Introduction
Good afternoon,
Thank you for joining us here this afternoon, here in the place that is the heart of the true workers of our country.
When we say workers, we mean the hard-working, blue-collar workers of New Zealand. The workers who know what a hard day's work is. The ones that get their hands dirty, get up early in the morning, put their blood, sweat, and tears into what they do, and do it six, sometimes seven days a week.
We are not talking about the lanyard wearing, soft handed, gluten free, soy boy, virtue signallers that walk around in comfortable shoes. Those are the upper class, chardonnay drinking, do-gooders who invariably vote for the Green Party.
That part we are not joking about. Look at the Greens - they hold three seats, Auckland Central, Rongatai, and Wellington Central - all three seats are the heart of the Green Party Vote and the heart of the 'Remuera-swiller' types.
The Greens constantly cry martyrdom about the poor and vulnerable, but the irony is their party now only exists because of the votes from inner-city wealth.
The irony surely cannot be lost on the media who continue to give them the fake platform of being the 'environment party' and 'care for the poor party'.
Labour Party
Ladies and gentlemen, it's not by mistake that we are here in Blackball - at the very start of our election year public meetings.
There is a message that we want to be heard far and wide.
The Labour Party no longer represents the workers.
They have become the 'party of moral outrage' - obsessed with accusations, 'gotcha politics', woke ideology, and opposing anything that happens to float by.
The spiritual home of the Labour Party is here in the West Coast - the site of the miners' strike in 1908, which gave birth to the party that used to represent the workers of New Zealand - the gold miners, the coal miners, the labourers, the foresters, the fishers, the hard working blue-collar battlers of our country.
The catch cry was 'a fair day's pay, for a fairs day's work'.
They represented those workers in the very industries which have now become the anathema of who and what the Labour Party represents today.
If a political party today frothed at the mouth every chance they got about the coalition government being 'racist, anti-Māori, colonisers, bigots, or climate deniers', you could place any member of the Labour, Green, or Māori Party caucus at that podium and you wouldn't know which was which.
Who do Labour now represent? It seems they don't even know themselves.
The problem for Labour is that they are now just the party of the 'Professional Managerial Class' - and they certainly are no longer the party of the workers.
The Labour Party has decided their entire re-election strategy will be - standing back and saying "yeah, but we are just less bad than them".
The lack of self-awareness is astounding.
Chris Hipkins even said at his State of the Nation speech that they will not be announcing any policy until around July.
What has the Labour Party been doing for the past two years? Are they just short of ideas?
They are supposedly the 'government in waiting' and all they can do is sit there and complain but not have one single policy solution to campaign on.
Here is some breaking news for you. We can tell you right here and now what Labour's campaign policies will be: tax you more, borrow more, spend more - and begger the consequences.
The terrifying thing is that if you look at their front bench, they can't put half a Cabinet together. Hands up here who knows the names of more than three front bench Labour MPs.
What's worse, is those Labour MPs who somehow have made their way to the front bench have no real-life experience, no business experience, no common sense. The only thing most of them seem to be experienced at is being a bunch of Communists - they openly admit it.
Many in Labours favourite partners, the Greens, open Marxists.
Not that long ago in New Zealand, being labelled a Communist or Marxist would have seen you labelled a traitor. What has our country come to?
Here is something about the Labour Party that voters will never forget.
The last three years of the Labour government oversaw a deteriorating economy, deteriorating education and health systems, worsening law and order on our streets, massively increased debt, record immigration, crumbling infrastructure, a cost-of-living crisis, and a hugely divided society. That is the reality of the constant pursuit of their fairytale ideologies.
The woke ideology of the left has crept in like a cancer that has spread so deep into their divisive thinking it has become their sole focus.
It has been clear for some time that the Labour Party has had a forlorn choice after the last election - attempt to move to the centre to hopelessly try to regain their votes, or push further towards the woke, cultural, and Marxist left. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which path they have chosen.
But that 'siloed-left' is occupied by the Māori Party and the Greens with the exact same messaging, the exact same ideology, the exact same rhetoric.
