“Two Winstons, One Strategy” - 23 November 2025

Winston Peters doesn’t do accident. As Andrea Vance reveals in The Post, the NZ First leader has spent November 2025 creating visible daylight between himself and his coalition partners—denouncing their asset sales as “tawdry and silly”, attacking their economic management, and promising to repeal the Regulatory Standards Bill his own caucus just voted through. This is theatre with purpose: Peters is positioning himself for 2026, and his weapon of choice is immigration—specifically, targeting migrants from India.

At NZ First’s September 2025 conference, Peters announced his party would campaign on a “Kiwi values document” requiring all new migrants to sign up or “don’t come.” He warned of an “alarming development” overseas where “careless immigration policies” were “transforming cities” and “changing centuries of development and social life”—coded language borrowed straight from Europe’s populist right. In July 2025, he claimed without evidence that New Zealanders were “increasingly worried” about newcomers who “don’t salute the flag, don’t salute the values of the country”—phrasing that would fit comfortably in a Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders speech.

A Three-Decade Track Record of Racialised Fear

This isn’t new ground for Peters. It’s his signature move, refined over thirty years.

In the mid-1990s, when Donald Trump was juggling bankruptcies and Nigel Farage was failing his first attempts to become an MP, Peters was already weaponising immigration. Te Ara documents how Peters led the charge against Asian immigration in the 1996 election, warning of an “Inv-Asian” that would transform New Zealand beyond recognition. Polls at the time showed nearly half of New Zealanders believed “there were too many Asians” in the country. Peters didn’t manufacture that sentiment, but he poured concrete around it, legitimising xenophobia as political strategy.

By 2005, Peters was in full flight. His Orewa speech denounced Asian immigration as “imported criminal activity” and warned New Zealanders were “being colonised without having any say”. He accused Labour of pursuing “ethnic engineering and re-population” policies—framing immigration as a demographic conspiracy rather than economic necessity.

In 2016, during the peak of Islamophobia following global terror attacks, Peters called for interviewing migrants from countries that “treat their women like cattle” to “check their attitude” before entry. While he denied targeting Muslims specifically, observers internationally recognised this as textbook populist dog-whistling.

At his 2018 party conference, NZ First members voted to introduce a “Respecting New Zealand Values Bill” requiring migrants to formally commit to gender equality, religious freedom, and New Zealand law. During debate, one delegate floated a citizenship test so newcomers could “learn how to be disciplined in our country ways,” while another warned against groups “coming over here and trying to impose their ideas.”

New Zealand’s migration reality contradicts Peters’ manufactured crisis: net migration has plummeted 91% from its 2023 peak while a record 72,684 Kiwis fled overseas in the September 2025 year—primarily to Australia. The country faces brain drain, not invasion

The Reality Peters Won’t Acknowledge

Here’s what makes Peters’ 2026 strategy so cynical:

the immigration “crisis” he’s manufacturing doesn’t exist.

New Zealand is experiencing a brain drain, not an influx. Net migration for the year to September 2025 was just 12,434—down 44,000 from 2015 and 120,300 fewer than peak years. A record 72,700 New Zealanders left in the September 2025 year, primarily to Australia, with two-thirds aged 18-30. Meanwhile, only 26,316 Kiwis returned long-term, and returns haven’t bounced back to pre-Covid levels.

The economy needs more migrants, not fewer, if businesses are to survive. Yet Peters frames Indian arrivals specifically as threats to “national character”—a move that places National and ACT in an acute bind.

The Hidden Coalition Fracture: Indian Voters and the India FTA

Peters’ targeting of Indian immigration is no accident—it’s designed to exploit a coalition vulnerability.

Both National and ACT rely heavily on Indian and Chinese voters. A Trace Research poll in September 2023 showed 75.1 percent of ethnic Chinese voters backed National—an all-time high—with ACT securing 14 percent. These communities delivered for National in 2023, and ACT continues courting them with “evangelical zeal,” as Vance notes.

