This article is a guest post and doesn’t necessarily represent the views of Greenpeace.

New Zealanders recently gave the Luxon-led coalition government a record low rating of 4.2 out of 10 in the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor survey. Even falling concern about price inflation failed to boost their flagging rating.

Their average performance rating for the previous six months found a statistically significant fall from 4.7 out of 10 last October to 4.2. That’s not good news for a government that has rolled out an increasingly populist menu of policies since coming into office.

Most notably, those policies are increasingly aligned with the US Trump administration’s ‘War on Woke’.

Immediately after coming into office on 20 January, President Trump and his team of Fox News presenters and TV wrestling moguls declared a ‘War on Woke’, with faux warnings about phoney folk devils and bogus moral panic. As part of their ‘anti-woke’ crusade, they have moved to limit the free speech of those they disagree with on US university campuses in an effort to distract American voters from their menacing Project 2025 agenda of weakening US democracy, climate action and nature protections.

Despite that, news headlines have still been dominated by Trump’s primary vehicle for implementing Project 2025 – Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His minions spent the first 100 days slashing federal government agency budgets and then contracting out more government functions to the private sector, including Musk’s own company SpaceX and those of Trump’s other big financial backers.

As this unfolded, NZ First party leader Winston Peters was quick to put on his double-breasted pinstripe suit and fly to the US to bend the knee to Trump’s Oval Office bully boys.

Mr Peters has been known to cosy up to far-right figures before. He reportedly first met Nigel Farago and his billionaire ‘Brexit bad boy’ ally Arron Banks in England in 2018, and Farago again in 2024. Banks reportedly bankrolled Farago’s populist Brexit campaign to the tune of $10 million and was known to visit the Russian embassy in Londongrad for a samovar of tea with high ranking Russian officials when he and Farago were campaigning to sway British voters to leave the European Union between 2015 and 2017. Their controversial campaign was accused of using misleading figures and false claims and by 2025 a clear majority of British voters said they think Brexit failed to deliver – including Farago.

In June 2020, Mr Peters reportedly provided consular assistance to Banks in relation to a transit visa for Australia. Later, Banks reportedly sent a team to Aotearoa to work on the NZ First party’s unsuccessful 2020 election campaign, in which Peters’ party was voted out of Parliament.

After returning from Washington DC in March this year, Mr Peters rolled out his Trump tribute-act, declaring with his Godzone MAGA-phone that he was launching his own ‘War on Woke’.

The Trumpian populist playbook

It was a move from the Trumpian populist playbook, something which has been critiqued by US-based Venezuelan academic and journalist Moisés Naím in his 2022 book The Revenge of Power: How autocrats are reinventing politics for the 21st Century. In his book he uses ‘The Three Ps’ to define the formula as, “Populism, Polarisation, and Post-Truth”.

Naim describes how populists like Trump claim to champion ‘the people’ but once in power they champion the one percenter billionaires and oligarchs who bankroll them – in Trump’s case Musk and his fellow ‘Tech Bro’ rich-list billionaires, and fossil fuel magnates including Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer, the company suing Greenpeace in the US over the Standing Rock pipeline protests in Dakota. 

Here in Aotearoa, we already know from RNZ reporting that the populist NZ First party has been bankrolled by big coal and big fishing rich-lister Peter Talley (full name Peter Ivan Talijancich) who is a joint owner of Talley’s and billionaire stock market investor Graeme Hart, whose Rank Group owns Carter Holt Harvey and retail chain Carters.

Then there’s the stoking of division by populists to create polarisation – the classic tactic used by Trump and Farago, in which they took Goebbels’ concept of a ‘kultur kampf’ (culture war) and rebranded it as the ‘War on Woke’. Whether it’s Trump petulantly renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, or Mr Peters attacking opposition MP Ricardo Menéndez March for referring to the country’s name as Aotearoa in Parliament, the clear purpose is to divide and polarise. While populists may pay lip service to the concept of national unity their public comments are often aimed at stoking division and polarisation.

According to Naim, the third ‘P’ stands for Post-truth fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories aimed at confusing people, disrupting the truth, and drawing in the confused and less well-informed.

Naim has now written a new book, ‘Charlatans – How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses’. Due out later this year, it promises to highlight how 21st century populists adopt a ‘circus showman’ persona (think 19th century US politician and circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum who famously promoted hoaxes) and seek to emulate reality TV hosts (think The Apprentice).

Bulldozing the RMA in the War on Nature

Soon after Mr Peters’ speech, the Luxon-led coalition announced its new Trumpian offering in the form of their ‘anti-woke’ replacement to the Resource Management Act (RMA). Their two new bills are set to bulldoze environmental protections and replace them with an anti-environmental free-for-all for big oil, big mining and big developers.

Interviewed on the RMA by RNZ, Mr Luxon said “We cannot have Tom, Dick, and Harry weaponise the planning system to block progress from the opposite end of the country.” This will have been music to the ears of the coalition’s rich-list backers and fast-trackers because the RMA replacement promises to be lucrative for them.

The RMA rollback echoes the Trump administration’s latest policy bulldozing US environmental protections, which allows the federal Forest Service to carry out logging on 58% of US national forests.

The RMA replacement comes after the government’s fast-track legislation passed in December, which deleted public consultation and environmental protections, and replaced them with a long list of environmentally destructive pet projects strapped to the back of a Space-X booster rocket.

They also have a track record of undermining and weakening climate action. In February, Mr Peters and his coalition co-lead David Seymour both floated the idea of following Trump in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Then in March, the coalition confirmed its intention to overturn the ‘woke’ 2018 ban on offshore oil and gas exploration – emulating Trump, who overturned the existing US offshore oil and gas drilling ban passed by the previous US administration within a day of coming into office in January.

Also deplorable has been the coalition’s announcement that it would cut public science sector funding, including scrapping Callaghan Innovation and merging the seven Crown Research Institutes into three entities with a stronger focus on commercialisation and profit, and fewer staff. This is similar to Musk’s DOGE minions in the US slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and government funding of scientific research in various federal research institutes and universities.

DOGE minions have also cut the federal US National Parks Service, while here in Aotearoa the coalition has cut Department of Conservation funding and the number of conservation science roles.

While Musk wielded a chainsaw in glee over the DOGE cuts, this week’s news that Tesla’s profits fell by 71 percent over the first three months of this year will have wiped the sneer off his face.

Here at home, the coalition’s ‘War on Woke’ has also included shameful moves to weaken the role of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the public sector and the appalling decision to rule out incorporating a Treaty principles clause in the two new RMA replacement bills.

The cold irony for the coalition is that their implementation of increasingly Trumpian populist ‘War on Woke’ policies has coincided with their record low performance rating. Perhaps there’s a message in that for them?