Winston Peters wants to put ‘responsible face on capitalism’ as he heads into 2026
Monday, 22 December 2025
NZ First leader Winston Peters has returned to Labour-friendly language as he sets his stall out for 2026 - saying he wanted to push the minimum wage higher this year and can’t understand why Nicola Willis would entertain the idea of debating Ruth Richardson.
Speaking to The Post for an end of year interview looking back at 2025 and forwards to 2026, Peters even reached for a version of a line he most famously used when picking Labour to govern with after the 2017 election.
“We stand for the responsible face of capitalism. We're capitalists, but we believe in the responsible face of capitalism,” Peters said.
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In 2017 when announcing that he would go into Government with Labour, Peters famously showed his hand by saying New Zealand needed to regain “capitalism with a human face”.
He has used this line little since then, with no mentions of it in Hansard this term, although he did mention the “responsible face of capitalism” on a podcast earlier this year.
Peters pushes left and punches right
Peters made the comment as he talked up NZ First’s chances of winning traditional Labour voters supposedly sick of Labour’s progressive views on social issues - what Peters calls “woke”.
He said NZ First would have a “Healthy New Zealander” policy next year, talked up past pushes to make GP visits free for children and the elderly, and his record on the minimum wage.
NZ First won an agreement to raise the minimum wage in both the 2017-2020 and 2023-2026 coalition agreements, in 2017 these rises were set out while in 2023 they were simply described as “moderate”.
Peters said NZ First would have preferred for the just-announced 45c/hour hike to be higher.
“If you’ve got some silly idea that you can make it in the first world with third world wages, you’re wrong,” he said.
“It's not understood by Labour either. We made all the dramatic changes [to wages] in the last [Helen] Clark government. We made the dramatic change in 2017-20 - wasn't Grant Robertson. These guys have had figures way below ours. We said you'll never get there unless the workforce gets a fair wage.”
Peters said he was inspired by the economic thinking of former Singaporean PM Lee Kuan Yew. (Singapore does not have a universal minimum wage however, with sector specific wage ladders more closely aligned to the junked Fair Pay Agreements.)
He said NZ First would have some sort of industrial relations policy but the Government and unions both had to be responsible and not “screw each other over”.
“There's too many so-called union union leaders who have never done any hard work themselves. That is the union delegates who look like they were brought up in a bakery.”
Peters sought to distance himself from the economic decisions of his coalition partners, saying National should have deferred its tax cuts.
“We argued that the tax cuts have got to be deferred, because New Zealanders are going to need to know the magnitude of the disaster we've picked up,” Peters said.
He said his coalition partners had not realised how bad the economic situation was on being elected.
“Our regret is that we didn't - from day one in this Government - insist that they [National and ACT] got a fairer and better understanding of the circumstances. They are now starting to admit it,” Peters said.
“It makes life very difficult when people are learning on the job, and we're not.”
He expressed dismay at the prospect of Finance Minister Nicola Willis challenging Ruth Richardson to a debate, and said it had distracted from the Government’s chunky Resource Management Act reforms announced the same week as the debate fracas.
“The thing was, this great announcement has been subsumed under a mere bagatelle of a debate that that's probably not going to happen,” Peters said.
“We were somewhat flabbergasted by the Nicola Willis Ruth Richardson controversy - we couldn't understand why the hell it was getting all the headlines.”
Peters says polls are wrong
Peters goes into election year polling far higher than he usually does in Government: consistently in the high single digits, far from the 5% threshold that has sent him packing before.
But he still refuses to believe these polls, saying the wide variance between them renders them useless.
“I have got a degree in political science, and I've been in politics longer than anybody in this country, right? And my real point is this, when you have a variation in a first world democracy of over 3% in any other country, they start questioning each other as to what's wrong with their methodology. In New Zealand, I've seen gaps of 14% and they still weren't questioning each other. It can't go on,” Peters said.
He said National Party internal polling had them higher than the public polls.
Asked why his party was performing better than it usually did while in Government, Peters said there were “1000 decent answers I could give”.
“The reason is that we've been more able to prove the essentiality of New Zealand, First to this country's stable future,” Peters said.
The ability to use social media to talk directly to voters had been a “charming development”.
“I get to speak to them direct about the facts, but all the things we've done, I mean, they understand what we've done in the anti-woke world,” Peters said.
NZ First has introduced an array of members’ bills clearly intended to stir debate rather than necessarily pass into law, including a law that demands that only New Zealand flags be displayed on Government buildings and another that legally defines men and women by biological sex.
Peters: Ask Labour if they’ll work with me
Peters repeated that he would not work with Labour leader Chris Hipkins again but did not rule out working with the party itself.
“You don't lie like a flat fish behind my back to me when good faith is required, then expect me to trust you again.”
(Peters has suggested Hipkins and other senior Labour Ministers lied to him by not keeping him abreast of pushes for Māori co-governance during the 2017-2020 term.)
He said NZ First wouldn’t support Labour’s proposed capital gains tax, as it wouldn’t raise enough revenue to pay for any health costs very fast, and wouldn’t recompense people for negative capital growth.
“There is no money until it’s done seven years - that's when it fully matures. That's in the report that Robertson got. So how come you guys all missed it?”
(The Tax Working Group report Peters is referring to talks about significant revenue coming in within five years of ‘valuation day’ - whenever that is set. Labour is proposing its own valuation day would be July 1, 2027.)
Peters also said countries around the world with capital gains taxes weren’t doing well.
Asked if there was anything Labour could do to win him over, Peters demurred.
“The real question you need to go out and ask them all is: ‘Are you going to work with New Zealand First in 2026?’ Go and ask them. I'm not answering that question from here to the next election.”