By TONY MOBILIFONITIS

NZ First leader Winston Peters, who is making his presence known again in NZ politics. Above: Hipkins (left) and Luxon.

NEW Zealand’s Labor Party has plunged in the pre-election polling, heading for the mid to lower 20s in percentage support and a wipeout at the October 14th election as the country wakes up to the reality of economic strangulation by Jacinda Ardern’s globalists.

The NZ economy fulfilled the technical definition of a recession by contracting in two straight quarters, 0.5% and 0.06% in the December to March quarters with slight recovery following. But average mortgage repayments in the country have risen by $1000 a month, and oppressive regulation, particularly environmental regulations built around the climate change narrative, is rampant.

But an awakening is happening and the mere presence of the Convoy of Courage protest in the capital city Wellington during the week was enough to force the organisers of a UN Association of NZ Agenda 20-30 conference there to call off the public gathering and go online.

Winston Peters, the senior statesman of Kiwi politics and leader of New Zealand First, is making a comeback after his party was wiped out in the last election. But this time NZ First could hold the balance of power if the National Party leader Christopher Luxon Act Party’s David Seymour fail to get their 61-seat majority. NZ First has surged above 5% in polling to 6%, which means it could gain at least six seats.

Luxon and his “opposition” Nationals are the equivalent of Australia’s wishy-washy “centrist” Liberals, while the Act Party is libertarian in philosophy but probably prone to serious compromise if offered power with the Nationals. Neither Luxon nor Seymour are seen as particularly inspiring leaders.

Luxon is said to have been mentored by former National PM and banker John Key, who signed New Zealand on to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2010, after the country initially rejected it in 2007. Luxon has only expressed soft opposition to co-governance, that is related to UNDRIP “principles”.

According to the 1News Verian Poll National is down 1% to 36% in and the Act party is steady on 12%, which would give National 45 seats and Act 15 – a total of 60 seats, one short of the 61 needed to form a government – and leave Luxon relying on Peters’ support.

Another interpretation of the same poll had National and Act getting 46 and 15 respectively for 61 seats “just enough to reach the 61 seats”. But that sounds very much like the establishment hoping for the usual scenario of “Team B” taking its turn.

As for the Labor PM Chris Hipkins, he sealed his fate with a huge section of the Kiwi voting public when he recently denied that people had been forced to get mRNA shots, adding “people made their own choice”. He was responding to a promise by Peters to compensate people injured by the shots.

Peters, at 78, has campaigned strongly, and is no close friend of the National Party or the Labor Party, regardless of the fact that he handed Labor power in 2017 when Ardern became Prime Minister in her first term after a big slice of Liberal voters were silly enough to defect to Labor. In a coalition deal, Peters served as deputy PM for that term until losing his seat in 2020.

Peters, a Maori by lineage and genuinely conservative, is no friend of the neo-Marxist Maori elite who are attempting a velvet-glove coup of New Zealand via the “co-governance” system fostered by Ardern. Peters insists that the Maori are not indigenous. Even mainstream history has them migrating from the Pacific Islands around AD900 and conquering earlier inhabitants known as Moriori.

NZ First is grudingly rated by the mainstream media and their polling companies as potentially getting six seats in the Parliament, but Peters has been on a roll and could surprise the two-party establishment with more than that. Under the country’s MMP proportional representation system a party needs to gain 5% of the vote to get seats in the Parliament.

The Labour Party, however, dropped another point to 27%, which would deliver only 34 seats. The Greens were up two points to 12% and 15 seats while the other potential left-bloc Maori Party was “steady on 3% for four seats. But this is probably a tad optimistic, given the awakening and public backlash against the leftist co-governance agenda.

Luxon, who like Scott Morrison professes evangelical faith, gives little confidence to those in the know that he’s much different to “the other Christopher”, PM Hipkins, aka Chippy, who took over from Ardern when she jumped ship to join the global PC circuit.

Luxon’s own PC behaviour was demonstrated last year when he publicly reprimanded an MP, who mostly to the annoyance of the country’s media, posted pictures of herself on Facebook, at an anti-lockdown and anti-mandate rally in her electorate.

“She wrote about freedom and choice in her post and criticised the label anti-vaxers,” fumed the Otago Daily Times, one of the country’s stable of pathetic neo-Marxist rags. “But the post has been deleted after being contacted by her party’s leader Christopher Luxon.

Another neo-Marxist establishment media outlet, The Guardian, was grappling with the possibility of Luxon being forced into a coalition with Winston Peters “but only as a last resort”. In the understatement of the year, The Guardian reported: “New Zealand will hold its election on 14 October, with polls pointing towards a change after two terms of Labour-led government, to the centre-right National party.”

More savvy political observers like Cam Slater of Reality Check Radio (RCR) note the the real issues are co-governance and deteriorating race relations, the threat of digital currency and New Zealand’s shocking economic decline.

He notes that while Labor faces “a complete bloodbath”, a flaw in the MMP system that allocates seats that fail to gain the 5% vote to the major parties, could see Labor winning more electorates than their party vote entitles them to.

“It’s all over bar the shouting and the inevitable recriminations for the many minor parties out there that simply do not have the grunt to make the 5% – the threshold,” Slater said in a recent broadcast four weeks out from the election. “How much wasted vote will there be, or will the voters fall in behind the parties that are going to make the 5% threshold?”

That is a major problem for the NZ freedom parties who, like their counterparts in Australia, create the problem of fracturing the anti-establishment vote. In NZ this fractured minor-party vote literally gets punished by the distribution of seats to mainstream parties.

Slater and others in his circle have been accused by Counterspin Media’s Samantha Edwards of “running an election psyop” against the small parties because he recommends non-mainstream voters think about voting only for a party that has a chance of getting the 5% threshold vote.

But Slater is only trying to be realistic and believes only a few of the field of freedom candidates, apart from Peters, have a reasonable chance of getting a seat. One of those is Helen Houghton of the New Conservatives who told Maree Buscke of RCR whole groups of parents were coming together on the issue of educational decline and the invasion of the classroom with woke porn and gender ideology.

“So while you don’t have the mainstream media or main parties talking about it, the communities are and I think that’s huge,” she said. “I think we’ll be in for a bit of a shock come voting. You may not see it all in the polls but people are talking and they are doing their own research and they are really showing that critical thinking …they’ve switched off mainstream media.”

Houghton tuned into the “big debate” between Luxon and Hipkins but said she eventually just switched it off. “It’s all about what one Chris isn’t doing right and the other Chris – you know they’re just attacking each other. And it’s like the public don’t care about the Chrises, they actually care about the real issues that are affecting us, our children, our wellbeing.”