Chris Trotter separates the Australian and New Zealand protest vote leaders, noting that Winston Peters simply doesn’t possess the repressed political rage of Pauline Hanson, or the ability to communicate it

By Chris Trotter*

Australian politics is struggling to make sense of Pauline Hanson’s surge in the polls. It is struggling even harder to come up with an effective response. How are Australia’s “responsible parties” supposed to deal with voters who just want to “burn it all down” – especially when the “it” refers to politics-as-usual. How should what remains of the old order respond to a right-wing populist political leader whose followers gleefully hail her as the “wrecking ball” they have been waiting for?

On this side of the Tasman the questions are different. Politics-watchers here wonder why the nearest thing New Zealand has to Hanson’s One Nation, NZ First, hasn’t crashed through the political guard-rails to similar effect.

Doubtless NZ First strategists are asking themselves the same question. By this point in election year they were anticipating poll numbers in the high teens or low twenties. National was supposed to be meeting NZ First’s surge with an equal and opposite ebbing away of voter support. NZ First insiders were equally confident that their party’s putative collation partner, Act, would by now be struggling to keep itself above the 5 percent MMP threshold.

The most galling aspect of NZ First’s current status is that it almost matches the strategists’ expectations. Registering between 12-15 percent in most recent polls, NZ First has more than doubled the support it received in the 2023 General Election.

The National Party, meanwhile, is languishing at or below 30 percent in the polls – well below its 2023 result.

Act, too, is languishing – no longer registering double-figures in many of the pollsters’ most recent surveys.

There’s much to be thankful for in these numbers, but NZ First, looking across the Tasman, must surely be experiencing acute pangs of jealousy. Over there One Nation stands defiantly atop the smouldering wreckage of Australia’s two-party system, while those charged with running the country’s near-impenetrable preferential voting system struggle to come to terms with the damage inflicted by Hanson’s electoral wrecking-ball.

The strategists’ jealousy is misplaced, because the difference between there and here is easily explained. It stands before them every day in a double-breasted pin-stripe suit.

Winston Peters is no Pauline Hanson.

Indefatigably polite (off the hustings) generous to a fault ,and deeply respectful of New Zealand’s parliamentary traditions, the last thing Peters could be accused of resembling is a wrecking ball.

Nor is he a political arsonist.

A shrewd and inventive opportunist? Yes. What successful politician isn’t? But it has never been Peters’ intention to burn New Zealand’s entire political system down to the ground. New Zealanders would never have voted for him and his party in such numbers if it was.

Peters is a small-c conservative. There is too much that he values in New Zealand’s history and institutions for Peters to start fooling about with cans of petrol and matches.

From the perspective of NZ First and its leader, the people with a penchant for burning things down were the people who backed the policies of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson.

Antagonised by Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” and its aftermath, Peters launched his NZ First Party in July 1993 as a nationalistic hymn of praise to the New Zealand that the neoliberal revolution was systematically dismantling.

Far from wanting to knock things down, Peters mission has always been to rebuild what the turncoat vandals of both major parties have demolished.

The contrast between the founder of NZ First and the founder of One Nation could hardly be sharper.

Hanson is driven by and gives voice to the inchoate rage of the poorly-educated provincial battlers who struggle every day to meet their mortgage payments and repay their business loans.

She speaks for those on the receiving end of the sideways glances, raised eyebrows, and curled lips of Australia’s metropolitan sophisticates. The sort of people who use words like “xenophobia” and expect ordinary Aussies to know what they’re talking about.

Hanson has always demonstrated a kind of reckless courage: a heedlessness of the consequences of her political actions which, even as she was forced to endure them, curdled into the bitter certainty that she’s the victim of a system that’s always been rigged against “people like her”.

And if that’s the case, then what’s the point of playing the game? Why not kick the whole crooked card-table over? See how the smart-arse bastards like that!

The angry Aussie voter doesn’t need a PhD to understand Hanson’s message. Her defiance of complexity and refusal to compromise is thrilling. That’s why between 20-30 percent of Australians are willing to lift her into the Canberra cab and show her how to set the wrecking ball of populist public policy swinging:

“Go Pauline! Show those smart-arse bastards how it works!”

But that’s not Peters – even if the raw calculation of populist politics sometimes forces him to convey a strong impression that it might be.

His decision to walk among the occupiers of Parliament Grounds: the message of solidarity it conveyed to all those who, after five years of “Jacinda” and two years of Covid, were in a mood to “burn it all down”; offers a salutary example.

It worked. The angry opponents of the New Zealand state’s uncompromising management of the Covid emergency contributed a vital measure of electoral support to NZ First in the 2023 election – perhaps 1-2 percentage points of its Party Vote.

Peters owes them, no question, but how much?

It is the recurring challenge of this particularly volatile style of politics: once you’ve climbed onto the back of the populist tiger, how do you get off?

The Jacinda haters and Covid sceptics are in NZ First now. They’ve become a vocal minority at NZ First conferences – much to the discomfort of the non-radicalised majority of party members.

Peters cannot spurn the growing number of radical right-wing Kiwis out there in the electorate, but neither can he afford to set too much of the heather on fire. The sort of New Zealanders who would be delighted see Peters become prime minister simply will not believe, and certainly will not vote for, a Winston Peters who is promising to burn their country down.

It’s a fine line that the NZ First leader must walk.

In the end, however, Peters will opt to stay on the moderate side of the line. He simply lacks the anger, born of hurt and humiliation, that makes Pauline Hanson such an effective representative of the millions of Australians who feel their country slipping away from them and don’t much care who they have to hurt to stop the slide.

Peters simply doesn’t possess that much repressed political rage, or the ability to communicate it.

Watch a recording of Hanson delivering a stump speech. How often does she lighten the tone?

Entirely lacking from the repertoire of right-wing Australian populism is the 1,000 watt smile that has always reassured New Zealand voters that their pin-striped tribune means none of them any serious harm.

Winston Peters keeps his matches for his ciggies.

*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.