New Zealand First’s drift to the fringe right

A few days ago columnist Andrea Vance wrote a zinger of a column about the drift of New Zealand First to the right of the New Zealand political spectrum. When one considers all that has happened, which New Zealand First has been a part of, it is no surprise.

Before I go into the reasoning behind this, I need to note the candidate selections that prompted this whole article in the first place.

Elliot Ikilei, former Deputy Leader of the New Conservatives party is one such figure. He was most prominent in the 2020 election campaign as being strongly in favour of treating the Margaret Atwood dystopian novel called The Handmaids Tale as an instruction manual for how to treat women and minorities.

Another is Michael Laws, former Mayor of Whanganui. Mr Laws claim to notoriety, aside from stridently resisting the renaming of Whanganui, has been a firm, unyielding anti-te ao Maori stance. This has seen him aggressively standing up against concepts of Maori sovereignty, raced based representation and the use of te reo Maori in public.

A third is Stuart Nash, an ex-Labour Party M.P. and former Minister of the Crown. Mr Nash has a storied past being the son of former Labour Prime Minister Walter Nash. He catches my attention because of his persistent failure to adequately address the lack of cameras monitoring behaviour on board fishing trawlers, and his comment that a woman is a “pussy and a pair of tits”.

It is not just the candidates that are standing that help highlight this movement. When I was a member of New Zealand First in the 2010’s it was a proudly centrist-nationalist outfit that had in some respects stronger environmental credentials than the Labour Party. It actively promoted centrist policies, such as a pro-rata eligibility for superannuation, giving students an emergency unemployment benefit, increasing expenditure on science and technology to 2% of G.D.P. The party also had much more moderate views around the Resource Management Act, the use and management of our natural resources. It was a strong believer in international law, the use of armed force in international affairs and the place of the United Nations.

Several policy changes have highlighted nicely how the drift has happened. Perhaps the most recent one is the most overt. A few days ago Mr Peters announced that the party would campaign on not permitting permanent residents to vote in future elections. Some have applauded this as “putting New Zealand First”, and that is arguably so. Yet at the same time, it ignores the many English and others who have settled in New Zealand and who have permanent residency, but not citizenship. New Zealand First also seem to have not realized that permanent residents being allowed the vote can actually act as an incentive to continue working towards citizenship by being allowed the privilege of casting a ballot paper.

A second one has been the stubborn refusal to recognize the Israeli treatment of Palestine as a genocide. 2011 New Zealand First almost certainly would have called it such. Indeed, the general support N.Z. has shown to the right of both U.K and U.S. politics is not something past editions of the party would have contemplated much.

Mr Peters support of both National-led (1996-1998; 2023-PRESENT) and Labour-led (2005-2008; 2017-2020) Governments – which political commentators seem keen to forget – across the decades also points to the party having been seen as viable across the spectrum. During the terms that the party has supported one or another, he has enabled some big wins – senior citizens got a Gold Card of discounts and other support; his M.P. Shane Jones was given regional development with a $3 billion budget. Mr Peters himself has been Minister of Foreign Affairs in each of these Governments.

Noting that New Zealand First seems to be developing a bit of a track record of only supporting a Government for one term before something happens, the 2026 election season seems to be bucking the trend. In 1999, New Zealand First only survived because Mr Peters won his Tauranga electorate. In 2008 and again in 2020, it exited Parliament after terms were served with the Labour led Governments of former Prime Ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern respectively.

The fact that Mr Peters and his party continue to track upwards despite this drift to the right could explain the stubbornly low support for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Here is a new right wing populist party sucking votes away from both A.C.T. and National.

Is there room for 3 big right wing parties in the New Zealand Parliament?