Written By:
- Date published:
11:05 am, October 7th, 2025 - 57 comments
Categories: blogs, Chlöe Swarbrick, Palestine, uncategorized, war, winston peters -
Tags:
In recent days former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has gone into battle with blogger Martyn Bradbury.
I am not sure why Martyn should be picked. He has attempted to create a job out of harnessing left wing anger but he does not do it very well.
He had a major role in the formation of the Internet Party, involving Kim Dotcom, Hone Harawira and Laila Harre back in 2014. Two of them I have a lot of respect for. The effort was hamfisted and resulted in a spectacular own goal. After the horrors of Dirty Politics they called a big reveal event at the Auckland Town Hall that was supposed to link John Key to the raid on Dotcom’s Coatesville Mansion.
The event failed miserably when the relied on evidence, an email, was shown to be fake.
The left failed at that election. The reasons are complex and you can read any of a myriad of Standard posts to understand what occurred. But Bradbury’s intervention did not help.
His blog continues.
It gets harder and harder to read. There are all these annoying pop up ads. I am firmly of the view that left wing blogging in Aotearoa needs to be a hobby and not a business and not monetised.
He still engages in red meat for the left type blogging and works out how far from the edge of acceptance he should go. Anger and controversy are really good blogging weapons.
Recently he has chosen to attack Winston Peters for the Government’s cowardice over Palestine.
Fair enough.
People decided to protest outside Winston’s home and I thought this was not an inappropriate protest action to take. A bit of noise compared to the utter devastation of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinian people seems very modest to me.
Of course Winston Peters chose to go to town on the issue. After protesters appeared he chose to complain that “New Zealander’s homes are supposed to be a place where we all can be and feel safe and secure. No one has the right to take that away.”
Good law and order stuff that.
Bradbury chose to respond by saying to waiters “[i]f you are serving a National, ACT and NZF MP food, make sure you spit in that food.”
My initial response was how dumb and stupid.
Here we are highlighting what an abject moral failure the Gaza situation is and Bradbury chose to divert attention away from this.
Of course Peters then chose to respond and attacked Bradbury for proving “just how violent and divisive the far left truely are.”
Bradbury chose to respond by claiming that the “facetious call to spit in his food is somehow akin to political violence that puts me on par with the Charlie Kirk shooter is Boomer level victimhood on Winston’s behalf”.
He might be right. He said the post was written by NZ First’s media team. It is the sort of shyte that Glen Inwood would wrote.
But he should not have chosen not to make the original statement. Attack the right’s positions with reasons. Using throw away lines for clicks is never going to work out.
And so we have another day of social media angst and attacks between left and right when we should be trying to persuade the country that killing and starving Palestinian kids is a really sick inhumane thing to do.
And now there is a report of a window at Winston’s place being smashed.
Peters has taken the opportunity to blame Chloe Swarbrick and has said that he has no doubts that her rhetoric around the Government’s Gaza response caused the attack.
Winston is exactly precisely where he wants to be. At the centre of controversy. And it is no coincidence that the attack techniques are right out of the US Republican Party handbook.
Can I ask that people never ever give Peters the chance to claim martyrhood. He will take every opportunity and will then proceed to continue to hog the spotlight as much as possible.
To be fair, getting people to protest outside any Ministers house for what ever reason is pushing the envelope and anyone refusing to condemn it is tacitly endorsing it.
Now I'm sure the organisers never intended those protests to run to vandalising a Ministers residence, but it happened on their watch, unquestionably. Again, anyone refusing to condemn this behaviour is tacitly endorsing it. FAFO comes next.
No matter how you spin it, calling on people to spit in anyone's food is advocating for assault. I think to suggest you can shrug it off by saying it was meant ironically is to be misreading the room at the moment.
What you think about the Minister in question is irrelevant at this point – every government in the world at the moment is (or should be) looking at the events that led up to blatant politically motivated assassination of a public figure and asking what could or should have been done to preempt that violence.
Just as we seem to have imported the practice of harassing public figures away from their jobs, dont be surprised if we also end up importing the consequences.
I guess your gaze is not on Gaza either.
Did you ask what drove a former PM out of politics?
Wot SPC said.