It shows just how far the Labour Party has descended away from its roots, and just how clearly they have abandoned and forgotten the very people and industries who founded their party a hundred and ten years ago - right here in Blackball.
Their focus now is on issues such as race and drumming up social justice rhetoric that only serves to divide our country and ignores the vast majority of New Zealanders who just want a functioning health system, a top class education for their kids, first world wages, and an affordable home.
That's what all New Zealanders want regardless of who you are.
Delivering those four things has always been the commitment of New Zealand First.
The Labour Party leadership has shown just how shallow and impotent the once great Labour Party of Savage, Fraser, and Kirk has become.
For all those conservative, old school, egalitarian, common sense Labour voters out there who feel abandoned, you've only got one place to come, there is only one real party for the workers, and you're looking at it.
So you remember when Helen Clark was Prime Minister? She proposed to shut the West Coast down. By stopping their traditional industries. Stopping West Coast forestry extraction. Giving mining the cold shoulder.
Back then before she did that you were the only province, from the only country exporting wood to Scandinavia. And here you are with about 85 percent of your land owned by the state. Paying all the rates from the remaining 15 percent you own.
And those politicians from the leafy suburbs, from cities hundreds of kilometers away. Just won't keep their big noses out of your business. For a lousy $120 million dollars.
And when some of you, back then who were Labour supporters, thought there's something wrong here and started protesting. She described you as quotes "feral".
Unions
It should be clear to all New Zealanders that the Unions no longer represent blue-collar hard-working kiwis anymore.
Their blatant direct connections with the Labour Party are now out in the open.
What has happened to the true workers unions?
The unions have changed from representing workers to representing left wing elitist political agendas.
When the leaders of these unions are Labour Party candidates, sitting on Labour Party policy committees, run third party campaigns for the Labour Party in elections, and affiliated unions get a vote for the Labour Party leader, New Zealanders need to be asking who do the Unions truly work for - the workers, or Labour.
New Zealand First has always fought and achieved changes for workers across multiple governments:
- We are the party who demanded a yearly increase to the minimum wage in our coalition agreements in 2005, 2017, and in 2023.
- We are the party responsible for bringing in legislation for the Protection of First Responders,
- For ensuring proper enforcement action against exploitation of migrant workers, for creating more jobs for workers in our regions through the PGF and RIF,
- For expanding apprenticeships and vocational training,
- For essential worker planning for labour shortages - the list goes on.
I used to be a union delegate for the Labourers Union myself.
I know what it means to back the workers of this country - back when unions were led by hard working blue-collar kiwi battlers who knew what a hard day's work was - not the bunch of arrogant, left-leaning, politically motivated, serial protestors like most of them are today.
Conclusion
Ladies and gentlemen, we said at the start that we wanted to deliver a message far and wide from here in Blackball.
The Labour Party are sadly no longer the party they once were. They no longer are the party of the workers; they are no longer the party that was born here in Blackball.
There is only one true party of the workers and that's New Zealand First.
And here is a message for all those wokesters:
For all those pearl clutchers who walk around in perpetual faux outrage and acting offended every time they disagree with something:
Let's be clear - we will not apologise for defending our country from you wokesters and cultural Marxists.
Your time is up and New Zealanders have had enough.
We won't have a bunch of people who have been here for five minutes trying to tell us all what our country should be.
It's not wrong to defend our country's name - New Zealand.
It's not wrong to stand up and question people who for the last decade or more have tried to spread their woke views like a cancer through our country.
It's not wrong to want to take our country to a place of hard work, responsibility, and virtue.
It's not wrong to want this country to be great again like it once was when it was heralded as the best democracy in the world.
It's not wrong to push back against weak-kneed do-gooders who want to take our country down a path of separatism and division.
It's not wrong to stand up for what the vast silent majority of kiwis want.
The world is changing and so is New Zealand - the pendulum is swinging back.
We represent New Zealand and New Zealanders and we will always put them first.
