Koro Wetere died in June 2018. He had been Minister of Maori Affairs in that 1984-90 Rogernomics/nuclear free Labour government which cast a shadow that still hangs over us all in Aotearoa. His mainstream media obituaries dwelt on his noteworthy achievements in things such as advancement of the Maori language and legally empowering the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal to hear claims dating back to 1840. Very few mentioned the Maori Loans Affair (also known as the Hawaiian Loans Affair) or, if they did, failed to explain its significance.

Lessons From Australia’s Bloodless Coup

Peace Researcher at the time certainly grasped its significance. For a very detailed analysis I refer you to issue 19 (first series), June 1988, “Winston Peters: The Great White Hope”, by Nuclear Free Kiwis, online at https://www.scribd.com/document/33725401/Peace-Researcher-Vol1-Issue19-June-1988 (Nuclear Free Kiwis comprised Warren Thomson, Dennis Small and the late Bob Leonard; all three of them having been Editors of, and writers for, Peace Researcher over many decades. My obituary of Bob Leonard is in Watchdog 134, January 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/34/13.html).

I most recently wrote about it in Watchdog 138, April 2015, in my obituary of Gough Whitlam, who was Australia’s 1972-75 Labor Prime Minister, before being overthrown in a bloodless constitutional coup: “There were, and are, lessons in Whitlam’s overthrow for New Zealand. The US covert State tried to repeat the same modus operandi a decade later to get rid of the nuclear free Lange government. As I wrote in my obituary of David Lange (Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm)”:

“‘The US tried to subvert and overthrow Lange using all the old tricks in the handbook of its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). There was the textbook Maori Loans Affair, which targeted Koro Wetere, the Minister of Maori Affairs, and which TVNZ, in one of its finest hours, tracked back to the CIA office in Hawaii. It was a deadringer re-run of the Loans Affair scam which played such a major role in overthrowing the Australian Labor government headed by Gough Whitlam in 1975’”.

“It didn’t work in NZ but then, why would the US want to overthrow the Government that, via Rogernomics, threw this country open to the depredations of American transnational corporations and carpet bombed the economy and society to make it easy pickings for Big Business?” I refer you to my 2005 obituary of Lange, cited above, for an overview of that 1984-90 Labour government, looking at both Rogernomics and the nuclear free aspect.

So, that establishes the context of the shonky “loans affairs” used first, and successfully, against an Australian Labor government in the 70s and then, unsuccessfully, against an NZ Labour government in the 80s. The similarities of the operations in each country were striking – I refer you to my article in Watchdog 56, June 1987, titled, appropriately enough, “Similarities In The Australian And New Zealand Loan Affairs” (https://www.scribd.com/doc/23706989/campaign-Against-Foreign-Control-of-Aotearoa). My primary source was a book by Denis Freney, titled “Get Gough! The CIA, Organised Crime And Arms Dealers In The Loans Affair”.

In brief, both involved dubious international “financiers” (i.e. con men) with US intelligence connections offering huge (imaginary) overseas loans from outside conventional borrowing channels. Both targeted key Ministers in sensitive portfolios and offered big money for laudable aims – in the case of Whitlam’s Ministers, Jim Cairns and Rex Connors, it was to “buy back the farm” i.e. claw back Australian resources from transnational corporations, specifically mining companies.

In the case of Koro Wetere and Tamati Reedy, the head of the Maori Affairs Department, it was to advance Maori aspirations. It nearly worked in NZ- Wetere offered his resignation as Minister but Lange and the Cabinet declined to accept it. The scandal did not bring down either Wetere or the Government but it played a vital role in weakening it, dividing it, and cultivating an appearance of Government incompetence which was seized upon by the National Opposition and the corporate media.

Winston Peters Key Player In Sting

For these political sting operations to work, a key ingredient is the active involvement of local Rightwing attack dog politicians. In the Australian case, it was the then Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen (New Zealand’s greatest gift to our Australian brethren). In the New Zealand case it was none other than National MP, Winston Peters. Yes, the same avuncular old elder statesman who put the present Labour government into power, and is the current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs (not to mention having been Acting PM for six weeks in 2018 while Jacinda was on maternity leave).

“It was, as best I recall, 1987 and I was sitting with Winston Peters in the garden bar of a hotel on Waikiki Beach, enjoying a drink in the colourful sunset. A beautiful, young native Hawaiian waitress stared at Peters as he wandered back into the hotel. ‘Who is that man?’ she asked curiously. ‘Is he your president?’ ‘Not yet’, I replied, "but he'd like to be’. It was still the first term of the Lange Government and Peters was an Opposition National Party MP on the way up. He had captured public attention with a series of hard-hitting attacks on the Government, backed by leaked documents and information received from ‘sources’ on a variety of juicy issues”.

“I had come to Hawaii to investigate his biggest scoop, the Maori Loans Affair. He had unearthed a proposed $300 million* loan from some deeply dubious financiers, negotiated by the Department of Maori Affairs with the aim of using the cash to fund Maori businesses. The loan was unauthorised, as only the Minister of Finance had the power to sign off a foreign loan deal and, in any case, had never gone through. However, the whiff of fraud was enough to land Maori Affairs head Tamati Reedy, Maori Affairs Minister Koro Wetere and the Labour Government in deep trouble”. *According to Wikipedia, the proposed “loan” was for $NZ600 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_loan_affair. MH.

“Peters was in Honolulu to dig up more dirt, as were TV1 news reporter Ric Salizzo and I. Peters claimed to have further evidence, never produced, that the Lange Cabinet had prior knowledge of the deal, and he called upon Labour to resign. We plugged away for a week and discovered he was partly right. The man who was sourcing the loan was a con artist”.

