I understand why you want to do it, Jacinda – but don’t.

Promise-Keeper: The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon the proposed “Hate Speech” legislation lightly, seeing it as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. All of this is understandable, but none of it makes the abrogation of New Zealanders’ freedoms acceptable.

I UNDERSTAND WHY the Prime Minister feels so strongly about “Hate Speech”. The events of 15 March 2019 are seared upon Jacinda Ardern’s memory. She will not, therefore, abandon lightly what she sees as a particularly effective means of preventing such horrors from ever happening again. It is also clear that the Prime Minister believes she has promises to keep to the victims of the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. From her perspective, legislating against “Hate Speech” is the most important way of keeping those promises.

She’s wrong, of course.

Prime Ministers cannot afford to take things personally. That may sound harsh and unfeeling, but it is, nevertheless, true. As the leader of this country, Jacinda Ardern has a responsibility to honour not just the pain and suffering of the victims of the Christchurch terrorist, but the pain and suffering of the generation of New Zealanders who battled against the most malign terrorist of all time.

Tens-of-thousands of young New Zealanders were killed or wounded in the global struggle against Adolf Hitler. One of the most precious things they were fighting to protect was the first thing Hitler and his fellow Nazis set out to destroy: the right of every human-being to think, speak and communicate freely.

The urge to suppress ideas and beliefs which contradict what one fervently believes to be the truth is not a healthy urge. It is a totalitarian urge. An urge to bend the whole world to your way of thinking. The great danger of succumbing to this urge is that you begin to see those who disagree with you as willful enemies of the truth. Confronted with their dissent, with their deliberate refusal to acknowledge what is self-evidently true, with their hate speech: what else can you do but make sure that the offenders are disciplined and punished?

Tragically, this is the direction in which the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into The Christchurch Mosque Attacks opted to steer the Government. Out of the terrorist’s mayhem, the Royal Commissioners were determined to bring forth what they called “Social Cohesion”. The people of New Zealand, they said, must be brought closer together, and in order for that to happen, all forms of speech which foster division, are insulting, create disharmony, and/or incite discrimination and hate, should be criminalised.

Had the Royal Commission restricted itself to recommending that language intended to incite hatred and/or violence against followers of the Islamic faith be outlawed, it is just possible that New Zealanders would have conceded the point. After all, if the law already forbids such expression in relation to ethnicity, then why not religion? In the dark shadow of the Mosque attacks, surely it would have been the least New Zealanders could do?

But, no. Restricting the extension of the existing law to cover religion was not deemed to be sufficient. The strengthening of New Zealand’s social cohesion would require the creation of a whole swathe of new “protected groups”. To bring the country together, the Royal Commission – and now, seemingly, the Labour Government – is intent on empowering the citizenry to send their neighbours to jail for up to three years for the “crime” of pissing them off.

One can only feel desperately sorry for the Police as women turn on men, Trans on TERFs, Maori on Pakeha, Christians on atheists, supporters of Palestine on supporters of Israel, Baby Boomers on Millennials, and Neoliberals on Marxists. The courts will be filled with angry and bitter complainants and defendants. Juries will be asked to solve problems philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Vast sums of money will be expended on lawyers. No one will emerge from the process emotionally unscathed. And all in the name of strengthening New Zealand’s social cohesion!

It won’t work, Jacinda. No matter how much you’d like it to; no matter how sincere all those promises you made to the victims. It won’t work. You need to listen to those who are warning you that the unintended consequences of this direct attack on the freedom of thought and expression, guaranteed to all New Zealanders in the Bill of Rights Act, will be huge.

Uniformity of belief and behaviour is Xi Jinping’s goal – it shouldn’t be Jacinda Ardern’s.

Freedom is unruly. It’s rude. It hurts people’s feelings. Makes them angry.

But people died for it, Jacinda.

Leave it alone.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 2 July 2021.

What They Do In The Shadows: Winston Saves Labour From Itself.

