An Ugly Demonstration.

Mobbed! As Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s (Posie Parker’s) opponents surged forward, her only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED on Saturday morning, 25 March 2023, in Auckland’s Albert Park is easily described.

At 11:00am, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (a.k.a “Posie Parker”) a small (just 155 centimetres tall) bottle-blond mother of four from the United Kingdom, would have stood behind the microphone set up in the Albert Park band rotunda and delivered a speech.

To a small crowd of about 250 people, she would have detailed her objections to transgender women (i.e. persons born biological males and, in some cases, retaining their male reproductive organs) having the right to enter spaces hitherto reserved for biological women and girls; being incarcerated in biological women’s prisons; and permitted to compete against human females in sporting events intended for biological women only.

Keen-Minshull would have been followed by a line-up of New Zealand speakers (most of them biological women and feminists) concerned about the linguistic erasure of their sex from official discourse (as in the expression “pregnant persons”) and alarmed at the efforts of transgender women and their supporters to silence the public expression of their concerns.

At a distance of about 50 metres, a much larger crowd of transgender persons and their supporters, safely corralled behind sturdy barriers, and a cordon of police officers, would have kept up a noisy barrage of objections to the content of the speakers’ speeches. Above their heads, banners and placards proclaiming their support for the rights of transgender New Zealanders would have been clearly visible to the “Let Women Speak” organisers in the rotunda.

The news media would have been there in force to record the confrontation for posterity. When the meeting came to an end, roughly 90 minutes later, and the crowds began to disperse, journalists would have been seen interviewing participants from both sides of the barriers for their media employers.

Spokespersons for the Transgender community would have set forth their objections to Keen-Minshull’s claims, drawing the journalists’ attention to the lack of evidence for any widespread abuse of women and girls by transgender women in toilets, changing-rooms, women’s refuges or prisons, and pointing out how extremely hurtful such suggestions are to the members of one of society’s most fragile and vulnerable communities. The journalists’ professional commitment to fair and balanced reporting would have ensured that the views of both groups were presented to the public.

By 2:00pm, Albert Park would again have become the preserve of Aucklanders enjoying a sunny autumn afternoon.



WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED on the morning of Saturday, 25 March 2023, bore very little resemblance to the civilised political ideal described above.

As Keen-Minshull stepped forward to speak she was physically assaulted by a person pretending to be a supporter. This attack caused the counter-protesters, estimated at more than 2,000, to surge forward, thrusting aside the flimsy barriers erected to separate them from the much smaller crowd which had gathered to hear the speakers. They were able to do this because there was no police cordon to enforce that separation. Within seconds, the counter-protesters were pressing in on Keen-Minshull’s audience, screaming abuse, hurling projectiles, and lashing out with fists and placards.

Fearing for the safety of Keen-Minshull and her audience, one observer implored a nearby police officer, who was looking on impassively, to intervene. He refused, allegedly declaring that Keen-Minshull: ‘is in a public space. If she feels unsafe she needs to leave’.

At this point, Keen-Minshull’s only protecters were a handful of burly security guards who surrounded their client and began forcing a path through what was now a howling mob. At least one video recording shows the diminutive Keen-Minshull, a terrified rag-doll, eyes dulled by the effects of shock, being heaved past individuals with faces contorted by fury and hate.

Only when the police present realised that if they did not place Keen-Minshull under their protection, then her bodyguards would be forced to exit the melee by driving through it in their own vehicle – with all the attendant risks to the counter-protesters’ health and safety such a manoeuvre would entail. Keen-Minshull was, accordingly, bundled into a police car and driven from the scene.

Not all the scheduled speakers were so lucky. This is how Ani O’Brien, from the group Stand Up For Women, described her experience:

No sooner had Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull arrived at the Rotunda, a protestor (who had managed to get past the barrier) ran at her and threw a red substance all over her and a security guard. As she attempted to clean up, the protestors pushed over, crushed, and dismantled the barriers and swarmed around her.

At this point, I was caught in the angry crowd. I had whistles blown in my face, abuse screamed at me, and I was fearful for my own safety. This was nothing compared to what Kellie-Jay endured. She was trapped and surrounded by a mob screaming abuse and trying to get past her security guards.

Chris, there were no police in sight. Despite widely publicised threats of violence, the police were nowhere near the protest frontlines to prevent the event from devolving into chaos as it did. I had to call the police from the middle of the screaming crowd! And even then they weren’t particularly concerned that a woman was trapped in the midst of a mob determined to get to her.

Keen-Minshull’s rally was over before it had even begun – victim of the Thug’s Veto. Her right to free expression had been illegally and violently curtailed. Left in possession of the park, the elated counter-protesters took to Twitter to celebrate their historic victory over bigotry and hate.



WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of the events of Saturday, 25 March 2023? The most urgent questions are those that will, over the coming days, be levelled at the Police. Who was in command? What intelligence did they have regarding Keen-Minshull and her increasingly vocal enemies? Why, in the face of credible threats to her person, was police protection denied to Keen-Minshull and her followers? Why, as the situation spiralled out of control, did the police officers present not intervene?

Predictably – and entirely appropriately – the Free Speech Union, has raised these issues in a letter to the new Police Minister, Ginny Andersen:

We call on you, and the Police Commissioner, to acknowledge the lack of action to defend the basic speech rights of those who turned up to the ‘Let Women Speak’ rally, and reassert that those who express unpopular or controversial views in public are entirely in their right, and deserve to be protected from threats, intimidation, and violence.

There will be considerable public scepticism, however, concerning the willingness of the Labour Government, and Party, to defend New Zealanders’ freedom of speech and assembly. There will be scepticism, also, that the Minister and her colleagues are any longer capable of perceiving the ethical issues which Saturday’s ugly demonstration laid bare.

All through the preceding week, Labour Ministers, Members of Parliament, and activist party members were telling those seeking to silence Keen-Minshull that, as far as Labour was concerned, they were doing the Lord’s work. In this they were echoed, even more vehemently, by the Greens. When the governing parties of the day publicly back a political movement, its followers may be forgiven for believing they have been given the green-light for coercion. The parliamentary Left did not balk at describing Keen-Minshull’s views as “abhorrent” and “incorrect”. Not quite in the same league as King Henry II’s “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest!” – but close.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this incident is the crucial role played by the mainstream news media in creating the preconditions for the violent suppression of free speech which ensued. Throughout the preceding week, journalists had denigrated Keen-Minshull – who describes herself as an “advocate for women” – as “an anti-trans activist” – finding her guilty, by association, of endorsing far-right, even Neo-Nazi, groups. That she, and people who shared her concerns, had a case to make was simply not acknowledged journalistically. In a synergy worthy of Putin’s Russia, the views of the Government, and the views of the mainstream media, had become interchangeable.

Certainly, the state media appeared incapable of perceiving the role it had played in the events of Saturday, 25 March. Television New Zealand’s Jack Tame even offered the violence unleashed by Keen-Minshull’s opponents as an ex-post-facto justification for denying her entry to New Zealand. In other words, allowing those threatening to exercise the Thug’s Veto to determine who should be allowed to speak in New Zealand, and who should not. Nothing could better illustrate the yawning generational gulf into which journalistic ethics has disappeared.

Over the next six months, the New Zealand electorate will discover just how effectively the parties of the Right are able to exploit the Labour-Green failure to uphold the Bill of Rights Act and the democratic polity it underpins. Chris Hipkins may soon regret that he did not step in immediately to set the political tone on Keen-Minshull. Because, whatever the reasons that set New Zealanders against one another so aggressively on Saturday, 25 March 2023, they had absolutely nothing to do with bread and butter.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 27 March 2023.

Too Big To Punish.

Too Strong For The Law’s Web: But, if the USA is too big to punish, why isn’t the Russian Federation? Russia’s economy may be roughly the size of Italy’s, but it’s nuclear arsenal is more than capable of laying human civilisation to waste. Threatening to arrest Vladimir Putin - especially when the Russian Federation and the rest of the United Nations are recalling George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq twenty years ago – is an astonishingly provocative act.

I AM CONSTANTLY ASTONISHED at how blithely unconscious the West is of its own transgressions. That the International Criminal Court (ICC) could announce its decision to issue a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin a mere three days ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the United States’, the United Kingdom’s, Australia’s and Poland’s illegal invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 shows just how morally comatose the West has become.

Twenty years ago, President George Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prime Minister John Howard and the Polish premier, Leszek Miller, ordered a massive airborne attack and an all-out armoured assault upon a nation that was at peace with its neighbours and, which had made no aggressive moves against any of the nations whose armed forces were pouring across its borders. Unsurprisingly, a large number of the world’s nations condemned the invasion of Iraq as a breach of the UN Charter and international law. Millions of people around the world, with considerable justification, branded Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller war criminals. Certainly, the invasion they authorised led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human-beings.

So, why didn’t the ICC, which had come into formal existence on the 1 July 2002, issue warrants for the arrest of Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller? Were they not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Had they not involved themselves in what the prosecutors at the Nuremburg Trials called “the crime of crimes” – the planning, preparation and waging of aggressive war? The crime for which the surviving Nazi leaders were hanged in 1946.