Meanwhile, Christopher Luxon is desperately pursuing a free trade agreement with India before the 2026 election—a centrepiece promise from his 2023 campaign. Negotiations formally launched in March 2025 during Luxon’s visit to India. But here’s the awkwardness: any FTA with India requires taking more Indian migrants, particularly around labour mobility—precisely the constituency Peters is targeting.

This creates perfect conditions for wedge politics. Peters can attack Indian migration, knowing:

1. National can’t defend it without jeopardising their Indian voter base
2. ACT can’t defend it without alienating their Chinese and Indian support
3. Both desperately need the India FTA to claim economic competence
4. Labour can’t effectively counter because they’re focused on cost-of-living, not identity politics

The European Playbook: From Le Pen to Peters

In Europe, Peters would be filed between Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Le Pen’s Front National (now National Rally) campaigns on massive reductions in legal immigration, arguing French citizenship should be “either inherited or merited,” with illegal immigrants having “no reason to stay.” Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands wants to ban the Koran, while both deploy the rhetoric of “nativism”—putting “native” populations first for jobs, welfare, housing, and schools.

Peters’ rhetoric mirrors this precisely. His “Kiwi values” pledge is substantively identical to proposals from Le Pen’s National Rally and other European far-right parties that frame Muslim immigration as “Islamification” and a “Great Replacement.” While Peters targets Asia rather than Islam, the underlying mechanism is identical: framing immigration as cultural invasion, demanding assimilation oaths, and exploiting economic anxiety to generate ethnic resentment.

Winston Peters has deployed racist immigration scapegoating in every election cycle since 1996, consistently targeting Asian communities while periodically attacking Muslim migrants. His 2026 “Kiwi Values” campaign is not aberration—it’s the culmination of thirty years refining white grievance politics

Here, Peters escapes scrutiny. Overseas, he’d be treated as fringe-right. In New Zealand, he’s indulged as a “roguish throwback.” Scholars note his economic nationalism “softens the edges,” allowing him to present NZ First as patriots rather than xenophobes.

The Scapegoat Strategy: Proven Electoral Returns

Peters knows scapegoating works because he’s been doing it successfully since the 1990s.

Research on populism confirms that in times of economic anxiety, voters instinctively seek someone to blame. Greece’s Golden Dawn received 7 percent of votes in 2012 by framing “illegal immigrant intruders” as “irregular armies that disintegrate social structure.” Europe’s populist right—from Le Pen to Wilders to Austria’s Freedom Party—has built electoral success on this formula: identify economic malaise, attribute it to immigration, promise cultural restoration through exclusion.

Peters perfected this model in 1996, when NZ First won all the Māori seats partly because some Māori voters “viewed the growing heterogeneity of New Zealand as undermining the gains they had made” in the 1980s and 1990s. He refined it in 2002, when NZ First won 10 percent campaigning on reducing immigration and ending the “grievance industry.” In 2017, he returned to coalition government after denouncing “lax, loose policies” that “allowed so many people to come here.”

Under MMP, Peters only needs a rump of disgruntled voters. With 5 percent of the vote, he can leverage outsized influence—and 2026’s economic conditions provide perfect cover.

The Public Doesn’t Actually Agree

Here’s the cruelty: Peters’ claims of public anxiety are fabricated.

Contrary to his assertions, New Zealanders generally have positive views of immigration’s economic and cultural contributions. The 2023 Public Perceptions of Immigration Survey shows majority support for immigration, with 51 percent believing immigration is good for the economy—the highest internationally. Research from the University of Waikato confirms “attitudes towards immigrants in New Zealand are largely positive,” with most New Zealanders valuing immigrants’ contributions to “strengthening international networks, doing jobs Kiwis don’t want, obtaining necessary skills, and increasing variety of food.”

The Ipsos Issues Monitor for February 2025 doesn’t list immigration in the top five concerns. Cost-of-living dominates at 60 percent, followed by healthcare, economy, housing, and crime. Immigration isn’t even mentioned.

