The issue is that this government is kissing the arse of the US, you are correct we have seen the rise of authoritarian regimes across the globe in the last 10 years. We don't need nor want NZ to fall. I have seen the slow decay of rights under this government with their fast track of bills very similar to executive orders trump is using
For context, this guy leads a party that is part of a coalition in government at the moment. However, they only got 6% of the vote. He/they (the guy/the party but I find it amusing given the context that I could have been referring to his pronouns) is certainly not representative of the country as a whole.
More concerning is that the other parties in the coalition are also trying their best to mimic Trump.
I don't know how accurate it is to say he doesn't represent the country as a whole. At a minimum that phrasing is misleading.
no person represents the country as a whole but he is in government and that government got the votes of the majority of the people who voted. That's significant.
As you said nothing he said isn't aligned with ACT or National positions and certainly nobody else in government has rebuked him.
Trumpism and MAGA has arrived in NZ and is running the country. If you are not alarmed you should be.
There's some fairly large amount of NZers that interact on the daily (some on the hourly) with Facebook. I dip in from time to time to read what people are saying just to try to keep some perspective on why it seems so many of my fellow citizens have such strange ideas.
For the most part replies and discussion on just about any topic are full of false assumptions, minimal facts, naked and unquestioned bias (x is always bad no matter what, y always good etc) and then the usual racism, misogyny and nastiness. This sort of crap from Winston appeals to that sort of folk, really he's just targetting a little lower and more broadly than his usual tactic of talking to the 70+ old white racists.
These guys are so unpopular, it is looking likely that we will have the first one term government for a very long time.
They have fucked up the economy really badly, they are trying to accelerate privatization of state assets (roading, education etc...) which is deeply unpopular, most kiwis think the selling of the power companies, banks and insurance companies in the past were mistakes.
That's the only thing that'll potentially save us - just how bad they are at running the economy. But you have to keep an eye on polling which still shows the majority of our voters trust National on the economy more than Labour.
Plus Act & National have a huge amount of money from the real estate & landlord grifters who are going to dump it in yet again to fight against CGT which Labour will have to go with some form of to keep their own voters on side.