From the grim perspective of the world of realpolitik, the reason why the ICC decided not to prosecute the four aggressors is obvious: the United States is simply “too big to punish”. Not only did the USA refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC over United States citizens, but every diplomat and jurist worthy of the name understood that any attempt to arrest George W. Bush would provoke a reaction of truly biblical proportions.

But, if the USA is too big to punish, why isn’t the Russian Federation? Russia’s economy may be roughly the size of Italy’s, but it’s nuclear arsenal is more than capable of laying human civilisation to waste. Threatening to arrest Putin - especially when the Russian Federation and the rest of the United Nations are recalling the illegal invasion of Iraq twenty years ago – is an astonishingly provocative act.

Now, some of those reading these words will object that they are nothing more than an egregious example of “whataboutism”. If Putin stands accused of illegally deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, then he should be put on trial for his actions – not let off because Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller were not held accountable for theirs. Crying “What about Iraq?!” is an irrelevant question – it has no bearing on the case against Putin.

Except, of course, it does. The application of justice must not only be even-handed, it must be seen to be even-handed. If the public had witnessed the child of a rich and powerful family engaging in clearly dangerous and illegal activity, and then seen the Police refuse to bring charges against him because his family was simply too rich and too powerful, they would be disgusted. And if they then saw the child of a poor and powerless family brought to trial for exactly the same offences, they would be outraged. Prosecuting the poor, but not the rich, child would, quite rightly, be regarded as a travesty of justice. What’s more, the court responsible would be utterly discredited in the eyes of all fair-minded people.

Two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a Scythian prince named Anacharsis had this to say about Ancient Athens’ celebrated legal code: “Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.”

The USA has proved the truth of Anacharsis’ observation by simply overawing the ICC’s timid prosecutors. Twenty years on from its failure to hold the invaders of Iraq to account, however, the ICC clearly believes that the Russian President is too weak to tear its legal web in pieces.

But who would be the person who arrests Putin? Or the country that tries to hold him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 March 2023.

All of Us, All of Us.

Mutual Support: Democracy in New Zealand will not be saved by pitting Pakeha against Māori, but by joining together with every other citizen who still understands the meaning of working together to build something good that will last. Call that co-governance if you like, or call it something else – Kotahitanga perhaps. 

THE CLAIM that the push for co-governance comes not from “ordinary” but “elite” Māori continues to gain ground. Yet another instance of the “divide and conquer” strategy – a favourite of colonisers throughout history – it is intended to cast those advocating co-governance as a privileged minority with little or nothing in common with the hundreds-of-thousands of Māori who do not have university degrees, do not receive six-figure salaries, are not fluent in te reo, and cannot recite their whakapapa beyond one or two generations.

The Māori who possess all these attributes, runs the argument, are the only people who will truly benefit from co-governance. They will be the ones sitting across the table from Pakeha politicians and bureaucrats, thrashing out the issues, arriving at a consensus, making the decisions. Such accountability as exists in this brave new administrative world will be, overwhelmingly, to people like themselves – well-educated, well-paid, well-connected. The Māori forester, or check-out operator, will be none the wiser – or the more empowered.

Where this argument falls down is in its overestimation of the size and influence of the Māori middle-class. In comparison to the Pakeha middle-class, the Māori middle-class is tiny. A great many of today’s credentialled Māori are the first members of their whanau ever to receive a tertiary education. Only a handful of Māori families can look back at generation upon generation of forebears who graduated from university. The great professional families that occupy the upper-echelons of Pakeha society are still a rarity in Māori society.

As a consequence of the Māori middle-class’s small size, Māori leadership is drawn from a much broader cross-section of Māori society than is now the case in the Pakeha world. What propels a Māori leader forward is a demonstrated capacity to inspire, organise and achieve. To a far greater degree than is the case among Pakeha (with the possible exception of matters relating to organised sport) this gives rise to circumstances in which resourceful and eloquent working-class men and women can aspire to, and be given, important community leadership roles.

Those who have investigated existing co-governance structures (like Newsroom’s Nikki Mandow) will attest to this phenomenon. Where Pakeha would reach for the services of lawyers and accountants, Māori will call upon the wisdom and experience of men and women who have demonstrated a commitment to, and mastery of, the issues which co-governance is being called upon to resolve. Practical, not theoretical, knowledge is what counts.

And it seems to work – not least because it harks back to the sort of New Zealander that is fast disappearing from Pakeha society. The practical, reliable and, at a pinch, inspirational New Zealander who somehow managed to build a nation without the input of consultants, and without the need for a small army of communication specialists. The sort of Kiwi who, like Ed Hillary, promised to do a job – and did it. Whose word, once given, was never broken. The sort of Kiwi who, these days, is more likely to be Māori than Pakeha.

