HIS INNER CIRCLE
The people Winston Peters depends on
NZ First leader’s staff best placed to know what’s real and what’s theatre, writes Audrey Young
There’s Winston Peters, the New Zealand First leader, and Winston Peters, the Foreign Minister.
This week we have seen Peters overseas, visiting Egypt, Poland, Sweden and Brussels for a Nato meeting, speaking to the United Nations, and meeting leading diplomats in Washington DC, behaving like a statesman, as befits a Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
It has been in marked contrast to Peters, the combative party leader, the one you are more likely to see snarling on the black and white tiles at Parliament, the one who will call a reporter “a drongo” or just barge through to the House playing Chumbawamba on his cellphone to cock a metaphorical snook at legal threats for having played it at a party meeting.
At the start of the coalition Government, Peters’ default fighting form was dominating the headlines at the expense of others but that has settled for the moment.
There is no doubt Peters has had a good trip as Foreign Minister. It even prompted the usually unsentimental Newstalk ZB host Heather du PlessisAllan to declare a sense of “pride” at his efforts abroad.
But which is the real Peters and which is theatre?
The people who spend more time with him than most are his staff. And with a political career that began in 1978, he has had a few, in Government and in Opposition, in political roles and in the public service.
The roll call included former MP Michael Laws, who is now a host on The Platform; Graham Harding, a former Police Association secretary; Ernie Davis, a former school principal who was his chief of staff for many years; political strategist Sarah Neems; Roger Foley and Frank Perry, who were former journalists turned press secretaries; Damian Edwards and communications consultant David Broome.
The role of staff has varied, depending on which role Peters was in or aspiring to at the time.
Laws, in his book The Demon Profession, described an encounter in Peters’ smoke-filled office in 1987 when Peters was determined to make a mark as National’s new employment spokesman and Laws was responsible for the issue in National’s research unit.
“This day Peters was in a thoughtful mood. He wanted a short oral briefing on the employment portfolio, the key issues, the trends and the policy options to which he sat back and listened without question,” wrote Laws.
After Laws had finished, Peters leaned forward and said: “Laws, I’ll do you a deal — you look after me and I’ll look after you. You find the issues and I’ll put them on the front page.”
Laws said Peters was an early believer in the American principle of political management: “Surround yourself with smart advisers, distil their best advice, then pray to the heavens you choose the right option.”
Frank Perry was one of Peters’ most trusted advisers in a previous era, mainly in Opposition. The former RNZ senior journalist worked for Peters in various stints between 1999 to 2012 but they still keep in touch.
“He rang me on Christmas Day,” said Perry.
“If it’s a birthday or Christmas Day or he does something brilliant or doesn’t do something brilliant or if I hear something I think he should know about, I’ll flick him an email. From time to time we have a yap.”
Perry said Peters was very pleasant to work for and there were no histrionics.
“He likes ideas,” said Perry and recounted his first meeting.
Perry was given a test to write a speech for Peters and, after adding a bit of sparkle to it, was invited to meet Peters in his office.
Peters had a picture of former
Prime Minister Richard Seddon in his office and Perry, a New Zealand history buff, recounted one of Seddon’s claims — that he could play an audience like a piano. A discussion about Seddon ensued and an enduring relationship began.
Perry said some of the run-ins with media were real and some were theatre. But Peters had not always been treated fairly by the media and he cited the coverage of the Winebox.
Former Press Gallery journalist Roger Foley worked for Peters when he was first Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer.
“I found him extremely pleasant to work for,” said Foley. “He’s quite private and to a degree shy. The person you see in the public arena is not the person you see behind closed doors. He is not aggressive at all.”
He was loyal to his staff and they were loyal to him.
Foley said that in the office situation, Peters was quiet — others spoken to for this piece made a similar observation, that he has a quiet demeanour in the office.
He could also be a lot of fun. Foley recalled a visit to China with Peters and they were taken up to the Great Wall, to quite a steep part where two guardsmen were on horses.
“The next thing Winston is up on the saddle sitting on this horse in his pin-striped suit. It really brought the place down.”
Peters has usually surrounded himself with smart advisers. Perhaps the most salient fact about his current staff is that his inner circle today is almost the same group that was with him when he was last in Government.
Jon Johansson, a former political scientist and author, has returned to work for Peters as a special foreign affairs adviser, having previously been his chief of staff through tumultuous times.
In his former job lecturing at Victoria University of Wellington, Johansson had been on good terms with Peters over the years. He had spoken at an NZ First conference but was never a party apparatchik.