I had a visceral reaction to the spitting comment. Utterly wrong on political and just basic human decency levels. Also, wtaf, we're still dealing with covid.
The smashing of the window is also outright wrong and I agree it's just a no brainer to condemn that.
Protesting outside of Ministers homes, there's a line for that I think, but it's not totally out of bounds. Protest is central to democracy and when Ministers make such bad decisions that people take to the streets, the Ministers should listen to what is being said. The issue is more about how the protestors are acting.
Chloe Swarbrick was on Midday Report today saying that the Greens had nothing at all to do with the demonstration outside Winnie's house.
Despite this she told the interviewer that demonstrating outside the house was legal.
And she said that the media should concentrate on the Gaza genocide issue not a minor spat like this.
I don't agree with protests outside politician's homes.
However don't you think Peters, Seymour et Al are being more than a tad hypocritical, when they knowingly dog whistled their nutcase supporters to do far worse?
Who wrote that Cabinet Paper on the Coalition’s stand on Palestine? It sure wasn’t Casey Costello or Shane Jones, as there wasn’t enough smoke & mirrors.
https://theconversation.com/who-wrote-the-cabinet-paper-recommending-nz-not-recognise-a-palestinian-state-266462
The main figure head of the Coalition’s 3-headed hydra is proud of deferring & demurring on just about any issue that requires a modicum of leadership.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/top/574427/kiwis-can-be-proud-nz-isn-t-recognising-palestine-yet-pm-christopher-luxon
Come election time every decision made by the coalition neets to be sheeted home, not only to Luxon and Seymour, but also Peters and Jones.
Jones may rail against power companies, but he is still a memeber of a coslition that gave them a free pass to continue to raid the wallets of New Zealanders.
Peters is just the worst hypocrite going. NZ1 used to stand for the kiwi family, now it stands for anything but.
I'd like to hear the legal perspective on this, is spitting in someone's food illegal?
I think so but interested to hear others' views.
Specifically, spitting at someone can be common assault under both the Crimes Act and Summary Offences Act. In rare cases, it could also be infecting with disease (which might also apply to spitting in food).
Spitting can be assault because it involves potentially spreading harmful diseases etc. Food sales are generally governed by the Food Act including food prepared in restaurants (e.g. meals) and retail shops (e.g. hot pies etc.).
The primary duty of anyone trading in food is that it is "safe and suitable" (s14). Among other things, that means being free from hazards which are defined by s8 as a:
Saliva clearly comes under that definition (wouldn't be assault to spit at someone if saliva wasn't some sort of hazard). The Food Regulations issued under the Food Act require operators to have procedures for hazard control (regulation 30) and protection against contamination etc by people (regulation 29) which includes behaving in a way which does not compromise the safety or suitability of food.
Potentially then, staff spitting in a customer's food could be a criminal offence under sections 222-224 of the Food Act: s222, s223, s224. Each of these offences carry potential prison sentences and fines. Notably, being negligent or reckless is among the offences, so not knowing that it's against the law is not any sort of defence.
[Caught in spam-trap because too many hyperlinks – Incognito]
The short answer is yes, under both the Food act which has some pretty stiff penalties for tampering with food and of course the Crimes act which is triggered with harmful intent. Spitting in someone's lunch would count as tampering and contamination.
Section 298B of the Crimes Act makes it an offense to contaminate food intended for human consumption, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The prosecution must prove the offender knew or was reckless as to whether the food was for consumption.
Missed that section, that's a good one for the memory banks!
Off topic, but there's a recent BNZ TV ad that gets my goat – a supermarket checkout operator takes a swig of milk from a shopper's purchase, then ["Oops too much"] goes to return milk to the bottle. Yuck – I know now to change the channel.
BNZ KiwiSaver High Growth Fund – Ethical Concerns:
1.9% Animal Cruelty
3.2% Human Rights Violations
0.3% Social Harm
5.7% Fossil Fuels
0.7% Weapons
1.5% Environmental Harm
Completely agree about Peters and the left giving him open goals. FFS.
100%.
