Winston Peters is right about parliament’s declining standards of decorum. But the rot didn’t set in last week. This has been a years-long process, and one MP in particular has been at the heart of the decline.
Winston Peters couldn’t hide his distress as he heard the word “cunts” being read out by Act deputy leader Brooke van Velden during question time last week. He buried his head in his hands, stared at his tie, and seemingly willed himself to physically or mentally dematerialise. Later he’d call the moment another milestone on our march to a decorumless democracy. “This is becoming a House of Chaos,” he wrote on cyberbullying service X. “From relaxing the dress standards in our House to now having utter disorder and the worst of offensive words uttered in question time – no matter which side of opinion you’re on – and with no reaction or repercussion. How should we politicians expect the people of New Zealand to view us all now?”
Winston Peters enters a fugue state after hearing the word ‘cunts’.
Peters has a point. New Zealand’s parliament often resembles the sandpit on a particularly out-of-control day at kindy. There are screams, insults, rude gestures and the occasional dust-up. If there’s one thing to nitpick in his post though, it’s the timeline. This decay isn’t new. It’s been setting in for years now, and one MP in particular has been at the heart of the decline.
Van Velden isn’t the first to quote other people’s insulting epithets in the House. Nor is she the only one to use an offensive and derogatory term. This MP once grilled former prime minister John Key in the House on whether he’d called footballer David Beckham “thick as batshit”. In 2024, he was ordered to withdraw his statement, and later called out by the IHC, after accusing Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer of making a “retard comment” in parliament. The same year he was criticised for lowering parliamentary standards and failing to meet expectations of decorum after instructing Labour and Green MPs not to “shout like a sick idiot”.
This MP’s most venomous and decorum-compromising barbs are usually delivered directly, in the form of personal insults. In 2012, he was kicked out of the House for calling National MP Gerry Brownlee an “illiterate woodwork teacher”. Brownlee has been a regular target. In 2018, the MP told speaker Lockwood Smith to “throw fatty out” after Brownlee interjected in a debate.
Other National MPs have found themselves on the receiving end of the MP’s rancour. He repeatedly mocked Simon Bridges’ New Zealand accent in parliamentary exchanges, feigning confusion about an industry called “moining” while answering a question on oil and gas exploration in 2018, and telling the National leader he’ll answer questions on China but not “Choyna” in 2019. The MP also called Brownlee, Chris Finlayson, and Māori Party co-leader Marama Fox an “unsightly trio of drama queens” after voting against Treaty settlements in 2018.
But no single politician has been savaged as much as David Seymour. In 2020, the MP called the Act leader a “political cuckold” during a testy exchange in parliament. It was a toned down reimagining of earlier work. The MP referred to Seymour as a “cuckolded puppet” in the House in 2017. He’s called Seymour a cuck so many times some news organisations have stopped counting individual incidents, with The Guardian simply saying it has happened “many times”.
This is all to say nothing about the allegations of xenophobia. He joked that “two wongs don’t make a white” during a campaign launch. He told Green MPs Lawrence Xu-Nan and Francisco Hernandez they should “show some gratitude” for being in New Zealand. He inexplicably complained there were too many delicious Asian restaurants on Dominion Rd.
Last week, the MP stood before reporters and told them that Labour leader Chris Hipkins is a “sausage eater who doesn’t know what a woman is”. Reporters pressed the MP on those comments, given he’d just been outspoken about parliament’s declining standards of civility.
In response, Winston Peters clarified that he meant Hipkins was a “sausage roll eater”. His quest to restore parliament to its previous standards of decency and respect continues apace.
With its operating allowance halved to just $1.3bn, Thursday’s budget will be ‘no lolly scramble’, the finance minister has warned. Here’s where the government might be looking to claw back some cash.
“Reprioritisation” is the name of the game this budget – taking money from certain stuff to fund other stuff. In other words, there will be cuts. That’s because the budget’s operating allowance – new money for spending – has been revised down from $2.4bn to $1.3bn, making it the tightest in a decade. In its Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update (Hyefu) last year, Treasury warned that even a $2.4bn allowance wouldn’t be enough, because in real terms it was more like $700m due to a large amount having already been pre-committed to the health sector.
It’s worth noting that the operating allowance is not all the funding available: the net capital allowance – that’s the amount of funding available to spend on assets, such as infrastructure, that will increase the value of the Crown’s balance sheet over the next four years – has been revised up to $4bn, but it’s assumed that the $2bn earmarked for five new defence force helicopters is coming out of that.
That’s the problem with trying to figure out what money is being spent where: there are different funding “envelopes” and it’s often not clear what’s being funded out of where. What we do know about pre-allocated funding is that last year, there was a post-budget raid on the 2025 budget coffers to give Pharmac a boost of $605m over four years, amid the fallout of the failure to fund 13 new cancer treatments.