To see this dynamic at work, take a look at the video recording made at Julian Batchelor’s Stop Co-Governance rally at Orewa. When those protesting against Batchelor’s ideas broke into a moving rendition of Wi Huata’s now famous Tutira Mai, the elderly Pakeha, non-plussed, could think of no better response than to sing God Defend New Zealand – badly and in English. Quick as a flash, the protesters came back with the national anthem – in Māori, and, even more tellingly, in harmony.

That ragged, half-hearted, and horribly out-of-tune rendition of God Defend New Zealand by Batchelor’s elderly audience spoke volumes about where Aotearoa-New Zealand is going – and who is going to take it there. Not least because the Pakeha among the protesters sang Wi Huata’s song of unity as confidently as their Māori comrades – and the Māori version of the national anthem too. If sceptics want to know why co-governance will work – and work inspiringly – they need only look at that video.

Thinking about it, what emerges most clearly from Batchelor’s rallies is the sheer strength of the psychological projection going on. Māori are accused of being misled and mistreated by tribal elites and “Treatyists”. But, is it Māori misdeeds and misdirections they are reacting to, or are the emotions they struggle so hard not to recognise actually born of their own mistreatment at the hands of their own – Pakeha – elites? Because, if you’re looking for evidence a secretive and elite group of ideologically-driven politicians, bureaucrats, academics, businesspeople and journalists who banded together in a grand conspiracy to completely transform the greatest little country on Earth into a broken and divided nation utterly subjugated to the doctrines of Neoliberalism, then look no further – you’re soaking in it!

Democracy in New Zealand will not be saved by pitting Pakeha against Māori, but by joining together with every other citizen who still understands the meaning of working together to build something good that will last. Call that co-governance if you like, or call it something else – Kotahitanga perhaps. And, if you’re looking for a credo to build that sort of movement around, then you could do a lot worse than to start with Wi Huata’s:

Line up together, people

All of us, all of us.

Stand in rows, people

All of us, all of us.

Seek after knowledge

and love of others - everybody!

Be really virtuous

And stay united.

All of us, all of us.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 24 March 2023.

Te Pāti Māori Are Revolutionaries – Not Reformists.

Way Beyond Reform: Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer have no more interest in remaining permanent members of “New Zealand’s” House of Representatives than did Lenin and Trotsky in remaining permanent members of Tsar Nicolas II’s “democratically-elected” Duma. Like the Bolsheviks, Te Pāti Māori is a party of revolutionaries – not reformists.

THE CROWN is a fickle friend. Any political movement deemed to be colourful but inconsequential is generally permitted to go about its business unmolested. The Crown’s media, RNZ and TVNZ, may even “celebrate” its existence (presumably as proof of Democracy’s broad-minded acceptance of diversity). Should the movement’s leader/s demonstrate a newsworthy eccentricity, then they may even find themselves transformed into political celebrities. The moment a political movement makes the transition from inconsequentiality to significance, however, then all bets are off – especially if that significance is born of a decisive rise in its parliamentary representation.

Te Pāti Māori (TPM) is currently on the cusp of making that crucial transition from political novelty to political threat. The decision of the former MP for Waiariki, Labour’s Tamati Coffey, to step away from his parliamentary career at the end of the current term will be welcome news to TPM’s male co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, who took the seat from Coffey in 2020. There is a good chance, now, for Waititi to turn the Māori seat of Waiariki into TPM’s anchor electorate.

Certainly, without Rawiri’s 2020 victory in Waiariki, TPM’s female co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, would not have been able to occupy the additional seat to which TPM became entitled under MMP’s convoluted rules of representation. Ngarewa-Packer’s presence in Parliament alongside Waititi did a lot more than simply double the party’s representation. The two politicians have grown into a powerful double-act: their flair for performative politics (a.k.a showmanship) both complementing and augmenting the pair’s uncompromising radicalism.

Waititi’s signature black Stetson makes him instantly recognisable in a House of Representatives tending towards the sartorially beige. Couple this cowboy persona with his bravura transformation of the humble necktie into a symbol of colonial oppression, and Waititi’s political style is nothing if not memorable. But, there is substance beneath the style – as evidenced by the critical role the only-just-elected Waititi played in defusing the Waikeria prison riot of January 2021.

Ngarewa-Packer is a similar mixture of style and substance. Beneath the radical-biker-chic lies a tireless worker for whanau, hapu and iwi, and a better-than-average grasp of the intricacies of indigenous politics – both foreign and domestic. Even more than Waititi, Ngarewa-Packer understands the dual mandate of TPM.