They Want It Darker: Peters knows exactly what is going on in the minds of the dark, rock-solid mass of National Party voters – there was a time when he stood in the shadows with them. Aware that Laura Norder was getting ready to let loose one of her full-throated screams, Peters moved swiftly to save Labour from itself. Andrew Little will just have to wait.

THANK GOD FOR WINSTON PETERS! The decision of the NZ First Party to torpedo the Labour Party justice minister’s proposal to scrap the “Three Strikes” legislation came in the very nick of time. Andrew Little may be a good man, and Sir Peter Gluckman a powerful advocate for evidence-based decision-making, but neither of them would appear to possess Peters’ gut instinct for what is – and is not – possible politically.

The leader of NZ First is looking at the dark and rock-solid mass of National Party support ranged against the Labour-NZF-Green government, and he is drawing some pretty gloomy conclusions.

The first and most obvious of these is that the Nats smell blood. At both the parliamentary and grass-roots level of the National “movement” (for want of a better description) the frequently voiced opinion whatever else this government may do it is most unlikely to win a second term is rapidly solidifying into a right-wing conviction.

The second is that Jacinda’s “stardust” only works on the “woke”. If you’re young and following the right people on Twitter and Instagram; if you’re middle-class and well-credentialed; if you’re a working couple living in your own home and raising a young family; well then, Jacinda’s bloody marvellous. In the grim ghettoes of deprivation and despair, however, Labour’s promises of kindness and transformation have yet to evoke a measurable political response.

Peters knows exactly what that means in electoral terms. Labour is failing to grow its vote out of anything other than the support bases of its own partners. The non-voting poor and marginalised – who should be their target – have yet to hear anything from Jacinda and her team compelling enough to distract them from the grim business of day-to-day survival.

For a few magical moments in 2017, Metiria Turei caused a number of them to lift up their heads – just in time to witness her brutal political destruction. But who’s giving hope to beneficiaries and the working-poor in 2018? Certainly not Carmel Sepuloni!

The third – and the gloomiest – conclusion Peters is likely to have drawn is that this is not an era of political sunshine. He is old enough to remember the early 1960s when, for a few brief years, both here in New Zealand and around the Western World, there was a public willingness to embrace social policies founded in compassion, bolstered by science and delivered by political parties temporarily freed from the encumbering baggage of traditional conservatism.

Full-employment and steadily rising living-standards had emptied communities of the fears and anxieties to which, throughout history, they had been prey. The sunshine of empathy shone into places usually cast in the shade of envy and prejudice. To an electorally significant number of citizens the world seemed to be getting better and better and they were willing to vote for politicians who promised to make it better still. Social-democracy and progressive liberalism made common cause against all manner of social evils: prisons built to punish not rehabilitate; birching and flogging; the death penalty.

Peters is also old enough to remember the Third Labour Government and how its sunniest ministers – the most outstanding of which was the Justice Minister, Dr Martyn Findlay – attempted to press ahead with ever more liberal and progressive reforms. He’d remember, too, the souring of the New Zealand electorate in the wake of the hugely inflationary oil-shocks and Kirk’s tragic death.

Peters will recall how fear and anxiety returned to the nation’s communities as unemployment rose and living-standards began to fall. Watching all this, that much younger Winston Peters observed how easily National’s leader, Rob Muldoon, turned it all to his advantage. How traditional conservatism – momentarily outshone – once again cast its pall over the electorate. How Dr Martyn Findlay and his liberal reforms were unceremoniously cast aside - along with the rest of the Labour Government.

Peters knows exactly what is going on in the minds of that dark, rock-solid mass of National Party voters – there was a time when he stood in the shadows with them. Aware that Laura Norder was getting ready to let loose one of her full-throated screams, Peters moved swiftly to save Labour from itself. Andrew Little will just have to wait.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 June 2018.

What Happens When The Generators Of Social Solidarity Fall Silent?

