Winston Peters

• 1. Introduction

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  Winston Raymond Peters has spent five decades making New Zealand politics uncomfortable for everyone around him. Born on the 11th of April 1945 in Whangārei, he has been a member of Parliament across five separate stints, survived multiple political obituaries, and returned to serve as deputy prime minister not once, not twice, but three times. His birth certificate lists him as Wynston, not Winston. His father was Māori, primarily of the Ngāti Wai iwi; his mother was of Clan MacInnes Scottish ancestry. That duality would shape everything about him.

  He has been sacked from Cabinet, ejected from his own party, shut out of Parliament entirely, and then invited back in to hold the balance of power all over again. He founded New Zealand First in 1993 after leaving the National Party, and he was still leading it thirty years later when he helped form the Sixth National Government. By the time of the 2023 general election, he was being elected to Parliament for the fifteenth time.

  How does a politician survive for this long, and on these terms? The answer involves a talent for timing, a willingness to shift alliances in ways that enrage loyalists, and a public appetite for exactly the kind of populist disruption he keeps delivering. What follows traces the arc from a farm in Whananaki to the offices of foreign affairs, and asks what kind of politics keeps a man like Peters not just relevant but indispensable.

• 2. From Whananaki to Parliament

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  Peters grew up on a farm in Whananaki, and the route from there to a seat in the New Zealand Parliament wound through a blast furnace in New South Wales and a tunnel in the Snowy Mountains. After leaving Whangarei Boys' High School and Dargaville High School, he taught briefly at Te Atatū Intermediate School in Auckland in 1966 before heading to Australia, where he worked for BHP in Newcastle as a blast-furnace worker and later as a tunneler. He returned to New Zealand in 1970 and enrolled at the University of Auckland, studying history, politics and law.

  At university he joined the New Zealand Young Nationals and became acquainted with Bruce Cliffe and Paul East, both of whom later served as Cabinet ministers. Peters graduated with a BA and LLB in 1973, married his girlfriend Louise, and spent the next several years working as a lawyer at Russell McVeagh between 1974 and 1978. He was also a rugby player, captaining the Auckland Māori Rugby team and playing for the University Rugby Club.

  His first attempt at elected office came at the 1975 general election, when he stood for the National Party in the electorate of Northern Maori. He secured 1,873 votes without losing his deposit, which the source notes is rare for a National candidate in a Māori seat. That campaign was preceded by a local land fight: Peters and other members of his Ngāti Wai iwi had successfully pushed back against a Labour government plan to establish coastal-land reserves in the Whangārei area, with the result that virtually no ancestral land was taken there. That campaign also helped inspire the 1975 Land March led by Whina Cooper.

  Peters finally entered Parliament after the 1978 general election, but only after winning a High Court electoral petition that overturned the original result for a southern Auckland electorate seat, where he had defeated Malcolm Douglas, the brother of Roger Douglas. He took his seat six months after polling day, on the 24th of May 1979.

• 3. The Māori Loan Affair and Rising Profile

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  On the 16th of December 1986, Peters stood up in Parliament and exposed what became known as the Māori loan affair. The case involved the Māori Affairs Department attempting to raise money illegally through a NZ$600 million loan package offered by the Hawaiian businessman Michael Gisondi and the West German businessman Max Raepple. The exposure gave Peters a national profile that his earlier years in Parliament had not.

  By then he had already survived losing his seat in 1981 and winning it back in 1984 in the electorate of Tauranga. After re-entering Parliament he had been appointed Shadow Minister of Māori Affairs, Consumer Affairs and Marketing by National leader Sir Robert Muldoon. When Jim Bolger replaced Jim McLay as National leader in March 1986, Peters was nominated for the deputy leadership but declined.

  Following the loan affair exposure, Peters was elevated to National's Opposition front bench as spokesperson for Māori Affairs, Employment and Race Relations in 1987. When National won the 1990 election and Bolger became prime minister, Peters became minister of Māori affairs in the Fourth National Government. In 1992 he co-authored the Ka Awatea report, which advocated merging the Ministry of Māori Affairs and the Iwi Transition Agency into what became Te Puni Kōkiri, the Ministry for Māori Development.

  But the same instincts that made Peters effective as an opposition MP made him difficult as a Cabinet minister. He continued to criticise the government's economic policies, particularly the neoliberal programme nicknamed Ruthanasia. His colleagues distrusted his publicity-seeking. In October 1991, Bolger sacked him from Cabinet. Peters remained a National backbencher, kept criticising the party publicly, and when the party moved to prevent him from seeking renomination in late 1992, he challenged them in the High Court in the case Peters v Collinge and won. In early 1993 he chose to resign from the party and from Parliament, triggering a by-election in Tauranga which he won easily as an independent.

• 4. Founding New Zealand First

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  Shortly before the 1993 general election, Peters established New Zealand First in July of that year. The party drew on voters from both Labour and National who were alienated by neoliberalism. One early signal that the party was not simply Peters's personal vehicle came when another New Zealand First candidate, Tau Henare, unseated the Labour incumbent in Northern Maori. Scholar Todd Donovan notes that this began a strong association of the party with Māori voters.

