Biography

● Winston Peters trained as a teacher but abandoned teaching in 1967, and spent several years living and working in Australia as a blast furnace worker with BHP in Newcastle and later as a tunneller in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales.

● He graduated from Auckland University with a BA and LLB and worked as a lawyer at Russell McVeagh between 1974 and 1978.

● He entered national politics in 1975, standing unsuccessfully for the National Party in the electorate seat of Northern Ma¯ori; he got 1873 votes, and was the first National candidate in a Maori seat for some years who did not lose his deposit.

● In the face of the Labour government’s plan to create coastal land reserves for the public, he and his Nga¯tiwai iwi campaigned and lost virtually no ancestral land on the Whangarei coastal areas. This helped inspire the 1975 Land March led by Whina Cooper.

● As Minister of Ma¯ori Affairs, he coauthored the Ka Awatea report in 1992 which advocated merging the Ministry of Ma¯ori Affairs and Iwi Transition Agency into the present Te Puni Ko¯kiri (Ministry for Ma¯ori Development).

● In May 1998, he was appointed to the Privy Council and later given the title of “The Right Honourable” — an honorific reserved for the Prime Minister, Speaker of the House, Governor General and Chief Justice.