The more range Luxon gives Peters, the less credible he’ll seem

We need to talk about Winston. In the past week, with the ink barely dry on the coalition agreement and the honeymoon never having eventuated, he’s usurped his Prime Minister three times, making Luxon appear weak and rudderless.

Central to all three occasions – the coalition announcement, Monday’s swearing-in ceremony at Government House and Tuesday’s ceremonial Cabinet meeting – lies Winston’s increasingly inexplicable antipathy towards the Fourth Estate, the media.

He’s accused them of being “mathematical morons” and made unfounded claims that TVNZ and RNZ weren’t truly independent, that they couldn’t “defend $55 million of bribery”. That’s a reference to the Public Interest Journalism Fund, a three-year contestable fund which the Ardern government established in 2020 to support media through the Covid pandemic. Even more bizarrely, he’s blamed the media for “allowing” the long Auckland lockdown.

Winston going to war with the media is nothing new, he’s always been an offenceis-the-best-defence kind of guy. But this unsubstantiated, unprovoked level of abuse is at an altogether culture-warlike Trumpian level. Because these false charges are being levelled at an industry whose raison d’etre is truth.

NZ On Air board member and longtime broadcaster Andy Shaw had his own truth-to-power moment on Linkedin this week, variously describing Peters as “not truthful”, “not accurate” and “malicious”, adding that his return was “the worst of this gang of thugs”. However, it contravened the rule that, as a member of a Crown entity, Shaw needed to demonstrate he was politically impartial, which led to his inevitable resignation.

Why does Winston Peters continue to perpetuate these lies? Because he’s playing to his constituency, one that doesn’t trust media.

More importantly, with Luxon improbably defending Peters at his first post-cabinet press conference, these outbursts are a harbinger of how this fledgling government intends to operate, happy to give agency to misinformation. Before the election, Winston may have told any journo who’d listen that this coalition government would be his legacy, when all he’s doing is managing to bring the Deputy Prime Ministership into disrepute.

It gives validity to the question Chris Hipkins posed about who’s really running the show and whether Luxon has control over his Government.

On November 24, he looked Prime Ministerial in announcing the formation of the coalition government. Since then, he’s been hijacked to The Winston Show, with his interjections at Peters’ ranting looking ineffectual. The prime minister's claims on Tuesday that he hadn’t seen Peters’ comments were laughable and meant he has yet to pass the most important barometer of his prime ministership: Dealing with Winston Peters’ rogue audacity.

But there’s another reason the PM is content to sit on the sidelines as Peters continues his assault on the media; Luxon’s own distrust of them. This was starkly on display during the coalition negotiations, when gallery journalists performed their own version of “Where’s Wally?”, renamed “Where’s Luxon?”, as they trudged across Auckland trying to find him. Why is this important? Because as Luxon’s buddy John Key needs to tell him, good media relations are a soft-power currency, just like money in the bank, and most effectively spent when faeces hits fan.

Luxon may be finding his way in his new job, where the tasks are immense and the burdens huge. Peters innately knows this, which makes his temper tantrums, capitalising on the prime minister's inexperience, even more egregious. It’s an inviolable political law; the longer a leader allows his deputy to make a fool of him publicly, upstaging him at every photo op, the less credible he’ll appear. If he’s to retain any semblance of who’s boss, Luxon needs to publicly imprint his authority on his deputy, and soon.

Because we’re a nation that may admire leaders who are kind but if there’s one characteristic we can’t abide it’s inadequacy.

To be fair, Luxon has made the hard calls and dealt to other senior caucus colleagues before, even in his relatively short time in Parliament. Remember when Dunedin MP Michael Woodhouse was given such a lowly position on the 2023 List that he threw a hissy fit, announcing his “departure from political life”? If he can do that, then he can deal with Peters.

No doubt the spectre of Winston walking out of the coalition deal, as he did with Jenny Shipley in 1998, hangs like some noxious cloud around the myth that is W R Peters. Luxon must ignore that and focus on what drives Peters more than anything else – his desire for personal respect. Remind the country’s deputy PM and foreign minister that his conduct in the job to date is unworthy of the positions he holds and will not earn him the respect he deserves, let alone the legacy he desires.

What’s more, Luxon will find that respect is a two-way street. By holding his deputy to the same standards he expects of anyone in his Cabinet, there’s a chance that he’ll receive it in return.

Maybe not from Winston Peters but from the rest of the country.