Winston Peters plans to set off a landslide of disillusioned Labour voters by deploying the explosive force of democratic expectations

By Chris Trotter*

Labour needs to defend itself. Winston Peters has made it very clear that he and his party are coming after Labour’s voters. Peters senses an avalanche of Labour support just waiting for a decent-sized detonator to set it sliding in NZ First’s direction. Labour’s leader, Chris Hipkins, should now brace himself for a series of NZ First political detonations, all of them aimed at triggering the mass defections from left to right that Peters needs to once again hold the post-election balance of power.

At the heart of Hipkins’ problems lies the very high probability that a substantial number of Labour voters – especially its steadily dwindling number of ageing Pakeha male supporters – would feel much more at home at a NZ First party conference than they would among the attendees at an annual conference of the Labour Party.

Over the course of the past 40 years Labour gatherings have ceased to reflect the cultural and political assumptions of the party’s traditional supporters. Their pride in the achievements of what many on the left would, without embarrassment, describe as “colonial” New Zealand, evokes fewer and fewer official echoes. Their understanding of what constitutes racist behaviour no longer accords with that of the majority of their parliamentary representatives. Even more difficult for them to understand is Chris Hipkins’ all-too-evident difficulty in answering the simple question: “What is a woman?”

Parachute these older, male, and Pakeha Labour stalwarts into the midst of a NZ First conference debate on any of the above issues and their ideological discomfort would instantly evaporate. Indeed, Labour’s strategists should be very grateful that TVNZ and TV3 seldom devote more than five minutes to covering any of the annual party conferences. Certainly, serious and consistent coverage of NZ First’s gatherings would long ago have prompted socially conservative voters to wonder out loud why Labour couldn’t be more like Winston’s lot.

That is not a question Labour’s leaders would be in any hurry to answer. Were they to try, they would soon find themselves enmeshed in the moral, ideological, political, and organisational conundrums precipitated by the parliamentary Labour Party’s sudden and unmandated adoption of what became known as “Rogernomics” in the mid-1980s.

From a mass party of more than 100,000 members, Labour, in the space of barely five years shrank to a “cadre” party of fewer (some would say considerably fewer) than 10,000 members. This sudden and profound change relieved the National Party of the need to maintain a mass membership as great, if not greater, than Labour’s.

As the historian, Barry Gustafson argues in his history of the National Party,

The First 50 Years, evolving into a genuine mass party, like Labour, was, from the party’s formation in 1936, the key objective of the party’s “master builder”, Tom Wilkes:

“[T]he Labour Party, both numerically and financially, is the greatest political organisation that has ever existed in the history of the Dominion”, and … National need[s] to match it with an effective and more democratic mass-based party, whose members … control candidate selection and play a major role in shaping policy.”

A cadre party, by contrast, organises itself around a small, highly trained, and dedicated group of members. These “cadres” constitute the core leadership and activist base of the party and are entrusted with the mission of developing and implementing both its core ideology and its key policies. Obviously, a confident mass membership, accustomed to shaping the party’s policies and selecting its candidates, is the very last thing a cadre party wants or needs.

Just how successful the core leadership of the Labour Party has been at destroying the mass membership organisation of 1984 was demonstrated last week in the formerly “safe” Labour seat of Mt Roskill (currently held by National’s Carlos Cheung).

Forty years ago, such a seat would have attracted a strong line-up of ambitious Labour hopefuls, thereby ensuring a lively democratic contest for the party’s nomination. Last Thursday, however, it was announced that Michael Wood, the man who lost his Cabinet seat for failing to fulfil his legal obligation to fully declare his financial arrangements and was then ousted from Parliament altogether by Mt Roskill’s voters, had been selected as Labour’s candidate.

Woods’ being the only nomination received, no contest was necessary. The Party bosses had made their preferences clear, and no cadre was foolish enough to put his or her own hopes of future selection at jeopardy by defying the orders of the apparatus.

National’s matching transformation, from a mass membership to a cadre party, was demonstrated with equal force earlier this year in the structuring of its annual conference. The veteran political commentator, Richard Harman, writing on his Politik website, reacted angrily:

“Politik has attended every National Party conference since this site was founded in 2015 was booked and ready to go to the National Party conference in Christchurch at the weekend, but then the agenda arrived, and as a consequence, the bookings were cancelled. The conference would be open to the media for four hours, and those four hours would be presentations from the Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers, along with two backbenchers. In short, it was a publicity stunt, not a conference like the party once had, where members had the opportunity to be heard and remits debated. But in these paranoid days, the ventilation of views alternative to those of the Beehive would have sent shudders through the current leadership. From a journalistic point of view, it would have been a waste of time (and money).”

It is no accident that two of the world’s most successful cadre parties are Singapore’s Peoples Action Party and the Communist Party of China, neither of which are conspicuous practitioners of democracy as generally understood in the West. A political party dedicated to the protection of a core set of ideological assumptions is unlikely to welcome the questioning of those assumptions in any context. Certainly not within the party, and not in the wider world outside it.

Peters gets this. He always has. It’s why he was always careful to preserve the democratic precepts laid down by Tom Wilkes in the 1930s. NZ First may be smaller than the National Party and Labour, but it conducts itself as if it was much larger.

Quite apart from the soundness of democratic principles, there are also solid practical reasons for keeping the banners of free speech flying over one’s political party. Few circumstances permit a politician to gain a better feel for the political zeitgeist than listening to the unfettered political debates of ordinary people. In their words, and the way they respond to the words of others, the driving ideas and emotions fuelling our politics are revealed. Far more effectively than any opinion poll, or focus group, a free-wheeling plenary debate at a party conference offers the receptive observer all that is needed to get a fix on the nation’s mood and purpose.

Perhaps that is why, back in August 2025, Harman commented:

“Only NZ First has a genuine old-style weekend-long debate-driven conference.
Some National MPs say that the reason for the truncated conference is to keep costs down. But NZ First members, not the wealthiest New Zealanders, seem quite happy to fork out $250 plus airfares and two nights of motels at $150 plus to attend this year’s conference in Palmerston North, where they will spend a weekend debating policy remits.”

It is the only detonator that Peters and his campaign team will need to dislodge all those older Pakeha blokes who used to vote Labour and send them tumbling down the electoral hillside into the welcoming arms of NZ First’s moderate Kiwi conservatism – the sheer explosive force of Democracy.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.