They shared a love of politics and history.
Johansson gave up academia to work in the heart of Government from 2017 to 2020 when NZ First installed Labour to Government and Peters became Deputy Prime Minister.
By the end of the three years, Peters and Johansson’s relationship remained strong but they were not on good terms with Labour. The strains were largely built through a sense in New Zealand First that it was sidelined, particularly during Covid-19.
After Peters and the party were voted out of Parliament in 2020, Johansson became a communications consultant and had a newspaper column until the call-up in 2023.
Johansson’s advice to Peters is independent of the official advice given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT). He has written some of Peters’ chunkier speeches but is not thought to have written the one Peters delivered to the United Nations.
Setting out New Zealand’s position in such a forum is very much the domain of the ministry.
Michael Appleton is the senior Foreign Affairs adviser to Peters and both he and Johansson have been with him on his recent trip.
Appleton left his post as New Zealand’s first resident High Commissioner to Sri Lanka to return to Peters’ office, although those with more than a passing interest in cricket probably know him as New Zealand’s walking Wisden. He tweets all manner of cricketing stats and his ease with social media is also reflected in his proper job.
As well as managing the flow of information between the minister’s office and MFAT, Appleton ensures Peters’ meetings with ambassadors and other foreign ministers are welldocumented.
It gives the office and Peters’ work a sense of order that might not otherwise be visible. There are a couple of other MFAT staff in the office, Jess Rowe and Paul Ballantyne, but
Appleton is senior.
This is Peters’ third stint as Foreign Minister and his other MFAT advisers have included Rob Moore-Jones first time round and Hamish Cooper, the current ambassador to Japan, last time — before Appleton took over.
The job Appleton holds, like the foreign affairs adviser in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), is given to promising midtermers.
Bede Corry, the ambassador to Washington who is returning to Wellington after Peters’ visit to head MFAT, was once the ministerial adviser to Don McKinnon and Phil Goff; and Ben King, the MFAT deputy secretary — just appointed as head of the DPMC — was its foreign affairs adviser when Sir John Key was Prime Minister.Behind every competent minister is usually an even more competent senior private secretary who acts as the command centre of the office. And Helen Lahtinen, who was with Peters in 2017-2020, has returned to his office.
One former colleague said she operates with “military precision” and is “quite scary”.
She spent the last term with Kelvin Davis, who was Labour’s Minister of Ma¯ori Crown Relations and Minister for Children. She worked for Paula Bennett when National was last in Government and had a stint with the State Services Commission when Iain Rennie was State Services Commissioner.
Like the best of people in that role, she is said to be an excellent organiser and can anticipate needs and problems.
Peters has made mention of her in his speeches in Scandinavia, by dint of the fact she was born in Sweden to Finnish parents. He once called her “northern efficiency” and it has stuck.
Peters’ chief press secretary this term was an important appointment given that the previous incumbent, Stephen Parker, was not available.
The unflappable former TV3 political editor had been a perfect fit with experience in both the media and the ministry. But he is now working at RNZ and the job was advertised last year at the height of Peters’ public attacks on the media.
John Tulloch got the job. And in any future crisis between Peters and the media, he is likely to be a voice of reason.
He worked for Newstalk ZB in the Press Gallery in the late 1990s before leaving for the “dark side”. He worked for Foreign Minister Phil Goff in what, in hindsight, was a special office: It included David Shearer in the independent adviser role that Johansson now has, as well as a young intern, Jacinda Ardern. That was three future Labour leaders working in the one office. Tulloch has worked in India and Pakistan, for NZ Post and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and more recently was a press secretary for “the spooks” — the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.
A key difference between Peters’ office last time and this time is that the role of his chief of staff has gone to a party loyalist, former MP and former party president Darroch Ball.
There was some feeling in the party that one of the reasons NZ First did not make it back to Parliament at the 2020 election was that Peters had concentrated too much on the Foreign Affairs role and not enough on the party leadership role.
Part of that was circumstantial. Peters had barely settled into Government in the first year, 2018, when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced she was pregnant and Peters prepared to become Acting Prime Minister. In the last year, Covid struck.
Ball led a review of the party’s failure at the 2020 election, helped to keep the party together during the three years in the wilderness and campaigned alongside Peters in 2023 for its comeback.
He is now there on the seventh floor with an eye to not only what is going on in the management of the coalition but also paying attention to the party profile. The party’s MPs, including some backbenchers, are holding a series of public meetings this month.
There may be those who yearn for Peters to simply be the statesman and Foreign Minister. But that doesn’t look likely.