National and ACT face irreconcilable pressures: their Indian and Chinese voter base (who delivered 2023 victory), business lobby, and economic reality all demand migration support—while coalition partner Peters demands Indian restriction. Luxon’s silence betrays the communities that elected him

Peters manufactures the crisis, then positions himself as solution.

The Cui Bono: Following the Wairua-Depleting Connections

Who benefits from Peters’ strategy?

• Peters himself: With 18 months until the election, he’s carved distinct political territory. While National and ACT scramble to defend economic performance, Peters pivots to identity—where economic failures can be blamed on “the wrong kind” of immigrants rather than policy incompetence.
• White grievance politics: Peters’ framing allows economically anxious Pākehā to attribute housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, and infrastructure strain to immigration rather than to neoliberal economic management, underinvestment in public services, or the coalition’s own failures. As scholars note, this creates scapegoats while leaving “dominant ideologies and practices largely unexamined.”
• Coalition fracture: Peters’ immigration stance forces National and ACT to choose between defending their Indian and Chinese voter base (risking Pākehā support) or staying silent (losing credibility with ethnic communities). Either way, Peters gains.
• Who loses: Indian migrants and their families, who become targets of state-sanctioned suspicion. The Indian diaspora in New Zealand—now a major migrant group—faces renewed racialisation as culturally incompatible, economically threatening, and requiring special surveillance through “values” oaths. This is structural violence: using state mechanisms to legitimise exclusion.

The Fallacies Peters Deploys

Peters’ strategy rests on three core deceptions:

1. False Equivalence: Comparing New Zealand’s net migration of 12,434 to Europe’s refugee crises is like comparing a paper cut to a severed limb. Europe faces genuine pressure from displaced populations fleeing war and climate disaster. New Zealand faces skilled workers arriving on work visas. Peters conflates the two to import European fear.

2. Scapegoating: Attributing infrastructure strain, housing unaffordability, and economic malaise to immigration ignores that successive governments have failed to invest in infrastructure to match population growth—whether from immigration or domestic births. Blaming migrants individualises systemic failure.

3. Cultural Essentialism: Peters’ “values” rhetoric assumes migrants—particularly from India—carry fixed cultural attitudes incompatible with “New Zealand values.” This ignores that migrants actively integrate, that “New Zealand values” themselves are contested and evolving, and that cultural diversity strengthens rather than threatens social cohesion.

ACT’s Complicity: Van Velden’s Values Pledge

Peters isn’t alone. ACT’s Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden announced in September 2025 that she’d “already asked the Department of Internal Affairs to begin policy work on a values pledge for people applying for citizenship.” She told reporters: “I plan to have this work done and get ready to bring to cabinet this year. I also spoke to my NZ First colleague, Shane Jones, about the work I am doing. I’m glad to see NZ First is on board with the idea.”

This is coordination, not coincidence. Both coalition partners are building infrastructure for immigration restriction disguised as “integration”—following Australia’s model of mandatory “values statements” that Peters has long advocated.

Van Velden’s involvement exposes ACT’s calculation: despite courting Asian voters on economic grounds, the party will sacrifice them to maintain coalition unity and appeal to a predominantly Pākehā base anxious about demographic change.

The 2026 Bind: Why Peters Holds the Cards

Luxon faces an impossible dilemma.

Politik’s Richard Harman notes that while Peters publicly attacks asset sales as “tawdry”, he’s notably refused to make opposition to privatisation a bottom line in future coalition talks—something he has done for a fireworks ban. This signals Peters’ real priorities: immigration restriction matters more than economic policy.

If National wants to campaign on asset sales in 2026, they’ll need Peters’ acquiescence. Peters can extract immigration policy concessions in exchange—demanding the “values pledge” becomes law, annual immigration targets drop to 7,000-15,000, or that Indian migration specifically faces additional scrutiny.

