Sam Sachdeva
Wellington, April 15, 2025
“Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters are at odds over the Government’s trade strategy,” says Sam Sachdeva (His Photo)
Comment
Wellington, April 15, 2025
Among the offerings at Wētā Workshop’s ‘Unleashed’ exhibition in Auckland, one creative class catches the eye: ‘An Intro to Scars and Scrapes.’
Christopher Luxon paid a visit to the display on Monday (April 15), taking part in a Tourism Marketing announcement – but the Prime Minister could not be blamed for staying well clear of the more interactive elements, given the scrapes he is already collecting in a (one-sided) war of words with his Foreign Minister Winston Peters.
So far in the Coalition Government’s short existence, New Zealand First has appeared the more mature partner in the relationship to Act’s young upstart. Yet, with Act Leader David Seymour set to assume Peters’ position as Deputy Prime Minister in just over a month, a difference of opinion over how to handle US President Donald Trump’s Tariffs has seen the veteran politician make an early switch from statesman to campaign mode.
The Luon-Peters Dispute
The dispute stems from Luxon’s grand plan for a coalition of the willing traders to offset the increasingly protectionist stance of the US under Trump, unveiled last week and followed by a highly public campaign of phone calls to other world leaders to rally support.
Just one problem: his Foreign Minister was allegedly not among those dialled into those plans.
“I hope that he will get my message and he will call me next time,” Peters told RNZ on Friday (April 12), having a day earlier dismissed the Prime Minister’s proposal as “all very premature.”
Then, in a speech to the East-West Center in Hawaii on Sunday (NZT), Peters offered a caution against “react[ing] too quickly and too stridently” to geopolitical events.
“In recent weeks, the tendency to hype up a debate about how international trade works into a black-and-white, polarising issue has been unfortunate and misguided,” he said. “The use of military language – of a ‘trade war,’ of the need to ‘fight,’ of the imperative to form alliances in order to oppose the actions of one country – has at times come across as hysterical and short-sighted.”
It was hard not to read that as a thinly veiled criticism of Luxon’s own talk of a trade war and free trade “worth fighting for”, as well as his plan to draw together a pro-trade alliance across the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
“Foreign Minister Winston Peters visited the USS Missouri as part of a delegation to Hawaii and the Pacific, but he has kept his verbal firepower trained on Wellington at points,” says Sam Sachdeva, to whom this Photo was supplied
“For a small country like New Zealand, when events are moving fast and changing day by day, the best course is almost always to be cautious, to be modest, to be pragmatic, and to be practical. To wait for the dust to settle before making choices we may later regret,” Peters added, in remarks aimed at Wellington as much as Honolulu.
Media Beat-up?
Predictably but cynically, Luxon has tried to blame his disagreement with Peters on “a real media beat-up,” as he told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking.
Never mind that the Foreign Minister had explicitly accused the Prime Minister of failing to consult him ahead of his speech and delivered remarks of his own that (to everyone except Luxon) seemed a veiled dig at the trade plans.
“You can say that – I would not possibly comment about your industry’s popularity,” the Prime Minister replied when Hosking raised declining levels of trust in the media; funnily enough, the role played in that decline by senior politicians scapegoating media to avoid dealing with difficult issues went unmentioned.
Yet in other comments, Luxon betrayed at least a small sense of frustration with the approach taken by Peters in suggesting he should have been kept in the loop.
“I do not expect to be consulted on every single decision or every single speech of any given minister, and I certainly do not plan to run my speech past every other minister as well,” he said in Auckland.
Luxon insisted that his Trade Coalition Strategy was something “we have talked about … as a Cabinet,’ and that there was “very strong alignment” between Ministers – but it is unclear in how much detail the matter was discussed, given Peters’ clear sense of surprise.
Complicating matters further is Labour Foreign Affairs Spokesperson David Parker’s claim to Newsroom that he had “fed [the idea] into the Government” through Peters’ own office following a trip he took to Europe.
If Peters’ staff were indeed involved in passing the idea onto Luxon’s team or the Foreign Ministry, how could they not have been aware – or been made aware – it was to become government policy?
Exactly where the disagreement (and Luxon’s disagreement about the disagreement) goes from here may depend on whether Trump blinks yet again and rolls back more of his tariffs.
Differing stand on Tariffs
The fundamentally different viewpoints on Trump and trade held by Luxon and Peters are unlikely to align – and with the best part of 18 months until the next election (barring a coalition collapse), there will be plenty more opportunities for those differences to be aired.
Peters certainly appears unlikely to back down, with his support for Trump’s trade agenda – even when it may hurt New Zealand – dating back to the first administration.
“What is Donald Trump’s biggest complaint?” the politician rhetorically asked in 2018.
“It is that the countries that are shouting out free trade for America do not take this Free Trade themselves. In fact, that is New Zealand First and my complaint – that the countries that we deal with apply tariffs against us whilst we’ve given them total unfettered, free access to our country.”
Nor will Luxon want to U-turn, having won praise and seeming more self-assured in the role of pro-trade statesman building a coalition of like-minded countries.
The Prime Minister’s specific proposal may also founder, given the complexities of dealing with the EU and the difficulties in getting any large grouping of countries to agree these days.
But the fundamentally different viewpoints on Trump and trade held by Luxon and Peters are unlikely to align – and with the best part of 18 months until the next election (barring a coalition collapse), there will be plenty more opportunities for those differences to be aired.
Sam Sachdeva is the National Affairs Editor at Newsroom based in Wellington, covering Foreign Affairs and Trade, Housing and other issues of national significance. The above article, which appeared in the Newsroom Website, has been published here under a Special Agreement.