I'll be going into my own, personal, reasons in a blogpost.
please let us know when it's up 👍
Bradbury is at times hyperbolic and bombastic, and he crosses lines. He's also intellectually inconsistent – for example, one moment excoriating identity politics and telling everyone to focus on class instead, and in the next moment criticising 'boomers' without appearing to realise that they are composed of different economic classes too. He appears to be thin-skinned and writes so much content daily that the quality and originality is questionable. To suggest, even in jest, spitting in someone's food is wrong and counterproductive. Not doing dumb sh*t that gives your opponent the moral high ground is a message that hasn't got through. But I don't think he's disingenuous. He is genuinely part of the 'progressive' coalition, like it or not. Sometimes he produces writing that is worthwhile, and he's not going away.
The next time there's a Labour-led government there'll likely also be multiple regional conflicts going on that the NZ govt won't get involved in. Will you think it's "very modest" then for people obsessed with one of those conflicts to make a racket outside Labour cabinet ministers' houses because a bit of noise is nothing compared to the devastation suffered by the people in region X, or is it just this one particular conflict that justifies harassing politicians' families?
Yay!
Your MO = pig fucking rhetoric = imaginary straw men = moot hypotheticals = flawed comparisons = false equivalences, etc.
Funnily enough, I don't see it as any of those things, just as a legitimate question to ask when people aren't too bothered by something that's currently only affecting their political opponents.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360846372/opposition-accused-weasel-words-over-outlawing-protests-mps-homes
There’s an important difference between protesting at Premier House and an MP’s personal residence. Ardern was able to leave Premier House when it got too much. Can Peters’ partner do the same?
I sometimes think about why Palestine is the focus of all the tragedies happeing the planet. Have to admit I find it challenging to see the left abandon climate action and pivot to this. And it’s suspect I will never forgive the left for abandoning Afghan women. But I do think there are valid reasons for why Palestine.
I’ve been in two minds today about the politicians’ homes as focal point for protest thing. We risk stepping over a line that will be hard to pull back from. And we’re in a post Kirk shooting world. That protestors thought rallying around river to the sea in the UK the same day as their fellow Jewish people were murdered at their place of worship really needs examining.
Mostly I think we are incredibly fortunate to live in such a peaceful country and we should do everything we can to protect that peace.
"post Kirk shooting world" lol wut? There were those US Democrat lawmakers murdered earlier in the year, & lets not forget Jo Cox the UK Labour MP in 2016. We been in a post-lets kill our not favourite political person for a long time. Kirk is given far too much significance, he's already forgotten.
Yea but my point was about the political tipping point from Kirk’s murder. Your position is partisan, which is fine, but I’m pointing to something that exists no matter how we feel about it.
My personal theory:
The post-COVID generation has come of age politically in a world defined by what I call safe-space socialism: a moral posture that feels radical but costs nothing personal. It’s the politics of performance: rebellion without risk, compassion without cost.
Confront an idea that makes you uncomfortable? Don’t wrestle with it: cancel it. Reject not only the argument but the person who dared make it. In a culture that confuses discomfort with harm, moral safety becomes the highest virtue, and intellectual courage the first casualty.
It doesn’t mean this is all wokeness run rampant. It’s deeper: a symptom of something hollowing the modern left from within. Somewhere, somehow, the left has lost its intellectual confidence: the courage to think in public, to tolerate ambiguity, to risk being wrong.
The great moral traditions that once underpinned progressive politics. Solidarity, reason, debate, and the belief that ideas could be tested rather than performed, have given way to fear.
Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of offending. Fear of thinking out loud.
In this moral economy, Gaza has become the perfect stage. It offers what modern politics otherwise denies: moral clarity. The script is simple. Victims and oppressors, heroes and villains, innocence and guilt.
You can signal virtue with no need to interrogate your own privilege, consumption, or dependency on the very systems you condemn. It’s clean, tidy, and emotionally satisfying.
By contrast, the injustices closer to home: inequality, environmental collapse, institutional decay, are messy. They implicate us. They demand slow, sacrificial work: changing how we live, what we consume, how we govern, and whom we hold accountable.
That kind of politics is hard. It requires endurance, not just outrage; introspection, not just denunciation.