The party’s purpose is not simply to put runs on the board for Māori by playing the Pakeha’s parliamentary game to the tangata whenua’s best advantage, but to translate TPM’s presence in the Crown’s most important political institution into a revolutionary transformation of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. Not since Harry Holland’s Labour Party first entered Parliament in 1919 has the Crown been confronted by such an uncompromising threat to the status quo.

And now, after a succession of polls documenting a four-fold increase in TPM’s share of the Party Vote, the Crown and its institutional defenders (what Māori nationalists describe, with considerable historical justification, as the “Settler State”) are having to come to terms with the alarming possibility that, post-October 14, TPM may have it in its gift the installation of a Labour-Green coalition government – on certain, non-negotiable conditions. What alarms the elite defenders of the status-quo the most, of course, is that they cannot be certain that Labour and the Greens will not accept those conditions.

Much will depend on how many, and which, Labour MPs survive the October cull. That, and the ultimate truth or falsity of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ post-Jacinda Ardern transformation from Woke Warrior to Waitakere Man (via the Hutt Valley). Certainly, it is difficult to accept the Press Gallery’s positioning of Hipkins on the right of Labour’s Caucus. In the words of political journalist Graham Adams:

Hipkins taking the lead role as “The Man Who Wasn’t There” in Labour’s election script — hastily rewritten to accommodate Ardern’s resignation in January — is preposterous. It beggars belief that anyone would fall for his double act in posing as both a political innocent and a simple Westie (“I’m Just Chippy from the Hutt”) but our mainstream journalists appear to have. Certainly they do not seem keen to point out that Hipkins is an ideologue who has been radically reshaping New Zealand education policy alongside Ardern for years, without any explicit electoral mandate to do so.

Exactly which of these two, very different, political personalities Hipkins inhabits may turn out to be critical. If innocent “Chippy From The Hutt” turns out to be the political confection Adams clearly believes it to be, and “Hipkins The Ideologue” is the real Chris, then a Labour-Green Coalition – critically supported by TPM from the cross-benches – may herald the beginning of something really big.

TPM’s most sensible political strategy would be to resolutely reject becoming part of a formal coalition agreement, and to demand instead Labour-Green support for a tranche of constitutionally transformative legislative initiatives. The strategic virtue of binding TPM’s support to the passage of “Tiriti-centric” legislation is that any failure on the part of Labour and the Greens to facilitate such a transformation would immediately place TPM’s agenda at the heart of the next election, which its abstention on the Opposition’s inevitable Vote of Confidence would precipitate.

A suicidal strategy? Only if the party adopting it is indissolubly wedded to the constitutional status-quo. But, very clearly, this is not the position of TPM – even if it turns out to be that of Labour and the Greens. Representation in the House of Representatives is very far from being the ultimate objective of TPM. Both Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer have made it clear that their presence in the Settlers’ parliament should be regarded as a purely transitory state-of-affairs. The parliament TPM envisages will have an upper house composed, 50:50, of Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti. In the lower house, meanwhile, Māori representation will be legally entrenched – just one of many “basic laws” passed to give effect to the foundational promises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer have no more interest in remaining permanent members of “New Zealand’s” House of Representatives than did Lenin and Trotsky in remaining permanent members of Tsar Nicolas II’s “democratically-elected” Duma. Like the Bolsheviks, TPM is a party of revolutionaries – not reformists.

As this reality explodes, like a grenade, in the consciousness of the Crown and its creatures, the days of patronising TPM will come to an abrupt halt. Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer will no longer be treated as entertaining eccentrics – but as serious threats. More and more reasons for them to be hurled from the House in October will be presented to the electorate. All this is likely to communicate to Māori voters, however, is that the Crown is frightened of TPM. It is difficult to conceive of a more compelling reason for Māori voters to come out in record numbers and vote for Te Pāti Māori.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 March 2023.

Checking The Left: The Dreadful Logic Of Fascism.

The Beginning: Anti-Co-Governance agitator, Julian Batchelor, addresses the Dargaville stop of his travelling roadshow across New Zealand . Fascism almost always starts small. Sadly, it doesn’t always stay that way. Especially when the Left helps it to grow.

THERE IS A DREADFUL LOGIC to the growth of fascism. To begin with, it seldom emerges in circumstances of left-wing weakness. Indeed, fascism is almost always a response to what the Right regards as the dangerous strength – or even the imminent triumph – of the Left. Fascism seeks to check the Left, and establishes its typically dictatorial political regimes to prevent the Left from rebuilding and reasserting the power that made fascism “necessary” in the first place.

I couldn’t help musing upon the genesis of fascist movements as I watched a recording of the Dargaville meeting organised by the Christian evangelist Julian Batchelor. The third of many such meetings planned by Batchelor under the banner: “Preserve Democracy, STOP Co-Governance”.

