New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has stepped up his subtle undermining of the Prime Minister at the same time as his party has begun preparing contingency plans for an election before the end of the year.
POLITIK understands the party’s board was to meet this weekend to begin that process.
It would seem the party is worried that once ACT leader David Seymour becomes deputy Prime Minister they can see an increased potential for the coalition to breakup.
Peters’ comments might need to be seen in the context of a party leader preparing for a situation like that and beginning to put some distance between himself and the Government.
Peters himself has already said that he will begin his election campaign when he relinquishes his role as deputy Prime Minister in July.
He may have already started.
To reinforce this, he has also privately intimated that he is trying to get all his foreign travel out of the way before July to clear the decks for action.
So, in comments on Friday and yesterday, he seems to have begun to challenge the Prime Minister’s attempts to build a multi-national consensus on free trade to balance the US-initiated global trade war.
The Government’s whole trade-war strategy has been widely applauded.
Even the Opposition has been reluctant to criticise him.
Peters has not been so shy.
Luxon set out his campaign in a detailed speech on Friday.
“New Zealand will continue to work with like-minded countries to promote free trade as a path to prosperity and explore the role of the CPTPP in strengthening that vision,” he said.
“One possibility is that members of the CPTPP and the European Union work together to champion rules-based trade and make specific commitments on how that support plays out in practice.
“My vision is that includes action to prevent restrictions on exports and efforts to ensure any retaliation is consistent with existing rules.
“Collective action, and a collective commitment, by a large portion of the global economy would be a significant step towards preserving free trade flows and protecting supply chains.”
Peters has consistently opposed trade deals like the China Free Trade Agreement and the TPP (the predecessor of the CPTPP) in the past.
In 2016, he described the TPP as a “sham and a scam”.
Yesterday, speaking at the US government-funded East-West Center in Hawaii, he directly addressed Luxon’s proposal.
“The use of military language – of a “trade war”, of the need to “fight”, of the imperative to form alliances in order to oppose the actions of one country — has at times come across as hysterical and short-sighted,” he said.
“For a small country like New Zealand, when events are moving fast and changing day• by day, the best course is almost always to be cautious, to be modest, to be pragmatic, and to be practical.
“To wait for the dust to settle before making choices we may later regret.”
How Luxon will react to having his trade initiative described as “hysterical and short-sighted” remains to be seen, but Peters’s statement is a clear reminder of his reluctance to embrace the idea that New Zealand depends not only on global trade but particularly on trade with the Asian region.
He seems to ignore the fact that seventy per cent of New Zealand’s exports go to East Asia and Australia.
Peters has often boasted about his close personal relationship with Singapore’s Foreign Minister, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan.
He is also proposing an alliance involving the CPTPP.
He told the Financial Times that he would like to see a merger of the CPTPP and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.)
His proposal is important because it brings China into the equation.
China has applied to join the CPTPP, but there are questions about whether it can meet the high standards of that agreement, given its restrictions on the role of state-owned enterprises.
The RCEP agreement is generally thought to be a lesser standard agreement, but its inclusion of Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines gives it greater penetration across Asia.
Peters has long been sceptical about China and enthusiastic about America, which was reflected in his Hawaii speech.
“The enduring experiment in democratic government that was created by America’s Founders still stands, unbowed,’ he said.
“Appreciating this history also serves to quiet the breathless language of panic because what we are seeing now is what many of our predecessors have seen before.
“So, one lesson is that cool heads and quiet diplomacy will succeed where talk of fighting” will not.”
Luxon, on the other hand, is much more assertive.
“I’m not ready to call time on the rules-based trading system,” he said on Friday.
“And I’m not ready for New Zealand to give up on our efforts to advocate for it on the world stage.
“We’re not in this alone.
“The same institutions that have served New Zealand so well for so long also underpin the prosperity of so many of our friends and partners, many of whom are also continuing to make the case for free and open trade in recent days.”
Comparing the two speeches, Luxon’s bore the hallmarks of having been drafted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, while segments in Peters’s speech looked more likely to have come from his American-phile political advisor, Jon Johansson.
From New Zealand’s point of view, the case the Prime Minister is trying to make will not be convincing if it is perceived that the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister are not on the same page.
