Howick old boy says no rise to super age, no means testing, and a warning about who else might govern.
Somebody at the Grey Power meeting on 28 August asked Winston Peters the question nobody in politics gets asked often enough: Why do you keep doing this?
He answered it by going back half a century, to a district he says had about 95,000 people and only three old law firms, “so I’ll start a law practice in Howick, which I did, opposite Prospect of Howick all those years ago”.
He remembered going down to the Pakuranga Rugby Club when it was bringing a player up from Invercargill, an All Black second five and, in his telling, a superstar.
He put his hand up and made an offer.
“If he wants me to do all the legal work for him, I’ll do it for free,” he told the meeting.
People said that was generous of him.
He said they had missed the point, because of all the other clients standing in the room.
The New Zealand First leader was in familiar territory on Friday, at the Pakuranga Bowling Club, where about 100 people turned out for the Grey Power Howick Pakuranga & Districts Association meeting.
Peters, who is also foreign minister, was on the stage for almost an hour.
He was MP for Hunua from 1979 to 1981, at the time representing large parts of Howick and Cockle Bay.
“It’s great to come back,” he told the Howick & Eastern Post. “You know, times change, but that was a great start.”
“I’ve never had any regrets here. I had a very successful law practice.”
“Unfortunately, I got called in a snap election, and I didn’t end up spending the next twenty-five years in Howick. But now it’s part of my experience, and it’s great to be back seeing how things are.”
Back in the hall, he gave the room a blunter version of why he is still at it.
“Well, if you’re motivated by two things, love or hate, I am going to do my utmost to stop these left-wing communists from winning.”
The speech ranged more broadly than superannuation, but that is where he began, by telling the room who he thought was under attack.
“And this group of people, 980,000 of them, and they’re meant to be you,” he said, referring to New Zealanders over the age of 65.
Peters gave the meeting three commitments, then immediately repeated them.
NZ First will not raise the age of eligibility to 67, will not means-test superannuation, and does not accept the argument that superannuation is becoming unaffordable.
“We don’t support raising the age to 67 as someone proposed,” he said.
Every other party, he said, has proposed at least one of those three things.
His argument against 67 was about physical condition.
People who have done physical work all their lives do not reach 65 in the condition of people who have not, he said, and by 67 their bones have gone.
On affordability he reached for a comparison.
New Zealand superannuation costs about 5.2 per cent of GDP a year, he told the meeting, against an OECD average of around 9 per cent.
The argument he most wanted the room to notice was about the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, which he said was set up in 2002 to build a buffer against the years when the cost of super peaks.
Peters asked why no other party talks about it.
One woman in the hall called out that they would spend it on something else, and a man that they would privatise it.
“You’re both right,” Peters told them.
Other parties cannot stand the idea that the state has fundamental roles, he said.
“Even Adam Smith, father of capitalism, admitted the state had certain roles. And this is one of them.”
Applause came for the record he claimed.
He listed the extension of the rates rebate and the retention of the winter energy payment, which he said was NZ First’s idea and not Labour’s.
This year’s Budget also put $36.4 million into making the SuperGold Card a valid form of government identification for people who hold neither a driver’s licence nor a passport.
The gold card drew the warmest response.
Peters said tens of thousands of businesses now offer SuperGold concessions, and worked the point into a joke about his own hairdresser’s discount for the over-65s.
He said the Government was seeing bipartisan agreement on aged care reform after a select committee inquiry.
The other half of the speech was a warning about who else might govern.
A Labour, Green, Te Pāti Māori and Opportunity Party arrangement would be a shambles for seniors, he said.
He spent most of that section on The Opportunity Party, telling the meeting its land tax would leave a retired couple who had saved and bought a house paying around $20,000 a year, and that its universal basic income of $19,400 would replace New Zealand Superannuation.
The Opportunity Party, led by Qiulae Wong, has come under scrutiny for its citizen’s income and land value tax proposals, set at 1.75 per cent in urban areas.
Peters called the package communism, then ran through what he said the left has proposed: capital gains, wealth, inheritance, land value and gift taxes, and asset sales.
“One person many years ago said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
He ranged more briefly over the rest of his party’s platform, including buying back the BNZ, leaving the Paris Agreement, restricting voting to New Zealand citizens, and $1,000 paid to every newborn to start them saving.
As the election campaign heats up, Peters predicted a strong performance from his party’s Botany candidate, announced only a few hours prior.
NZ First is standing former Financial Markets Authority chairman Craig Stobo against Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
“Craig Stobo will go seriously well, because he’s a top-class candidate,” Peters told the Howick & Eastern Post.
“High-quality background, a superb economics degree, first-class honours.”
“And so we’ve got, that’s our third future MP, or present MP, with an economics degree. So we’re seriously getting ready.”
Experience matters, he told the meeting, and NZ First had been on the road since March.
“But you need leaders to say the things that others won’t say, that are unpopular,” he said.
He had closed the speech itself on a challenge to both the parties that have governed for the past 40 years.
The two old parties, he said, were Pepsi and Coke, as he ridiculed their prospects.
“We’re so damn useless we can’t run the economy, but we still want you to vote for us,” he said in a mocking tone.
“You’ve had 40 years of failure. How about you get out of the way and give someone else a try?”
Voters will be passing their own judgements soon with the election being held on 7 November.