“However, we also discovered several of the key figures involved in the deal were clearly linked to the CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence. A private detective, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, handed us files that showed some had been involved in a previous court case in the US and the CIA had blocked evidence in court on the grounds of ‘national security’. The Maori Loans Affair bore a startling resemblance to the Australia Loans Affair a decade before, when CIA-linked con men ran a similar scam on the Whitlam Labor Government and helped bring it down”.

“In light of the ferocious US reaction to the Lange Government's anti-nuclear stand, it bore all the hallmarks of a botched US intelligence operation designed to discredit the rebellious Lange Government. I know Peters gained much of his information from a man subsequently identified as the head of the CIA headquarters in Hawaii, who was operating under a commercial cover as a businessman. Today, much of this story looks like some weird John Le Carré novel. But these were still the days of the Cold War, the hardline Reagan era, and small Third World nations that stood in the way of US defence interests had suffered far greater interference and punishment”.

“Peters stubbornly refused to listen to any of the information regarding US intelligence links to the affair; it did not suit him to do so because he had enough material to embarrass the Labour Government. He did so very effectively, forcing the closure of the Department of Maori Affairs and blighting the careers of several New Zealand businessmen, public servants and politicians in the process” (NZ Listener, 13/9/08, “Scandalmonger”, Bill Ralston, https://www.noted.co.nz/life/life-in-nz/scandalmonger/).

Regime Change Is A Constant

This all happened 30+ years ago but there are lessons for today’s New Zealand. One is that regime change, whether of friend or foe, has always been part of the repertoire of dirty tricks employed by the US covert State. The only difference is that regime change as applied to foes e.g. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, involves industrial doses of death and destruction (not to mention consequences, foreseen and unforeseen, that unfold over decades). Whereas regime change as applied to “friends” e.g. Gough Whitlam’s Australia (or David Lange’s NZ), can be done bloodlessly.

Not that the US has anything to fear from its NZ friend. True, that 1984-90 Labour government did make NZ nuclear free. But Labour in Government has never done anything about Waihopai or Five Eyes or any of the other overt or covert ties that bind NZ to the American Empire. The Ardern government is as servile as the rest of its predecessors. If not more so.

Peters Has Always Been A Safe Pair Of Hands For US Empire

The second lesson is that Winston Peters, the common denominator between that 80s’ Labour government and the present one, is, and always has been, a loyal and faithful servant of the American Empire. Here’s a quote from my article “Not Very Great Expectations At All”, in PR 54 (November 2017, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/pr-backissues/pr54.pdf):

“As for Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters - he already held the latter portfolio from 2005-08 under the last Labour government. So, we’ve already seen enough of him in action in that capacity to have absolutely negative expectations. Filipinos have just the word for him – AmBoy (America’s Boy, which they use to describe various of their Presidents and political leaders. There is never any shortage of them in that country)”.

“Upon being appointed by Ardern, he said that he had devoted his previous stint at Foreign Affairs to rebuilding NZ’s relationship with the US. TV news illustrated this with a clip of him shaking hands with Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State under President George W Bush. We tend to forget that, until Trump came along and lowered the bar to a whole new level, Dubya Bush was viewed as the absolute nadir of US Presidential ignorance, idiocy and warmongering (now he’s wheeled out for public appearances as a kindly old elder statesman)”.

“Bush gave the world the ongoing and seemingly never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which have sucked in New Zealand as one of the minor accomplices in crime. We still have troops in both wars (I’m sorry, ‘trainers’. I cut my teeth on the Vietnam War – in the early days, the US military presence was described as consisting of ‘advisers’. Today they would be called ‘consultants’). Bush gave the world the endless and global ‘war on terror’. This was the Administration with which Peters was proudly ‘rebuilding the relationship’”.

“Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s a quote from a 2005 US Embassy cable (one of those leaked by Wikileaks and online at the Anti-Bases Campaign site at http://liberation.typepad.com/files/wellington-us-embassy-cables---bryce-edwards.pdf. They’re well worth reading, all 600+ pages of them). ‘We believe that Peters is genuinely interested in improving bilateral relations with the United States, and during his introductory meeting with Ambassador McCormick last week he made clear this was a priority. (FYI: Peters purposely made sure that Ambassador McCormick was the first Ambassador he met with as Foreign Minister)’”. So, Winston should fit in just fine with Trump’s America…”.

When Peters and New Zealand First were dumped out of Parliament in 2008 (when National replaced Labour as Government), Winston had been embroiled in scandals involving very large sums from rich donors, most prominently that from expatriate Kiwi businessman Owen Glenn. I wrote, in my analysis of that 2008 election (“Heeeere’s Johnny!”, Watchdog 119, February 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/02.htm):

“There have been suggestions that billionaire Owen Glenn was the modern day equivalent of the shonky ‘financiers’ used to get rid of the Whitlam Labor government in Australia in the 1970s and to very nearly get rid of the Lange Labour government here in the 80s (remember the Maori Loans scandal, which was traced back to the US Central Intelligence Agency?)”.

“But I reject that comparison. Why would the CIA want to get rid of a Minister of Foreign Affairs who made it his central policy to suck up to the Bush regime? And why would the US want to destabilise a Government which proved itself such a valuable ally in so many ways? Nope, Winston was finally undone by his own glaring contradictions, both personal and political”.

It would have been richly ironic if Peters had been dethroned by the very same covert tactic in which he had played a key part in the attempt to bring down the 80s Labour government.  And, of course, Peters and New Zealand First came back into Parliament at the 2011 election. The rest, as they say, is history. As far as the American Empire is concerned, Peters has always been a very safe pair of hands.