Finishing-off the old right

As the country's journalists enthusiastically sharpen their knives in preparation for finishing off Winston Peter's, Michael Laws points out their over-zealousness may well-backfire.

It's not just the fact they're clearly enjoying questioning Peter's over his fast and lose financial dealings, but the fact they've jumped straight into the role of judge and executioner.

A few months out from the election, Peter's looks to be in big trouble, and the smart thing for his media critics to do would be to simply back-off a little and let public opinion decide his fate.
Instead, over excited political editor's like Colin Espiner have jumped in to spout their personal indignation about Peter's and practically ordered him to resign.

This gives Peter's a small glimmer of hope that he can rally enough anti-liberal sentiment to get past the five percent threshold in November's national election.

To what extent the media's dislike of Peter's is due to his old-right ideology, or to his evasiveness and grandstanding, is hard to figure out, but there certainly seems to be a lot of right and left liberals who would love to see the back of him.

One thing that even Laws has overlooked is the fact that as National's policies have moved closer to NZ First's, Key's attacks on Peters have intensified. Under Key, National has assumed NZ First's centrist stance on Foreign policy and its Keynesian stance on infrastructure spending, and its also toned down its neoliberal stance on privatising state assists.

Maybe this isn't a bad thing - if National is toning down its right liberalism, then New Zealand First becomes more irrelevant as a political alternative.

The thing that disturbs me though, is that this sudden desire to decisively knock over NZ First, whilst assuming some of its policies, could be a ploy by National to make the country think its becoming more conservative, and use that as cover for increasing immigration levels.

After all, whatever one thinks of Winston Peter's populist style and NZ First's amateurism over party administration, NZ First has been only the break on unpopular immigration expansionism over the last 15 years. Sure their success in this regard may have been modest, but without NZ First's strong showing in the 2002 election, it seems unlikely Labour would have shifted its focus to skilled workers and tougher English-language requirements.

Similarly, when National opened the doors to East Asian immigration in the early 1990s, there was no political party to represent the interests of immigration restrictionists. Knocking over NZ First would once again leave the main parties in total control of immigration policy without having to worry about public opposition.

On the other hand, the removal of Peter's would make it easier to untangle the personal animosity from the ideology. If New Zealand First were able to survive without Peter's as leader (admittedly, a big ask) then it would be easier to see whether the media was actively trying to oppose old-right policies like immigration restrictionism - which a supposedly objective media shouldn't be doing - or whether it was just rallying against Peter's populism and sloppy party administration.

The other thing about the donations saga that hasn't been touched upon is that there doesn't seem to be any ideological intent behind them. It's seems strange for example that a right liberal like Robert Jones would want to give money to an old-right party he claims to be ideologically opposed too.

Similarly, if Owen Glenn supports NZ First’s political manifesto, why does he want a show down with Peter's over alleged statements made in regard to donations. Surely if he supported the party then he would want to keep things quiet.

In the weird world of political donations, people rarely seem to donate large amounts of money to political causes for straightforward reasons.

Since corporations prefer giving money to left-liberal, anti-business causes so as to improve their public image, then perhaps businessmen also like to donate to causes they don't support in order to improve their image or sway their opponents in a direction more to their liking.