The explicit purpose of Batchelor’s roadshow is to build a mass political movement of Pakeha New Zealanders, not only to stop co-governance, but also to halt what he sees as the state-sanctioned elevation of Māori over European culture. Batchelor’s principal targets are the “tribal representatives or elite Māori” and “elite Māori treatyists” who, he alleges, are hell-bent on transforming New Zealand into “the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific”.

The planned culmination of Batchelor’s anti-Co-Governance crusade is a 100,000-strong gathering to be held at the Auckland Domain on the eve of the General Election – Friday, 13 October 2023.

This is a truly ambitious target. The largest political demonstration ever recorded in New Zealand took place on the eve of the 1938 General Election, when 70,000 supporters of the First Labour Government – most of them trade union members – rallied at the Auckland Domain in a non-violent show of working-class strength.

For Batchelor to succeed, he would need to awaken a huge, and so-far undetected, strata of angry Kiwi racists. And when I say “huge”, I’m talking in the order of a million citizens. A million! Yep. To get a crowd of 100,000 supporters in the Domain, he would have to generate at least that many followers. In any organisation, the ratio of passive to active members is generally around 10:1. Batchelor is, therefore, hoping that at least 20 percent of New Zealanders are mad as hell about co-governance, everything it stands for, and that they’re not going to take it anymore.

About now, the readers of this post will be saying to themselves: “Not. Going. To. Happen.” What they may not be factoring-in to this political equation, however, is the dangerous dynamic at work in what appears to be Batchelor’s method of building his mass movement.

The crowd that gathered in the Kaipara Community Hall in Dargaville on 9 March 2023 was not composed solely of angry and/or curious Pakeha. As any astute observer of current events in the Far North could have predicted (especially following the “Karakia Incident” at the Kaipara District Council meeting back in October 2022) roughly half of the people turning up to hear Batchelor were angry and/or curious Māori. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the meeting to dissolve into rancour. Local Māori were shocked by Batchelor’s uncompromising rhetoric. Accusations of “blatant racism” elicited angry responses from those supporting the speaker’s argument. The Police were called. Things turned nasty.

And it was all recorded. Cleverly edited, the confrontation at Dargaville, may yet serve as a powerful recruitment tool for Batchelor’s cause. Posted on social media it may persuade a larger number of angry/curious Pakeha to turn up to the next meeting. Which may turn even nastier, because, predictably, Māori and their anti-racist Pakeha allies are threatening to turn up to shout down Batchelor’s “hate speech”. Undoubtedly, the Police will, once again, be present to keep the antagonists apart. All the elements will be there for another riveting social media post.

Thinking ahead – and apparently unaware of the many legal and political fish-hooks embedded in their intentions – Batchelor’s opponents are planning to contact local councils around the country and urge them not to allow the “blatant racist” to hire their facilities for his public meetings. If some local councils, perhaps worried that Batchelor’s meetings might become unruly, or, even worse, attract threats of serious violence, decide to deny him access to their facilities, then as sure as eggs-are-eggs, the Free Speech Union will become involved. Instantly, Batchelor’s cause will expand to embrace not just the “dangers” of co-governance, but the threat its promoters pose to New Zealanders’ freedom of expression.

It is at this point that Batchelor, providing he possesses both the political smarts and the rhetorical skills to take full advantage of the unfolding situation, may be able to break his movement out of its narrow psychographic confines to engage with a much broader ideological community. People who may not be as hostile to co-governance as Batchelor, but who are extremely hostile to the angry crowds who turn up to shut his meetings down, may feel obliged to, at least, defend his freedom of speech. There may even be an element who feel strongly enough to offer themselves as “security” for Batchelor’s meetings. Naturally, they will wear uniforms – to assist both the Police and the public in distinguishing them from the “extremists”.

With unnerving speed, Batchelor’s movement will begin to acquire all the historical hallmarks of fascism. This will only increase if the Police and the mainstream news media are widely perceived to be – and are criticised for – taking the side of the protesters. Batchelor’s essentially conspiratorial argument that “the elites” are determined to destroy New Zealanders’ rights and freedoms on behalf of anti-democratic “treatyists” will, in the eyes of more and more citizens, be vindicated. The claim that the Left has become too powerful will find a growing number of adherents.

Observing the rapid growth of Batchelor’s far-right pressure group, the National and Act parties will find it very difficult to resist the temptation to range themselves alongside it. Neither of these “official” representatives of the Right will want to be caught opposing Batchelor, for fear that their rivals will immediately come out in support. It is equally hard to see NZ First and the other, even smaller, right-wing parties turning down the chance to piggy-back on what Batchelor’s opponents are angrily calling New Zealand’s shameful “white supremacist” movement.