Crumbling System: With the steady decline of organised religion, organised labour and organised sport, New Zealand's most crucial generators of social cohesion have largely ceased to function. As a result, New Zealanders no longer tend to define themselves by the things that draw them together, but by the things that drive them apart.

THE INTERNAL MIGRATION of Maori from the countryside to the cities changed New Zealand society forever. For decades, this country’s race relations regime had operated on the cynical proposition that so long as Maori could be kept “out of sight”, they could also be kept “out of mind”. Such complacency could not, however, survive the constantly rising demand for labour that grew out of the extended post-war economic boom. The needs of the construction and manufacturing sectors were such that tens-of-thousands of mostly young Maori were lured away from their rural communities and into New Zealand’s rapidly growing urban centres.

The late Dr Ranginui Walker wrote often of the massive cultural dislocation which this rapid shift from rural to urban occasioned. That it did not produce (at least, not immediately) the dramatic social pathologies evident in other countries experiencing similar internal migrations (Italy, for example) has been attributed to the strength of three intersecting institutions: the churches; the trade unions; and the sports clubs; all of which swiftly sank deep and binding roots into the new city-based Maori communities.

The powerfully integrative effect of these three mass institutions (augmented by specifically Maori organisations like the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Maori Wardens) made New Zealand’s experience of massive and rapid internal migration comparatively painless. It also contributed hugely to that most enduring of Pakeha myths: “New Zealand has the best race relations in the world.”

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it has become clear how important the churches, unions, and sports clubs were to the lives of ALL New Zealanders – Pakeha as well as Maori. Since the 1970s, their relentless decline has not only reduced dramatically the opportunities for the two cultures to come together in pursuit of common interests, but also, in the space where common beliefs and aspirations once flourished, a vacuum has been created into which a host of very different, and often divisive, ideas has migrated.

It was the churches that went first – and with them the common Christian narrative that had allowed New Zealanders to view their social and economic problems through a single ethical lens. In Pakeha culture, the morally amorphous secularism which rushed in to fill the vacuum offered multiple opportunities for non-religious belief systems to take root and flourish. Some of these, like “New Age” spirituality, were harmless. Others, like Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism”, and the New Left’s “Identity Politics”, would prove dangerously corrosive of social cohesion.

In Maori communities, the vacuum created by the Christian churches’ declining persuasiveness was quickly filled by a revival of traditional indigenous beliefs and practices. Overarching and mobilising this “Maori Renaissance” was the much broader and politically-charged narrative of tino rangatiratanga – Maori Sovereignty.

The triumph of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s only speeded-up the disintegration of New Zealand society. The collapse of trade union strength which followed the passage of the Employment Contracts Act in 1991 led directly to the elimination of penalty pay-rates. With them went the institution that had made so many of New Zealand’s sports clubs viable – the common Kiwi Weekend. For Kiwi sportsmen and women, the imperative very quickly became: commercialise or die.

With the traditional generators of social solidarity no longer humming, cast adrift New Zealanders retreated to that most fundamental identity marker: ethnicity. Maori had got there first and had a ten year start, at least, in developing the rhetoric of difference. But, as the extraordinary response to Don Brash’s in/famous “Orewa Speech” made clear, Pakeha racial chauvinism is not all that difficult to conjure-up. Both here and in America, more and more disenchanted whites are tuning-in to the unrelenting tinnitus of the tribe.

In the latest edition of The Atlantic , journalist Peter Beinart writes: “Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organised religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasising morality and religion and emphasising race and nation.”

What does it say about the cultural malaise in which Western civilisation currently appears to be gripped, that the ideological radicals of the Left have, since the late-1970s, and with growing fervour, also been emphasising those aspects of human existence over which the individual exercises the least personal control: race, gender, sexuality?

Bereft of the mass institutions that once drew them together, New Zealanders are increasingly defining themselves by the things that drive them apart.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 April 2017.