The good news stories, or the “cuddlier parts of the budget”, as the Herald’s political editor puts it, are “tactically declassified” for marketing reasons while the cuts remain under wraps. But there’s no doubt those cuts are coming. To make this scrawny budget work, the government has undertaken a “significant savings drive”, putting spending decisions made by previous governments under the microscope and “re-evaluating them in the context of today’s constraints”, said Nicola Willis when she announced the revised operating allowance late last month. This had required making “some tough, but necessary, choices”.
Finance minister Nicola Willis (Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
We won’t know what those choices were until Thursday. The government won’t even reveal exactly how much is being saved by the controversial pay equity changes – which either had “nothing to do with the budget”, if you’re a National minister, or “saved the budget”, if you’re an Act minister. The prime minister has said the figure is in the billions, plus there’s another $1 billion over the next four years coming from changes made to emergency housing.
But that isn’t likely to be enough to take the pressure off other areas. Economist Matt Brunt wrote in a BNZ budget preview that the operating allowance is “likely not even enough to cover natural cost increases from population growth and inflation”. Economist Miles Workman, on the other hand, said in a budget preview for ANZ that while the operating allowance was “considerably smaller than the expected increase in the cost of delivering key public services”, there was plenty of room to unwind the previous government’s “unsustainable fiscal expansion”, and “to continue reprioritising less-effective spending from within existing baselines to meet new demands and priorities”.
Simplicity’s chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub is firmly in the more pessimistic camp. “They never tell you what’s being cut, reduced or stopped,” he told The Spinoff. “Governments just tack on new things they want to do with new operating and capital allowances. They’ve been pre-committing all their operating allowance so they’re going to have to cut something.”
Here are a few areas where the axe may be set to fall.
Image: Getty Images
KiwiSaver
Willis has strongly hinted that KiwiSaver changes should be expected, and many are predicting the introduction of means-testing for the government contribution. Currently, the government coughs up 50c for every $1 a KiwiSaver member puts into their account, up to a maximum of just over $521 a year, at a total cost of around a billion dollars a year. Means-testing this contribution – only paying it to those who earn under a certain amount – would be one way of cutting that cost. It’s most likely the threshold would be set at $180,000, the current cut-off point for the FamilyBoost childcare subsidy and where the top tax bracket kicks in. As of 2024, 3.4% of wage and salary earners in New Zealand earned $180,000 or more.
Be prepared for other KiwiSaver changes too – Willis has indicated she’d like to see the default employee contribution rate increased from the current 3% (the Retirement Commission has advised upping it to 4%). Eaqub said while he had no issue with changing the subsidies per se, he wasn’t a fan of governments “messing with KiwiSaver” for short-term financial gain. “It shouldn’t be a budget thing, it should be done in slow time. I get frustrated that we use the budget for talking about these big longterm problems. KiwiSaver is really precious, we need to approach it as non-partisan and long-term and patient.”
Eaqub said he also didn’t support increasing the default employee contribution, because it would “penalise poor people”. “In the middle of a cost of living crisis, you’re going to tell them they have to pay more into KiwiSaver?”
More means-testing?
Treasury chief executive Iain Rennie has indicated his support for targeting government payments to those who need them most. So what else could be means- tested? Despite the ballooning costs of NZ Super, it’s highly unlikely that will be touched this year, as doing so is politically fraught and National has an election to win (plus NZ First as a coalition partner to deal with). For that reason, changes to free public transport for over-65s are also unlikely.
One possibility is Best Start, which was mentioned by Willis in an interview with the Herald at the start of the year. Best Start is a payment that families with young children get for the first three years of their life – in year one, each family gets $73 a week, which reduces in years two and three for every dollar of family income above $79,000. It’s possible that means- testing will be brought in for year one as well, though Willis said she was “conscious to keep within our electoral mandate”, so it’s less likely to be something we see in this budget.
Could means-testing be introduced for the new final-year fees-free scheme, or tweaks be made to the student loans scheme?
More Reading
Entire government departments?
While last year’s budget tightened the belt around the whole public sector, this year there’s likely to be a more targeted approach. As The Post reported, at the beginning of 2025 associate finance minister David Seymour was tasked with identifying (more) potential savings that could be made in the public service and reporting back to Willis, who would have the final say on whether to take his advice.
We’ll find out on Thursday what was agreed, but ministries and departments that are believed to have been asked by Seymour to find savings include the Ministry of Social Development, Ministry for Disabled People, Te Puni Kōkiri, Ministry for Pacific Peoples, Department of Internal Affairs, Department of Conservation, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Oranga Tamariki, Ministry for the Environment, Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and Ministry of Transport.
Seymour has made no secret of his desire to see fewer government ministries and departments and has been particularly vocal about wanting to abolish the Ministry for Pacific Peoples.
And also…
It would appear that one initiative whose days are numbered is Kāhui Ako, a $118m-a-year education scheme that groups schools together to work on common problems. A draft cabinet paper obtained by RNZ earlier this year sought in-principle approval to disestablish the scheme.
A charities tax was ruled out for this budget, but there has been speculation that the foreign buyer ban could be ending for suitably pricey property purchases, after Winston Peters softened his stance. Taxing these purchases could be a handy revenue raiser for the government.