An awful lot would have to go completely right for Julian Batchelor before his currently tiny travelling roadshow burgeoned into a movement capable of mustering 100,000 New Zealanders into the Auckland Domain. The best reason he has for optimism, however, is the current febrile state of the New Zealand Left. More than any other single factor, the Left’s reaction to Batchelor’s campaign will determine whether it remains a passing curiosity, or develops into something really nasty.

It is, sadly, entirely possible for the worst to happen. If Batchelor becomes the voice of aggrieved Pakeha. If National, Act, NZ First, and all the others rally to his cause – for fear of being lumped in with “treatyists”, “cultural Marxists”, and all the other manifestations of the “Woke Left” – then a great, 100,000-strong, gathering of the right-wing clans in the Auckland Domain on Election Eve suddenly becomes a “live” proposition.

Fascism almost always starts small. Sadly, it doesn’t always stay that way. Especially when the Left helps it to grow.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 17 March 2023.

Weaponising Illegal Immigration.

Human Destabilisers: Russia now has a new strategic weapon – migratory waves of unwelcome human-beings. Desperate people with different coloured skins and different religious beliefs arriving at, or actually breaching, the national borders of Russia’s enemies can wreak as much havoc, culturally and politically, as a hypersonic missile exploding in the middle of a Ukrainian power station.

THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT has uncovered what it believes to be a new layer of mendacity in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Thousands of kilometres to the south of the fighting in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, deep in the anarchic wilderness of Sub-Saharan Africa, there’s been a grim addition to the criminal infrastructure of human-trafficking and people-smuggling. Russians.

Displaying that formidable mixture of state and private interests the world has learned to recognise in the Wagner Group’s fearsome mercenaries, new groups of highly organised Russian smugglers are hard at work. Unquestionably, these men are motivated by the huge profits to be made out of human suffering and desperation. But, they have not set up shop in these lawless lands entirely of their own volition. Somebody sent them there.

Moscow may not have intentionally propelled a vast wave of Syrian refugees in the direction of the European Union back in 2015. Indeed, it was most likely the German Chancellor’s, Angela Merkel’s, open arms of welcome that caused so many tragic columns of humanity to come bursting through Europe’s border fences in search of “Angela’s Country”. But Moscow looked on with considerable interest as this great wave of refugees broke over the nations of Western Europe.

Startled, at least initially, by the extraordinary welcome extended to the refugees by Europe’s most innocent and idealistic citizens, Russian cynicism was all-too-swiftly confirmed by the vicious racist backlash unleashed against the newcomers. Russia saw Germany riven by animosities its leaders had believed long buried. It watched the rise of far-right political parties disturb the civilised equilibrium of the Federal Republic. With a mixture of horror and delight, Moscow watched the eager ghost of Nazism break free of the stones piled upon its tomb.

Putin’s advisers now had a new strategic weapon to work on and perfect – migratory waves of unwelcome human-beings. Desperate people with different coloured skins and different religious beliefs arriving at, or actually breaching, the national borders of their enemies could wreak as much havoc, culturally and politically, as a hypersonic missile exploding in the middle of a Ukrainian power station.

The first inkling that Moscow had drawn a devastating lesson from the “Syrian invasion of Europe” came at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. Operating through his most trusted lieutenant, the Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, Vladimir Putin arranged for Middle Eastern economic refugees, hungry for the peace and abundance of Europe, to be flown from their homelands and bussed to the frigid forests straddling the border of Belarus and Poland. “Over that fence lies freedom and prosperity!”, cried the freezing refugees’ minders – pointing westward.

The Poles, all-too-familiar with mendacity of the Russian bear, were having none of it. Crossing the border in significant numbers, the refugees would find themselves swaddled in the proudly humanitarian laws of the EU. The Polish government decided that under no circumstances could that be allowed to happen. Batons, tear-gas, and the use of water cannons in sub-zero temperatures ensured that the refugees did not make it across the fence.

Two years later, with Europe united against Russian aggression in Ukraine, the next great human wave of refugees is coming up out of the South, crossing the Sahara Desert, setting sail in frail and dangerously overcrowded boats from the coast of lawless Libya for the toe of the Italian boot – where gangsters every bit as ruthless as their Russian confreres are waiting to welcome them ashore. Twenty thousand illegal arrivals this year alone.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman prime minister, may now be regretting the strong stand she and her country took against Russian aggression. As the leader of Brothers of Italy, a party of the Italian far-right, she is well aware of the political utility of illegal immigrants. Without them, and the racist tempers they inflame, she and her coalition could not have won power. Meloni promised to turn back the boats, but still they come: more and more. Putin has made a liar of her.

