Disloyalty cost Penk his job. How come Peters gets away with racism? Hipkins asks
(From left) Prime minister Christopher Luxon, foreign minister Winston Peters and Labour leader Chris Hipkins.
The Opposition leader is asking why Luxon hasn't shown similar appetite for consequences over racist remarks.
Chris Penk challenged Christopher Luxon’s leadership and was out of cabinet within days. Ministers accused of making racist remarks, by contrast, have survived.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins used an urgent debate in Parliament on Tuesday to argue that the difference revealed something about the standard the prime minister applies when deciding what conduct deserves consequences.
“The message Christopher Luxon sent last week is that firing Chris Penk is, in his view, a bigger crime, because he committed the sin of being disloyal to Christopher Luxon,” Hipkins said.
“That gets you sacked from cabinet, but being openly racist doesn’t.”
Penk was removed from his ministerial portfolios after Luxon blamed him for the destabilisation that led to last week’s confidence vote.
Hipkins did not name foreign minister Peters in that part of his speech, but there was little ambiguity about the recent controversies he was invoking.
“Apparently, making racist attacks on Chinese New Zealanders is perfectly acceptable conduct for a government minister in Christopher Luxon’s government; making racist attacks on Indian New Zealanders is perfectly OK conduct for a minister in Christopher Luxon’s government—no sanction for either of those things,” he said.
Peters has faced sustained criticism since telling Chinese-born Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country” during a parliamentary debate last month.
“That’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here,” Peters told Xu-Nan, before adding, “This is called a democracy, unlike what you’re used to.”
Peters later stood by the remarks and continued attacking Xu-Nan’s background and command of English. When Xu-Nan later challenged Peters in Question Time, the foreign minister repeatedly argued that he had made the remarks as NZ First leader rather than in his ministerial capacity.
Luxon did not sack Peters, instead telling voters to judge the government at the election when questioned over the controversy.
The Penk debate gave Hipkins an opportunity to put those two episodes alongside each other. He also challenged the government’s account that Penk had essentially acted alone.
“If Chris Penk simply was a lone wolf acting alone, why did every one of National’s 49 MPs need to fly to Wellington?” he asked.
“Why did they need to spend three hours debating it before they could come out and say, ‘Actually, nothing to see here; no leadership challenge. We’re all right behind Christopher Luxon.’”
But it was Penk’s punishment, rather than the mechanics of the leadership turmoil, that gave Hipkins his sharpest line of attack.
Luxon had been prepared to remove a minister whose conduct threatened his leadership, Hipkins argued, while ministers who had made remarks he described as racist had remained in their jobs.
The Greens then made the Peters comparison explicit. Co-leader Marama Davidson asked why Luxon had been able to move quickly against Penk but had not taken similarly swift action against his foreign minister.
“Why was the prime minister not able to take swift action to also hold his minister of foreign affairs to account for what the prime minister himself has acknowledged were racist, unhelpful remarks that were actually anti foreign affairs?” she said.
Davidson said Peters’ remarks were not an isolated issue and referred to previous comments directed at MPs of Filipino, Mexican and Chinese backgrounds.
“The thing about those racist remarks is they are not just about the MPs in this House – they never are,” she said.
“Migrant communities have been very, very clear that that has caused harm to entire communities – not just to migrant communities but to relationships between all communities and our migrant communities.”
For the government, there was little appetite to relitigate Penk’s departure.
Health minister Simeon Brown said the events had already been “well traversed in the media” and that Penk’s actions had ultimately made his cabinet position untenable.
ACT took a noticeably warmer view of the former minister. MP Simon Court said the party was “disappointed to lose such a collegial, competent, and hard-working minister from our government”, praising Penk’s work on building and construction reforms.