  In 1994 Peters started the Winebox Inquiry, which investigated companies using the Cook Islands as a tax haven. He had also advocated for the mixed-member proportional electoral system during the 1992 and 1993 referendums on electoral reform. That advocacy paid off dramatically in 1996: under MMP, New Zealand First won 17 seats, up from 2, and swept all of the Māori electorates. Neither National nor Labour could govern without New Zealand First's support, which gave Peters the label "kingmaker".

  It was widely expected he would side with Labour. He had bitterly criticised his former National colleagues. But after more than a month of negotiations with both parties, Peters entered into coalition with National. Michael Laws, then New Zealand First's campaign manager, later claimed Peters had already decided to go with National and used the Labour talks purely to extract more concessions from Bolger.

  The concessions were extensive. Peters became deputy prime minister and treasurer, the latter position created specifically for him. He was also senior to the minister of finance, a highly unusual arrangement. He had full latitude to select the ministers from his own party without Bolger's approval. The coalition held for roughly two years before unravelling after Jenny Shipley staged a party room coup and became prime minister. After a dispute over the privatisation of Wellington International Airport, Shipley sacked Peters from Cabinet on the 14th of August 1998. He immediately ended the coalition. Several New Zealand First MPs, including deputy leader Henare, stayed in government and left the party; Henare and other disaffected MPs formed the short-lived Mauri Pacific party. None of them retained their seats at the next election.

• 5. Scandal, Defeat, and Comeback

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  New Zealand First dropped to 4.3% of the vote in the 1999 election. Peters just barely held on to Tauranga, defeating a National challenger by 63 votes after losing nearly twenty percent of his 1996 vote. The party was reduced to five seats. In the 2002 election Peters campaigned on reducing immigration, increasing punishments for crime and ending what he called the "grievance industry" around Treaty of Waitangi settlements, and New Zealand First won 10% of the vote and 13 seats.

  After the 2005 election Peters lost his longstanding hold on Tauranga to National MP Bob Clarkson. He remained in Parliament as a list MP and secured the portfolios of Foreign Affairs and Racing in Helen Clark's Labour-led government, a move that attracted scepticism given his earlier statements about immigration. National leader Don Brash said the choice was "astonishing" because, as he put it, "the whole region distrusts Winston Peters."

  A funding scandal in 2008 damaged his credibility severely. Peters had received $100,000 from Owen Glenn, a wealthy New Zealand businessman based in Monaco, to fund legal costs from the Clarkson challenge. Under parliamentary rules, any gift to an MP over $500 must be declared. Peters denied knowing the source of the money, but his lawyer Brian Henry and Glenn himself contradicted that denial. The Vela family, prominent in the racing industry, had also donated $150,000 to Peters over four years in sums of $10,000. A further $25,000 donation via the Spencer Trust, administered by Peters's brother Wayne, was not declared to the Electoral Commission as required.

  On the 22nd of September 2008, the Privileges Committee recommended Peters be censured for "knowingly providing false or misleading information on a return of pecuniary interests." Parliament passed the censure motion the following day. Peters was later cleared by the Serious Fraud Office on the donations but some electoral law matters were referred to the Electoral Commission. In the 2008 election he tried to regain Tauranga and lost to National's Simon Bridges by a margin of 11,742 votes. New Zealand First fell to 4.07% of the party vote and was shut out of Parliament entirely. Political commentators described the defeat as "the end of the road."

  Peters said in his concession speech, "This is not the end." In the 2011 general election, New Zealand First won 6.8% of the party vote and secured eight seats. Peters was back.

• 6. The Ardern Coalition and Acting Prime Minister

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  Peters's 2017 election produced a familiar dilemma: neither National nor Labour had enough support to govern alone. National leader and Prime Minister Bill English signalled interest in a coalition with New Zealand First; a National-New Zealand First arrangement would have given them 65 seats, enough to govern without additional support. Labour leader Jacinda Ardern proposed a three-way arrangement with New Zealand First and the Greens.

  Peters said he would not make his final decision until the special votes results were released on the 7th of October 2017. During negotiations with Ardern, he abandoned his party's policy to hold a referendum on Māori seats, explaining that the defeat of the Māori Party during the election had removed the rationale for it. On the 19th of October 2017, he announced that New Zealand First would form a coalition with Labour, citing changing international and internal economic circumstances and a belief that Labour was better placed to handle social and economic welfare.

  As part of the agreement, Peters became deputy prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, minister for state owned enterprises and minister for racing, assuming those positions on the 26th of October 2017. On the 19th of January 2018, Ardern announced she was pregnant and that Peters would serve as acting prime minister for six weeks after the birth. The birth happened on the 21st of June 2018. Peters managed the day-to-day business of the country while Ardern was on maternity leave, which the source describes as a first in modern politics. Ardern returned to the role of prime minister full-time on the 2nd of August 2018.

