As is so often the way in these interminable and seemingly inevitable clashes between Mr Peters and journalists, there has been a lot of heat but not a great deal of light.
In this specific situation Mr Peters did deserve a little bit of heat.
There is seldom a point in any public speech where referring to Nazis or Nazism is a good idea.
The potential for whatever point is being made, no matter how well-intentioned, to be entirely blunted by misinterpretation and over-reaction is huge.
Let alone the strong possibility that someone hearing the remark will find it offensive and distressing.
If you must compare someone to something, that is almost always a bad comparison to make.
And Mr Peters, seemingly, was not originally planning to make it — in the draft of his speech circulated to media prior to delivery he was scheduled to complain about "the insidious creep of racist co-governance [which] had spread throughout legislation and the public sector. Not just ideological theory, it was race-based theory — where some people’s DNA made them better than others."
While this fleeting reference, despite its relative obscurity, would no doubt have been enough to rile many up on its own, Mr Peters would not have been alone in those views.
New Zealanders like to think of ourselves as an egalitarian society where no-one is superior to anyone else — that precept has been at the core of the philosophy of the New Zealand First party since its inception.
But what Mr Peters actually then went on to say was: "Where some people’s DNA made them, sadly, according to these people, and condoned by their cultural fellow travellers, their DNA made them somehow better than others" before adding: "I’ve seen that sort of philosophy before, I saw it in Nazi Germany, we all did. We have seen it elsewhere in the world in the horrors of history, but right here in our country tolerated by the very people whose job is to keep the system honest.”
Cue a rash of headlines where it was claimed that Mr Peters compared co-governance to Nazi Germany, and Mr Peters’ furious denial that he had done any such thing.
Strictly speaking, Mr Peters is correct.
He had indeed moved past co-governance on to other things. But the two paragraphs were very close together and were building up the overall strand of Mr Peters’ argument.
Accepting him at his word that the media got this wrong, whether claiming Te Pāti Māori is coming from the same philosophical songsheet as the Hitlerian regime is any wiser a thing for him to have said is another discussion entirely.
We agree with Mr Peters that all races are equal, and that it is horrific to claim otherwise. The Te Pāti Māori manifesto claim might have been meant as a lighthearted comment but such statements are too incendiary to be made lightly.
Mr Peters could, should, and certainly intended to, say that what Te Pāti Māori had said was offensive to many. And fair enough too.
But once this other "N" word starts to be bandied about, rational interpretation of what might otherwise have been a reasonable statement flies completely out the window.
This will, of course, have played very well to Mr Peters’ base, and he will also have come to little electoral harm for his increasingly shrill attacks on the media.
But whether anything about this unfortunate episode will have helped in the slightest in the fraught, delicate, nuanced discussion of race relations in this country is another matter entirely.