Safe-space socialism offers a shortcut. It lets kids these days feel morally alive without confronting the discomfort of being morally responsible. It substitutes performance over real politics, moral intensity for moral discipline.
All in all, it's as empty as it is counterproductive.
I tend to think of Gaza as a touchstone issue for many people. It seems to both contain and express all their feelings of despair, helplessness and horror about every other issue as well as Gaza itself – and also about the systems of power that allow all these things to continue.
I wonder if the Spanish Civil war fulfilled the same function for the 1930's generation, though a number of the actually went there and fought, which was not a safe space at all. Louis Macneice wrote a poem (Autum Journal) that contains a section that looks back from the grim days of 1938 to an earlier holiday in Spain in 1935:
And next day took the boat/ For home, forgetting Spain, not realising/ That Spain would soon denote/ Our grief, our aspirations/ Not knowing that our blunt Ideals would find their whetstone, that our spirit/ Would find its frontier on the Spanish front/ Its body in a rag-tag army.
So, I would be inclined to be a bit more forgiving of people intensely preoccupied with Gaza.
Two accounts of the Guernica painting.
I would too if it weren't for the bigger picture. The US is tipping into authoritarianism as we stand and watch, and climate collapse will make everything we are witnessing now pale into comparison. I could perhaps make an argument that fascism and climate collapse are too big for people to cope with, so they focus on what they can, but that's just a kinder way of saying what RP is saying.
I'm Gen X and I wouldn't compare myself to any of the generations before that have been through war or fought fascism. I can't imagine what it's like to be raised in one of the internet generations that are so reliant on safe-space socialism.
Perhaps. Though the difference seems to be that their convictions carried a price.
When fascism arose, they didn’t just post solidarity. They crossed borders to fight it.
That’s the line between sentiment and sacrifice.
I think about this a lot too, what I would be willing to do if it comes to it in NZ.
Possibly much of my political motivation comes from doing the work so I never have to end up making those decisions /grimlol
The moral economy and safe space socialism 👌
Which also brings a sense of belonging.
I’ll add to that, the idea that neoliberalism taught the left we cannot win* so we should settle for the gains we can make. Hence the rise of identity politics to replace rather than complement class politics.
*actually a ruse.
I think it’s more nuanced than that.
To be fair; Intersectional theory, despite how often it’s misused or caricatured, still offers a powerful framework for understanding how class, race, gender, and culture interact.
And that’s where class still bites. A rich trans kid will usually have access to therapy, community, and social acceptance that a poor trans kid won’t. When you’re worried about rent or food, questions of identity become harder to navigate.
Not less real, just less survivable.
It’s simply class politics with knobs on. Or off, depending on how you identify yourself.
right but I'd say that's where culture and class are complementary in terms of understanding power structures, who is affected and how, and what we can usefully do in response.
Neoliberalism said, you can have the identity bit, but lol, there are no more class gains. We can have same sex marriage, but we can't get back compulsory unionism. And I think the left went along with this because things got too hard, or maybe it was just the natural outcome of having to vote for one's own capital gains instead.
With my Grumpy Old Man hat on, I see it as pretty straightforward: Gaza is what's in people's social media feeds, so it's what's important. What's happening to women in Afghanistan or to people in Sudan, Yemen etc isn't in their social media feeds, so isn't important. No doubt I'm being unfair, but that's certainly what it feels like to me.
The women of Afghanistan
1.There was once a secular regime in power in Kabul, so women had rights.
2.The Americans determined on arming the mujahadeen to remove the regime.
3.The Russians left and the Taleban took power off the other mujahadeen
4.They hosted al Qaeda
5.9/11
6.Taleban removed.
7.Trump and Biden both decided the USA should leave.
8.It would have taken only 5000 troops at the air base to support the Afghan forces to prevent the Taleban from ever returning to power (or even holding a provincial capital). Just a POTUS to say we owe the women there, human rights is part of our forever war. This is why we are on the UNSC.
9.They to the shame of the entire western world, walked away.
10 Now Trump, enabled by SCOTUS and a white race nation Christian nation establishing GOP tramples over the words of the constitution, as if they mean nothing.
The first amendment says no established religion, so clearly their republic has fallen in accord with Project 2025.
