Winston Peters says New Zealand will recognise a Palestinian state, and that the only open question is when. The Foreign Affairs Minister made the prediction on RNZ’s Morning Report on Tuesday, a day after using his last major speech of the parliamentary term to defend the decision not to recognise Palestine and to argue that the country’s celebrated nuclear-free policy came with a price.
Peters told RNZ that recognition was a question of when, not if, and that a recent conversation with the Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister had moved things forward.
“I just spoke a few days ago to the foreign minister for the Palestinian Authority,” he said. “She understands our position. But I asked the most critical question and got a positive answer – so when are you going to be holding an election so we can recognise an elected state?”
“She said very, very soon. Now that’s a giant step forward.”
Peters said many countries had recognised statehood straight away on the promise that Palestinians would meet requirements later. His preferred order is the reverse, with an election held first. “The delightful thing about talking to the foreign minister just a few days ago was that they’re going to hold an election – now we’ve got something to recognise if there’s a properly conducted election,” he said.
That position has a history. In September 2025, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Peters announced that New Zealand would not recognise Palestine at that time. “With a war raging, Hamas still in place, and no clarity on next steps, we do not think that time is now,” he said then, according to 1News. The decision put New Zealand at odds with Australia, the United Kingdom and most UN member states, and alongside the United States, Japan, Korea, Singapore and several Pacific nations. Labour called it “an embarrassment” and the Greens called it “cowardly”.
On Monday afternoon Peters used that decision as his main example of what he calls a truly independent foreign policy. Speaking to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs at Parliament, in what RNZ described as his final speech as Foreign Affairs Minister in this government, he said independence cannot only ever mean disagreeing with Washington.
“However, for the left and a large section of our media, they define us acting independently only when we are disagreeing with the Americans,” he said, pointing to the anti-nuclear policy and the 2003 decision to stay out of the Iraq war as the examples critics usually reach for.
He then turned to the nuclear-free policy itself, a touchstone of New Zealand identity since the 1980s. “The anti-nuclear policy and the construction of this in David versus Goliath terms bolstered our national self-esteem, no doubt, as it boosted our sense of national identity,” he said.
But Peters argued a realist would ask whether the policy “grew or constrained” New Zealand’s room to act in the decades that followed, and said the answer “is far more mixed, because costs did occur”. He did not spell out what those costs were. He did say critics were never asked to explain the likely costs “if we followed their advice to use megaphone, rather than quiet diplomacy”.
The Palestine decision, he said, was a case “where we differed from some of our closest partners”. He summed up his approach in one line. “A truly independent foreign policy can only be multi-directional, and we have expressed it from time to time this term.”
Peters opened the speech by accepting the widely held view that “we face the worst international conditions since 1945”, and was blunt about the state of the United Nations, which he said was “hamstrung” by abuse of the Security Council veto. “The UN is just muddling through, in a weakened state,” he said.
The minister also laid out the numbers from his three years in the job. He made 44 overseas visits and spent 248 days abroad, around two-thirds of the parliamentary term, and held 279 meetings with other foreign ministers. He said heavy travel would be the burden of any future foreign minister “trying to mitigate against the perennial under investment in our diplomatic network”.
Quiet diplomacy does not mean staying silent, Peters told Morning Report. He said he had put New Zealand’s concerns directly to China’s foreign minister a few months ago. “I put our position to him very, very clearly. I asked him, why are you having experimental operations in the South China Sea, for example? Why are you firing missiles across the Pacific to countries that were not being warned? I stated that case and then we had a conversation about it.”
His closing theme was one he has repeated often. “There’s always a way to talk,” he said. “From understanding comes opportunity, and from diplomacy comes compromise, a crucial building block for better relations between nations.”
The speech lands with Parliament close to rising for the election, and foreign policy is rarely a vote-changer in New Zealand campaigns. Still, the Palestine stance Peters defended this week drew sharp criticism from Labour and the Greens in 2025, and whoever holds the foreign affairs portfolio after the election will inherit the recognition question. Peters did not rule out a fourth stint in the job if New Zealand First is returned to government.
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Should New Zealand wait for a Palestinian election before recognising a state, and did the nuclear-free policy cost the country more than it gained? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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