Roaring and purring
What a difference a bit of sunshine makes. A few weeks of good weather, and your view of the world is changed. You become softer and kinder. What sunshine does for humans, power does for politicians. Consider the remarkable mellowing of the savagely combative Opposition MP Winston Peters.
The new deputy prime minister thinks the seating in Parliament should be rearranged to make it less adversarial.
How much better, Peters says, are those parliaments where MPs ‘‘sit like a delta and the Speaker is up there. Every group is lined up over here looking in the same direction, so to speak, rather than eye-balling each other in a bear pit which is what our Parliament sometimes resembles.’’
He wants more co-operation and has suggested giving more power to the Opposition through select committees. The lion has become a pussycat.
Peters has also changed his tune on China. In September he put out a press release headed: ‘‘China’s growing Control in NZ must be investigated’’. He noted that the week before he had called for ‘‘a full inquiry into how Jian Yang, a member of the Chinese Communist Party with strong ties to their intelligence community, could become a National List MP in our Parliament’’.
He quoted China specialist Anne-Marie Brady’s call for a special commission ‘‘to investigate China’s impact on our democracy’’. There was stuff about China taking over our infant formula industry and our biggest red meat exporter and even our infrastructure. China was quietly starting to dominate the lives of New Zealanders and our economic direction.
But now things don’t look quite so grim.
The new minister of foreign affairs says we shouldn’t be too quick to judge China over freedom because ‘‘when you have hundreds of millions of people to be re-employed and relocated with the change of economic structure, you have some massive, huge problems’’.
Western commentators shouldn’t be constantly harping on about the ‘‘romance of freedom’’. Rather they should remember the song about ‘‘freedom’s just another word for nothing else [sic] to lose’’.
He’s also changed his tune over the Chinese threat to New Zealand. Now he says the Chinese economic influence here is because we hadn’t got better trade deals elsewhere.
Also, he says he never wanted a full-scale public inquiry into Chinese influence.
Some might be cynical about these astonishing changes of attitude and policy. In fact, they are as predictable as they could be. Peters roars in opposition and purrs in office. He’s done this for decades, and the pattern provides a kind of reassurance.
Once he’s a minister, he will be cautious and even timid. He makes an ideal minister of foreign affairs, because he becomes merely the chief diplomat of all the diplomats. In other words, he never says anything offensive or even interesting.
He’s just like Murray McCully, in short.
The downside, however, is that when he preaches co-operation and less opposition to the new Opposition, he can’t expect to be taken seriously.
How Winston Peters has changed.