The country's clocks went forward an hour last weekend. Not so at New Zealand First's annual convention, however.
The get-together in Winston Peters' old stamping ground of Tauranga seemed to be more consumed with winding back time rather than advancing it.
That was par for the course. Ugly and self-serving as it might be, Peters' genius as a politician has been to sell voters a vision of a better past.
He paints a picture of a society which was far more attractive than was actually the case.
It is the ultimate con job. It is advertising agency-style appeal to nostalgia — coupled with the message that only Peters can deliver voters a return to nirvana.
The pulling power of Peters' mythology of a New Zealand which never was encapsulated in one delegate at the convention expressing his unhappiness at finding himself always being served in dairies by someone of Indian extraction.
Peters can do nothing to remedy that. But he can do the next worse thing —namely punishing and marginalising people for being immigrants.
Last weekend's 25th anniversary convention looked to be just another chapter in the same old story.
The convention's endorsement of draft legislation obliging new immigrants and refugees to sign up to a set of core New Zealand values was a solution looking for a problem.
Peters was employing his trusty old tactic of saying or doing something outrageous and then sitting back and soaking up the criticism of the Establishment safe in the knowledge that a sizeable chunk of the Silent Majority agrees with him, but is afraid to say so.
It might have looked like business as usual. This time, however, Peters might well have misjudged the likely reaction — and hugely so.
He had deliberately avoided announcing anything else at the conference which would have been regarded as new policy to ensure the code of conduct for new immigrants got everyone’s attention.
It certainly succeeded in doing that. The draft Respecting New Zealand Values Bill was almost universally panned across the political spectrum as unworkable and discriminatory. The proposal was widely and firmly condemned by all and sundry outside Parliament.
That the only positive response came from ACT will have only rubbed salt into Peters’ wounds.
Any requirement for immigrants and refugees to sign up to a list of core values stumbles on the simple truth that preserving the rights of the many is not achieved by constraining the rights of the few.
The more you examine the concept, the more the fishhooks multiply.
What exactly should be considered to be core values? Who decides? What kind of behaviour would amount to a breach of those values?
Who would police possible breaches? What rights of appeal would be available to someone deemed to have behaved in a manner which infringed core values?
Then there is the paramount question: what sanctions would apply to someone who was deemed to infringed those values?
Without some sanction applying to those immigrants and refugees who flouted New Zealand values, their signing up to those values would be meaningless.
Such a breach would —presumably — see the miscreant repatriated back to from whence they had come.
The mention of the word "presumably" is necessary because both Peters and Clayton Mitchell, the New Zealand First MP who has responsibility for this exercise in stupidity, have done their utmost to avoid revealing any detail as to how such a law would work in practise.
The vaguer the detail, the more difficult it makes it to debunk the idea.
That Peters finally realised he was on a hiding to nothing was evident in Mitchell’s fronting the matter.
Peters' stance has varied from his expressing strong support for the idea to him saying that things might not need to go any further than there being a "dialogue" on the merits or otherwise of the concept.
That gave him an out. That escape-hatch was insufficient in stopping the Prime Minister from seizing a much-needed opportunity for her to scotch suggestions she has become Peters’ poodle.
She was unambiguous in declaring Labour would not back the measure even to the select committee stage in Parliament.
Instituting such a code would implicitly be treating some residents as second-class citizens.
That would be viewed by Labour’s rank-and-file as the ultimate in things objectionable and thus completely unacceptable.
The draft legislation is dead in the water. That’s for sure. Harder to assess is whether it might have served its purpose before it had been killed.
The sole purpose of this dog of a policy was to be a dog-whistle designed to be heard by bigots, racists and anyone else so prejudiced.
In his dreams Peters might have hoped the policy could have paid some kind of a political dividend even if not on a scale generated by New Zealand First’s tough anti-immigration stance of the 1990s.
Both he and Mitchell have sent mixed messages, however.
They have sought to answer the charge that the legislation was nothing else but an exercise in vote-seeking bigotry
They stressed that a code of values would include such things as the right to religious freedom along with gender equality — things which authorities in the homelands of refugees and some migrants only pay lip-service, if that.
Freedom of religion is already included in the New Zealand Bill of Rights. If Peters really was serious about protecting rights, he would be better employed in endeavouring to persuade other political parties to pledge to make that document binding on governments.
But such a radical change in the country’s unwritten constitution isn’t on his radar. Just as he has yet to any real commitment to enhancing gender equality.
The notion of New Zealand First being a bastion of liberalism is a joke — one which many will not find funny.
Peters' attempt to portray the Respecting New Zealand Values Bill as something it is patently not simply doesn’t wash.
The net result, however, is voter confusion as regards where New Zealand First stands on this and other issues.
The party meets the definition of a classic "reactionary" party whose prime role is to be a counterweight to the forces of change.
Such has been the tide of social liberalism that has engulfed New Zealand in the past three decades that Peters’ party is not so much waving as drowning.
That was never more obvious than in the stance New Zealand First took on same-sex marriage. Or rather didn’t take.
The party abstained. That was effectively a vote in favour of becoming irrelevant.
New Zealand First is stuck in a time-warp.
It was perfectly reasonable for the party to have spent last weekend celebrating its survival over the past quarter century. The challenge for Peters was to offer at least a few signposts pinpointing the party's future course — one which is not dependent on pushing a few old populist buttons every now and then with ever diminishing returns — be it immigration or that other standby of the abolition of the Māori seats.
That Peters offered nothing fresh meant the convention was a missed opportunity. It meant it was nothing less than a failure of leadership on Peters' part.
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