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Winston Peters has condemned the Government’s “malignant tinkering” and “retarded theft”, promising to undo its treaty, climate, and immigration policies.
In a speech to more than 200 people on Sunday afternoon, the NZ First leader promised to ban gang patches in public places, spend “billions” on education and fix rising truancy and “reset” Immigration NZ to bring in skilled workers but not their families.
“New Zealanders are getting sick and tired, and they’re getting sick of soft-in-the-heart, with a head to match, lily-livered liberals espousing policies against New Zealand’s interest when it comes to immigration,” he said.
“These are the issues that should guide coalition negotiations.”
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Peters gave the speech to close out the NZ First annual conference held in Christchurch this weekend, at which he promised to return the party to Parliament in 2023.
The more than 80 party members that attended the conference debated policies they hoped to take to the election, including overturning a Labour-National housing density law, changing tax brackets to account for a decade’s worth of inflation, and reviewing the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in the country’s laws.
“Co-governance, separatism, and the seeds of apartheid are being scattered throughout all of our laws and institutions,” Peters said in his speech.
He said he knew nothing of the Govenrment’s co-governance plans when he was in coalition with Labour, and now “with no handbrake, they are ramming it down your throats”.
The Government’s Three Waters reforms, which would grant iwi a decision-making role in water administration under a co-governance model, were not reforms but “retarded theft”.
He said the plan to require farmers to pay for methane emissions from livestock was “bovine scatology – pure unadulterated bull dust”.
“Apparently Greta in the supermarkets of Europe is going to search the shopping aisles for a 35% more expensive product because the PM said so.
”Instead of collapsing our farming industries, we should be preserving them … This is woke virtue signaling madness again.”
Throughout the conference, both Peters and former NZ First MP Shane Jones were scathing of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Labour’s electoral prospects and record in the past three years, claiming the Government had lost its way after NZ First was voted out of Parliament in 2020.
The ACT Party, which has been campaigning on issues favoured by NZ First, was similarly targetted by Peters. ACT leader David Seymour on Sunday afternoon issued a statement calling Peters “Winnie-the-wasted-vote”.
But Peters and Jones made little mention of the National Party throughout the weekend, though there was some criticism of the idea of tax cuts – which National is pushing.
“You hear parties at the moment saying, ‘We’re going to give you tax cuts’. Well, that’s what Liz Truss in the UK the other day. It lasted four days.”
Peters, after his speech, said said he followed National leader Christopher Luxon but he would not give a view on the leader or its party.
“This is about a New Zealand First convention. It’s not about the Labour Party. It’s not about the National Party, or any other party,” he said, after his speech.
Earlier on Sunday, party members agreed unanimously to a policy of adjusting tax brackets to not only catch up with inflation, but automatically adjust in line with inflation.
The effect of such a policy would halt “tax creep”, where more wage inflation has more tax taken from workers as the tax brackets do not similarly adjust.
The National Party also has this policy, but NZ First wants to go further by adjusting tax brackets to catch up with a decade’s worth of inflation, instead of the four year’s worth National wanted.
Former NZ First MP Shane Jones told members NZ First did not support wholesale tax cuts – another policy of National’s – but felt that such an adjustment was needed to respond to inflation.
“This is not a crazy ACT scheme to shrink the state,” he said.
Also supported by a majority of members was a policy of revoking a combined Labour and National law to allow three-storey building in much of New Zealand’s cities without requiring resource consent – though there was some disagreement.
“What’s going on in some of our family areas is that they’re building these abominations, these three-storey, 12 meter high apartment blocks, that have the architectural graduer of a three-storey dog kennel designed by a six year old,” said Jon Reeves, a former NZ First candidate.
Other remits included introducing financial literacy as a subject for high school students, a moritorium on new environmental regulations for the agricultural sector.
There was debate, and agreement, over removing the word “apartheid” from a policy denouncing separatism and “racist ideology”.
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