Yet again, Winston Peters has Green MPs who weren’t born in Aotearoa – oh, New Zealand, sorry – in his crosshairs.

Echo Chamber is The Spinoff’s dispatch from the press gallery, recapping sessions in the House. Columns are written by politics reporter Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Wellington editor Joel MacManus.

Straight off the bat as question time kicked off yesterday, spurred by a patsy question from National’s Grant McCallum, finance minister Nicola Willis revealed – at about the same time as the official announcement came from the Reserve Bank – that the Official Cash Rate (OCR) would be dropping by 50 basis points, to 3.75%. If you’re not entirely sure what that means, you’re not alone – basically, the OCR is the interest rate at which commercial banks can borrow money from the Reserve Bank, and those banks use it to set their own interest rates for consumers. 

It was widely predicted by economists, and if you ask the government, the drop is very good news. If you ask the opposition, it’s not enough to cover up every other bad thing going on with the economy. To defend herself against jeers from the opposition benches, Willis warned “there are always risks to the economic outlook”, only to be interrupted by Chris Hipkins: “She’s one of them.”

There was one dig the government benches kept coming back to on Wednesday. Deputy prime minister Winston Peters led the way, interjecting during the Greens’ Chlöe Swarbrick’s questioning of Christopher Luxon with: “Is the prime minister telling Chlöe Swarbrick that we will not be following the Marxist model of wealth redistribution that she advocates?” 

That was just the beginning of Marxism in the House on Wednesday – National minister Chris Bishop later labelled the Greens “degrowth Marxists”, a line repeated by Willis an hour later during the general debate.

If there’s one thing scarier than Marxists, it’s immigrant Marxists. When Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March questioned the minister of immigration Erica Stanford on the fairness of deporting people born in the country – in reference to the story of Daman Kumar, who has been granted temporary reprieve after being told he must leave New Zealand – Winston Peters interrupted. Peters didn’t have a problem with the question itself, but the phrasing: Menéndez March’s use of “Aotearoa” rather than “New Zealand”.

The barracking kicked off before Peters could even finish his point of order. He had to repeat it three times, the jeering against it was so loud: “Why is someone who applied to come to a country called New Zealand as an immigrant in 2006 allowed, in this House, to change the country’s name without the mandate, the approval, or referendum of the New Zealand people?”

A groan rippled through the House. Labour’s Kieran McAnulty argued that because te reo Māori is an official language, “Aotearoa” was more than appropriate, to which NZ First’s Shane Jones argued the word was only popularised by William Pember Reeves. The Greens’ Steve Abel had a go at arguing that Aotearoa is all good, and Peters countered that no Māori had used the name before colonisation. That gave Hipkins the opportunity for a good dig: “He was there!” Peters replied with an oft-issued threat: “I’ll be around long after [Hipkins is] gone.”

Those sitting in the House would be forgiven for wondering if a ​​folie à deux had befallen them, for the impact of the collective déjà vu caused by Peters’ words was strong enough to be mistaken for group psychosis. Wasn’t it just last week that Peters had asked the House if it were too much to ask for migrants to be grateful to New Zealand for letting them come here? Oh yes, it was.

That moment was reminiscent of that other time, three weeks ago, when Jones chose to target immigrant Green MPs – or rather, just the one: Menéndez March (unless he is convinced Francisco Hernandez is also Mexican. Of course, Celia Wade Brown and Julie Anne Genter are also immigrants, but they seem to have escaped the targeting.) Jones had called “send the Mexicans home” (there’s only one MP of Mexican descent in parliament), while Peters took aim at Hernandez and Lawrence Xu-Nan with a demand to “show some gratitude”.

Maybe they were inspired by National MP Todd McClay’s comments last July, when he told Menéndez March “you’re not in Mexico now”. And they all would’ve got away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids: after Peters defended his anti-immigrant comments three weeks ago, he challenged the media to ask the Mexican ambassador, Alfredo Pérez Bravo, what he thought about the remarks. 

As it turned out, he wasn’t a fan. Who knows whether Pérez Bravo will have time to book another crisis meeting with the minister of foreign affairs this week.

About two hours after Peters’ comments, a letter Swarbrick had sent out three weeks ago was released to media for the first time. The Greens co-leader had written a formal complaint to the prime minister, asking him to reel in the “inappropriate and racist” behaviour of his deputy prime minister and other ministers in the House. She told RNZ they planned to write another letter, but had little expectations of any outcome. Watch this space.