The 'pro-natal' policies Winston Peters announced over the weekend have been tried in a great many countries. They do not work

By Chris Trotter*

My parents had four children. The total number of children produced by their offspring is three. To maintain New Zealand’s birthrate, my siblings and I should have produced at least 12 children.

Twelve required, three provided. In that discrepancy New Zealand’s demographic difficulties are neatly summarised. A dramatic reduction in average family size: from the fecund World War Two generation, to the birth-controlled Baby Boomers, to the increasingly childless Millennials, is transforming New Zealand society in a fundamental way.

We have reached the “eleventh hour” says NZ First leader Winston Peters, beyond which lies a New Zealand which most New Zealanders alive today would struggle to recognise. If Māori and Pakeha women do not commit to having at least three children, then the demographic Rubicon will be crossed and the ethnic composition of New Zealand society will, by the end of the present century, be changed beyond any hope of being changed back.

To facilitate this essential boost in fertility, NZ First is promising up to $45,000 annually to every couple (one of whom must be a NZ citizen) who beget three children and raise them responsibly (at least one parent must be employed) in a stable familial environment.

A strong indicator of the flavour of NZ First’s thinking is provided in the inflammatory statistic the party provided to illustrate the urgency of its proposal.

According to Sunday Star-Times journalist, Henry Cooke:

“The policy has an explicit anti-immigration bent. Only the children of at least one citizen would get the payment, and Peters is using data from Internal Affairs showing that a growing proportion of New Zealand births are to non-citizens – 28% in 2025, up from 10% in 2006.”

“Anti-immigration bent” would strike many as a rather mild description of the thinking behind NZ First’s policy.

Reading the policy, the party’s left-wing enemies will doubtless raise the spectre of the “Great Replacement” theory. This grotesque conspiracy theory insists that non-Western (usually Muslim) immigrants are secretly determined to overwhelm their suicidally infertile Western hosts by outbreeding them. It has generally been espoused by activists inhabiting the farthest reaches of the Far Right, including the ideologically-driven mass-murderers Anders Brevik and Brenton Tarrant.

That a policy capable of sparking this connection has been released is perhaps a measure of how much odium NZ First is now prepared to wear in the name of attracting the support of every last right-winger not already committed to either National or Act.

The thinking of Peters’ strategists is presumably running along the lines of: Those who object to these ideas are never going to vote for NZ First anyway, while those who have, to date, thought it wiser to keep their support for such “Far Right” policies under their hat will be thrilled and delighted to hear Winston say the quiet parts of contemporary politics out loud.

They may be right, but such heedless electoral cynicism is extraordinarily corrosive of what little remains of our democratic architecture. The greatest danger of Trumpism lies in the utter contempt it fosters for the self-denying ordnances of democracy. (Recall the fate of Piggy and the Conch in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”.)

Peters’ savaging of the Chinese-born Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan on the floor of the House during last week’s General Debate undoubtedly evoked a “you tell ‘em, Winston!” response from tens-of-thousands of conservative anti-immigrant voters, but it was also an act unbecoming of a hitherto widely respected New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The New Zealand of 2026 is not the New Zealand of 1996. In the 30 years that have elapsed since Peters sounded his tocsin against the “Asian invasion”, and his broadside against Xu-Nan, New Zealanders have, collectively, become a lot less tolerant of what most of them would describe as racist abuse.

And that raises another question which Peters’ advisers should, but may not, have factored into their electoral strategy: How large, really, is the hardcore Right in this country?

Most of the academic literature suggests that it is tiny – certainly well short of 5 percent of the electorate. Social media may have made this tiny minority louder, but there is scant evidence that it has made it bigger. Which poses another question for Peters’ strategists: How much of an already miniscule fraction of the electorate remains out there for NZ First to win over? Many psephologists would say: “Bugger all.”

But “bugger all” is not the correct answer to the question which, prior to the week just past, many commentators were asking. Exactly how many former left-wing voters, currently homeless, are floating around out there who might be persuaded to cast their votes for NZ First?

Not every leftist in New Zealand follows their erstwhile comrades “line” on the Treaty, Gaza, and Transgenderism. Not all of them are willing to accept Chris Hipkins’ “nobody moves, nobody gets hurt” election strategy which has led to him  to promise changes that are so small and cheap that they make Labour look, well, cheap and small.

A not insignificant number of these free-floating lefties have been drawn to NZ First’s hands-on approach to regional development and its staunch defence of parliamentary sovereignty. So much so that many were contemplating over-riding the ideological reflexes of a lifetime and voting for Winston Peters’ party.

What the NZ First leader should have asked himself before he unleashed his inner redneck on Xu-Nan, was how many of those considering a shift of electoral allegiances in 2026 had also marched against the Springbok Tour in 1981.

That’s right, Winston, these are older voters with long memories. People who remember the almost offhand racism with which the Tour was defended by their fellow New Zealanders, and pretty quickly learned to despise it.

The same people who, appalled by the Minister of Foreign Affairs racially-charged outburst during last week’s General Debate, are no longer contemplating a vote for NZ First.

There was a time when Peters grasped what Mike Hutcheson, one of New Zealand’s leading advertising executives, also understood: that New Zealanders have always been and remain “socialists of the heart”. That Winston Peters knew that the reason so many Kiwi parents were happy to raise so many kids in the 1950s, 60s and 70s was that the post-war world was shaped by and devoted to the needs of families in general, and children in particular. Why wouldn’t Kiwis in their 20s feel confident enough to start a family when all the things that families need: homes, jobs, education, health-care; were the top priorities of both political parties?

Surely Peters must understand that the only “Great Replacement” Kiwis are interested in is the one that replaces neoliberalism with the set of economic and social policies that once made New Zealand “such a great place to bring up kids”.

The “pro-natal” policies he announced over the weekend have been tried in a great many countries – most notably South Korea and Hungary. They do not work.

To keep the troops fighting in World War One their government promised them “a land fit for heroes”. If Winston Peters really intends to win the next election, then he needs to promise New Zealanders “a land fit for children”.

*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.