👍
It's funny how everything terrible that happens is always the Americans' fault, never the fault of the people doing the terrible things based on their terrible ideology. Rhetoric is fun like that.
Is there any left wing cause you would care to affirm on the site?
Any idealism?
The Western Conservative Classic Liberal World Order is best and is OK Society is looking for new members.
do you not agree that the Afghan women are in the situation they are in, in part because of how the US has acted?
Obviously the Taliban are a bunch of misogynistic arseholes, who is going to stop them, or should we just leave Afghanistan to itself?
I don't know. The alternative hypothetical is that instead of arming Muslim terrorists seeking to impose Islamic totalitarianism on Afghanistan, the US had left the USSR to re-impose communist totalitarianism on Afghanistan. Whether the eventual outcome of that would have been better or worse than the outcome of what it did do is unknowable.
I do know that:
1. Neither Islamic nor communist totalitarianism has a good outcome.
2. US governments act in their own national interest, same as others.
3. Only the Islamic totalitarians running Afghanistan are responsible for how it's run.
4. The only way to help people in the Muslim world is to oppose Islamic totalitarianism, but I hear that that isn't a "left-wing cause."
Removing the regime in Kabul led to 9/11.
Leaving Kabul led to the return of the Taleban regime.
The Western Conservative Classic Liberal World Order is best and is OK Society policy application looks real dumb at times
Governments are often wrong about what's in the national interest, yes. Their leaders also act in their own personal interests. I wasn't writing a thesis there.
Necessary but not sufficient. Agree it's a problem on the left, but so is conflating Islamism and being Muslim (a follower of Islam). Like many other things, the left is not good at having those hard conversations. What I don't get is why we largely can't see the utter chaos unfolding eg in the UK and come up with a better strategy than 'shut up, you're all racist'.
see I think that preventing country-wide misogyny is other countries' best interests, unless those countries don't actually care about women's rights. Which does describe the US, it's not the first time. It's still wrong.
Afghanistan. "A secular regime where women had rights. The USA armed the mujihedeen to topple it.
Iran. A secular democratic regime where women had rights. The USA topples it and installed the Shah (SAVAK).
Indonesia. A secular democratic regime. The USA replaces it with a violent repressive dictatorship.
I could go on for over 80 instances and counting.
See the pattern.
Thanks Noam, but I already read your books so you don't need to go through it for me.
You. Asked the question.
like Zionist takeover, murder and land grab "from the river to the sea"?
A bunch of mad religious extremists??
The USA oversees the ME (Israel-Palestine) peace process.
The terms of Israeli's membership in the UN involves there being another state.
The plan for permanent rule by Israel over the West Bank with the PA reduced to oversight of Area A PaleStans is something the South Africans can see from decades past as Bantustan apartheid.
Remember UNSC Res 2334
Sudan's war is a war between the two factions that removed the previous regime. It's a civil war. The leaders of the two factions were partners in human rights crimes over 20 years ago. Both should have been tried as war criminals back then.
Yemen is a failed state in which the Houthi operate as an armed gang (supplied by Iran). It is what Lebanon was heading towards because of Hezbollah.
Should condone "one particular conflict" AKA bombing children, because there are other instances?
Some of us have been also opposing the other examples of mass murder, for decades also.
Seems Hone's office being shot at has been memory holed.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/257722/call-for-security-for-mp-offices
Got to happen to a Coalition of cockups politician. Otherwise it didn't happen!
Remember the mob of cookers who stood outside the Ardern/Gayford wedding venue bawling into a loudhailer.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-today/news/wyn-drabble-protesters-sign-at-ardern-gayford-wedding-was-tasteless-tactless-disrespectful/DLOL6FGJXFGBFDTJ67RTSL57P4/
Or Hana Maipi-Clarke's home being broken into.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/hetangata/posts/1165118202203476/
lol
Not a home invasion – Peters
“Sorry, first of all, it’s not a home invasion for a start. That description is wrong. The second thing is we’ve all had that. We’ve had all sorts of things done to us over the years. This is not new…I’ve had my house trashed on the outside,” he said.
https://www.teaonews.co.nz/2023/10/03/candidates-allegations-of-ram-rade-divide-political-parties/