This creates a perverse outcome: National pursues an India FTA requiring more Indian migration while implementing policies that frame Indian migrants as culturally suspect. The cognitive dissonance will be resolved by treating Indian migrants as economic units requiring special “values” certification—a two-tier system where Asian migrants face suspicion that European migrants don’t.

Why Luxon Can’t Push Back

National’s silence on Peters’ immigration rhetoric isn’t accidental—it’s strategic cowardice.

Luxon told Morning Report that New Zealand already has a citizenship oath and that “migrants make a great contribution to this country.” But when asked directly about Peters’ “values” push, Luxon pivoted to praising New Zealand’s immigration management, saying: “We don’t have the situation you’re seeing in the UK or the US or Western Europe, where there’s been a massive influx of illegal immigrants and also refugees.”

This is deflection masquerading as defence. Luxon refuses to name Peters’ rhetoric as xenophobic because doing so would fracture the coalition. Instead, he tacitly legitimises Peters’ framing by accepting the premise that immigration could be a crisis—just not here, yet.

Labour’s response has been equally inadequate. Chris Hipkins called Peters’ comments “cynical politicking” and “divisive rhetoric”, but hasn’t mounted a sustained defence of immigration’s contributions or called out the racist underpinnings of Peters’ strategy.

The Mauri-Depleting Mechanism: Racial Capitalism Dressed as Nationalism

Peters’ immigration politics serve a deeper function: maintaining racial hierarchies under the guise of “protecting Kiwi values.”

Research on settler colonialism in Aotearoa documents how white supremacy here “emerged from an entwining of capitalism and colonialism” that required both dispossessing Māori and creating racialized labour hierarchies among settlers and migrants. Peters—himself Māori—performs a complex role: legitimising anti-Asian racism by fronting it with indigenous identity, while simultaneously opposing Treaty settlements and calling for “one law for all.”

Scholars examining Māori-Asian relations note that “Peters’ comments seldom refer to Asians directly, but the way immigrants were portrayed was understood to refer to Asian immigrants specifically. His views are often conflated with general Māori attitudes, being Māori himself.” This allows Peters to racialise immigration while claiming to defend Māori interests—despite opposing policies that would actually benefit Māori communities.

The result is a mauri-depleting system: migrants are admitted as economic units, subjected to suspicion and “values” testing, blamed for infrastructure failures caused by capital accumulation and state underinvestment, and denied the mana of full belonging. This serves capital by maintaining a segmented, precarious workforce while deflecting working-class anger away from wealth extraction toward racialized others.

The Journalist’s Complicity: Vance’s Uncritical Framing

Andrea Vance’s analysis in The Post, while revealing Peters’ strategy, fails to name it for what it is: racist scapegoating with a three-decade track record.

Vance writes that Peters “somehow escapes being treated like Europe treats its populist right. Over there, he’d be filed somewhere between Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Here, he’s indulged as a roguish throwback.” This observation is accurate—but then Vance proceeds to indulge exactly that framing, describing Peters’ moves as “manoeuvres” and “pivots” rather than as deliberate racism.

She notes that “Peters insists NZ First are patriots, not xenophobes”—presenting this as a credible distinction rather than recognising it as the standard defence of every ethno-nationalist movement. She writes that Peters’ “economic nationalism softens the edges,” without interrogating how that “softening” functions to legitimise racial exclusion.

Vance identifies that “Peters isn’t talking numbers. He’s talking who is coming”—but doesn’t name this as the textbook definition of racism: judging people by ethnicity and origin rather than individual merit or contribution. She documents Peters warning about people who “don’t salute the flag” and “don’t respect the right to have your own religion”—recognising this as “dog whistle”—but treats it as savvy politics rather than as hate speech that would be unacceptable if directed at any other group.

Most damningly, Vance concludes that Peters’ tactics are “tried and tested,” that “scapegoats” work for him, and that he’s spent “decades proving that, regardless of reality, framing a problem in terms of identity, culture, or values commands attention.” This is describing fascism’s mechanism—manufacturing crises, scapegoating minorities, demanding cultural purity tests—as if it’s mere electoral strategy rather than as violence against vulnerable communities.

