’s who have ever participated at the Oxford Union it is only Willie Jackson who has been on the winning side. And for the record Willie was arguing for Maori – not against them as Winston does. Who would have guessed the Maori Matlock would turn out not to be Winston, but Willie.