  In August 2019, Peters called for a binding referendum on the Government's proposed Abortion Legislation Bill, claiming it had not been part of New Zealand First's coalition agreement with Labour. The demand surprised both Justice Minister Andrew Little and New Zealand First MP and cabinet minister Tracey Martin. Peters declared that New Zealand First MPs would not be allowed a conscience vote and would vote as a caucus in favour at first reading. Little rejected the referendum demand. In October 2019 Peters announced a NZ$7.7 million investment upgrade to the SuperGold Card scheme, including a new website, mobile app and 500 new partner businesses. According to the New Zealand Herald in July 2020, New Zealand First fully or partially achieved 80% of the 70 promises made to secure its support for Ardern's premiership.

  In the 2020 general election held on the 17th of October, Peters and his fellow New Zealand First MPs lost their seats after the party's vote dropped to 2.6%, below the five percent threshold. Peters continued in a caretaker role until the 6th of November 2020, when he was replaced as deputy prime minister by Grant Robertson and as foreign affairs minister by Nanaia Mahuta.

• 7. Foreign Affairs in the Sixth National Government

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  Peters returned to Parliament for the 2023 election and won 6.08% of the popular vote along with eight seats. After coalition negotiations between National, ACT and New Zealand First concluded on the 23rd of November 2023, Peters met Christopher Luxon and David Seymour in Wellington to finalise the agreement. Under its terms, Peters and Seymour would share the deputy prime ministership in rotation, with Peters holding the office for the first half of the parliamentary term. Peters again became minister of foreign affairs.

  His first overseas engagement as foreign minister was a visit to Fijian prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka on the 15th of December 2023. On the 12th of January 2024, he expressed New Zealand's support for Anglo-American airstrikes against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen, stating that "we are a trading nation that relies on international maritime law and the free flow of goods, and Houthi actions strike at the heart of New Zealand's national security." On the 22nd of February 2024, he announced a NZ$25.9 million aid package to Ukraine that brought New Zealand's total contribution since the war began to over NZ$100 million.

  Peters undertook a semi-global tour from the 1st of April 2024, moving from Cairo through Poland, Brussels for the NATO Foreign Ministers summit, Stockholm, New York and Washington DC. In Washington he met with Senator Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. His comments indicating a closer alignment with the United States prompted criticism from former prime minister Helen Clark, whom Peters had previously served under as foreign affairs minister. Clark said that closer ties to the United States would compromise New Zealand's independent foreign policy. Peters responded that Clark "would regret the comments she's making."

  On the 6th of March 2025, Peters dismissed Phil Goff as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom after Goff made remarks questioning Trump's understanding of history at a Chatham House event in London. Peters said the remarks made Goff unsuitable to represent New Zealand in the UK. His foreign affairs tenure also involved tensions with China over the Cook Islands, with New Zealand suspending nearly NZ$20 million in core funding to the Cook Islands in June 2025 after the Cook Islands government signed a partnership agreement with China without consulting New Zealand. Those strained bilateral relations were eventually repaired: on the 2nd of April 2026, Peters and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown signed a defence and security declaration in Rarotonga, and New Zealand confirmed it would resume about NZ$29.8 million in annual aid funding to the territory.

• 8. The SuperGold Card and Domestic Imprint

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  Peters launched the SuperGold Card in August 2007 as a condition of the 2005 confidence-and-supply agreement with Helen Clark's Labour Government. The card included free off-peak public transport funded by the Government, plus discounts from businesses and companies across thousands of outlets. Peters negotiated its introduction despite widespread opposition on the grounds of cost.

  The card became one of his flagship domestic initiatives across multiple stints in government. By October 2019, while serving as deputy prime minister under Ardern, he announced a NZ$7.7 million upgrade to the scheme that added a new website, a mobile app and 500 new partner businesses. The scheme illustrates how Peters has consistently oriented his politics toward older voters, a constituency he cultivated explicitly through his campaign themes around senior citizens and his Racing portfolio.

  His domestic record also includes moments that generated lasting controversy. A state of the nation speech in Palmerston North on the 17th of March 2024 drew sharp criticism when he compared the previous Labour Government's co-governance policies to race-based theory in Nazi Germany. The Holocaust Centre of New Zealand's spokesperson Ben Kepes described the remarks as offensive to Holocaust victims and survivors. Labour leader Chris Hipkins described Peters as a "drunk uncle at a wedding." Peters doubled down in a Radio New Zealand interview the following day and later claimed his remarks had been "deliberately misrepresented."

  The British anarchist punk band Chumbawamba objected to Peters using their song Tubthumping for political campaigning and expressed disagreement with his politics, asking their record label Sony to act. Peters served as deputy prime minister from the 27th of November 2023 to the 31st of May 2025, when he was succeeded in that role by David Seymour as part of the previously agreed rotation. He retained the foreign affairs portfolio and his place in the coalition beyond that handover.