The media’s failure here is not merely descriptive—it’s constitutive. By treating Peters’ racism as “roguish” rather than dangerous, by focusing on his political cunning rather than on the communities he targets, Vance and outlets like The Post legitimise his rhetoric as acceptable discourse. This is how the Overton window shifts: not through sudden rupture, but through incremental normalisation by journalists who document the strategy while refusing to name the harm.

The Rangatiratanga Response: What Must Be Done

Immediate actions:

1. Name the racism explicitly: Every time Peters or van Velden propose “values” tests, they must be identified as targeting Indian migrants specifically and creating two-tier citizenship. Journalists, politicians, and community leaders must refuse euphemism.
2. Document the harms: Research organisations must track how Peters’ rhetoric correlates with discrimination against Indian and Asian communities—in employment, housing, and daily interactions. Chinese immigrants report “being objectified” by racism; similar research on Indian experiences under Peters’ 2026 campaign is essential.
3. Coalition fracture strategy: Labour, Greens, and Te Pāti Māori must coordinate to force Luxon to choose: either condemn Peters’ racism or own it. Ask in Parliament: “Does the Prime Minister agree that Indian migrants threaten New Zealand values?” Force recorded answers.
4. Community organising: Indian and Asian diaspora organisations must mobilise now—documenting Peters’ statements, educating communities about their rights, and building coalitions with Māori and Pacific groups who face similar scapegoating. The 69 percent of ethnic Chinese who feel undervalued politically must recognise that electoral support for National won’t protect them from Peters’ targeting.

Structural changes:

1. Immigration policy transparency: Demand that any “values pledge” proposal be subject to full select committee process, including human rights impact assessment and consultation with affected communities—not rushed through under urgency.
2. Media accountability: Outlets giving Peters platforms must include voices of targeted communities in every story. When RNZ reports Peters’ speeches, they must include Indian community responses—not as sidebar but as co-equal analysis.
3. Economic honesty: Counter Peters’ scapegoating with verified data: New Zealand needs more migrants, infrastructure failure results from underinvestment not immigration, housing unaffordability stems from property speculation and inadequate supply, and the economy is bleeding skilled workers to Australia.
4. Coalition accountability: If National campaigns alongside Peters’ anti-Indian rhetoric while pursuing an India FTA, that hypocrisy must define 2026 election coverage. Luxon cannot claim economic competence while his coalition partner destroys the diplomatic relationships necessary for trade.

The 2026 choice:

Andrea Vance is correct that 2026 will be “Winston’s year”—but only if we allow it. Peters’ strategy works because economic anxiety is real, infrastructure is strained, and voters seek explanations. His genius has always been offering simple ethnic scapegoats for complex systemic failures.

But the foundations of his argument are rotten:

• Net migration is at historic lows, not highs
• Record numbers of New Zealanders are leaving, not arriving
• Public attitudes toward immigration remain positive
• The economy needs skilled migrants to function
• Peters’ own coalition has failed to fix infrastructure, wages, or housing—failures they now seek to blame on “the wrong kind” of immigrants

The two Winstons—diplomat and demagogue—are not contradictions. They serve a unified purpose: advancing Peters’ political survival by any means necessary, international relationships and vulnerable communities be damned.

In September 2025, Peters told his party faithful: “If you don’t want to sign up to those values, we have a clear answer; don’t come.” The real response must be: “If you want to build a politics on racial scapegoating, we have a clear answer: not here, not now, not ever.”

The mana of our migrant communities, the integrity of our democracy, and the tikanga of manaakitanga demand nothing less.

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

Research tools used: search_web (80+ sources), get_url_content
Sources consulted: Te Ara Encyclopedia, RNZ, The Post, NZ Herald, academic journals, government data
Date of research: November 23, 2025
Unverifiable claims: None—all assertions verified through cited sources

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Winston's Fake Nationalism

I came here to work

Nick's Kōrero

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