One can only speculate as to whether the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has been made aware of exactly who the gangster wolves driving Africa’s immigrant lambs over Europe’s borders are working for. Meeting this week with his AUKUS partners in San Diego, did he pull aside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and whisper:

“Tell me again, Tony, how Australia stopped the boats.”


This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 March 2023.

Nobody To Shoot.

Unbridled Consumption: This civilisation we have built (we being the whole human species) is the most astonishingly wonderful thing homo sapiens has ever seen. We love it. We cannot imagine how awful life would be without it. And, we most certainly are not going to co-operate with anyone who advises us to throw it away.

THERE’S A SCENE in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” where an embattled dust-bowl sharecropper struggles to defend his land. He threatens to shoot the man sent to demolish the farm buildings on behalf of the bank. Don’t blame me says the demolition man. The farmer then threatens to shoot the bank president who signed the foreclosure papers. Patiently, the demolition man explains that the bank manager is only carrying out the instructions of the bank’s owners back East. Utterly defeated, the propertyless sharecropper cries plaintively: “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” To which the demolition man replies: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t human at all.”

It’s an exchange I always recall whenever I hear people advocating going after “the man that’s starving me”. The latest target of this “who can we shoot” proposition are the 100 companies allegedly responsible for 71 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, the first of these planetary polluters to fill the gunsights of Earth’s angry sharecroppers are the oil companies.

Former One Tree Hill-feller, Mike Smith, now working for the Iwi Leaders Forum, is aiming to bring Rainer Seele, CEO of the Austrian oil-giant OMV, before the International Criminal Court for “genocide and other climate crimes impacting on indigenous communities now and in the future”. It would be churlish not to wish Mr Smith well, but the chances of Mr Seele being convicted (or even indicted!) by the ICC are about as good as Steinbeck’s sharecropper bagging a New York banker with his gopher gun.

The Iwi Leaders Forum may have deep pockets, but they are unlikely to be as deep as OMVs when it comes to keeping a team of international law experts on retainer for the length of time between Mr Smith launching his legal case – and its inevitable abandonment. Inevitable? Of course. The idea that the CEOs of those 100 companies will ever be brought before a criminal court for doing what their billions of customers and clients around the world demand of them is ludicrous.

That’s the nub of the problem, isn’t it. Those giant corporations would wither and die in just a few months if the peoples of the world unanimously agreed to stop purchasing their products and services. What could be simpler? Just throw away your lap-top and cellphone. Junk your car – and your ready-to-wear wardrobe. Leave the city you’re living in. Stop using electricity. Throw away your prescription medicines. Easy-peasy! Take away the demand, and rest assured, there will be no more supply.

Except, the demand for all those goods and services isn’t going anywhere – is it? In fact, it is set to grow, exponentially, as all the peoples on earth currently shut out of the Western lifestyle determinedly amass the wealth needed to acquire it. Now, the Mike Smiths of this world will undoubtedly urge the people of India and Brazil, and the poorest nations of Africa, to embrace their poverty as the surest means of saving the planet, but I would advise them to put on their running shoes before they start making their pitch.

There will be many who object that this is nothing but a crude exercise in victim blaming. Most people really do want to save the planet, but the relentless battering of journalists, advertisers, public relations consultants, lobbyists, corporate fixers, corrupt politicians – many of them on the payrolls of those 100 companies – keep us all running, like so many demented consumerist hamsters, on the great wheel of capitalism.

But, once again, all we have to do is stop. Except, we don’t stop – do we?

This civilisation we have built (we being the whole human species) is the most astonishingly wonderful thing homo sapiens has ever seen. We love it. We cannot imagine how awful life would be without it. And, we most certainly are not going to co-operate with anyone who advises us to throw it away.

We like our lap-tops and our cellphones. We like our cars and our cheap RTW clothes. We like living in vast, vibrant cities built out of concrete and steel. We like being able to flick a switch and get all the energy we can use. We like turning on a tap and being able to drink the water that comes out. We like it that there are hospitals and clinics full of clever doctors and nurses, and pharmacies full of clever drugs. And we don’t actually care if every last Polar Bear in creation is reduced to a pathetic heap of skin and bones – just so long as our super-civilisation, powered by its indispensable and irreplaceable (at least for the foreseeable future) fossil-fuels, keeps on a-rockin’.

So, much and all as Mr Smith might wish it were otherwise, Mr Seele and all the other CEOs of those miscreant 100 companies have nothing to fear from virtue-signalling activists. They know, just as the demolition man in Steinbeck’s novel knew, that there’s nobody to shoot.

Because the thing that is frying the planet – and all our futures – isn’t human. It’s a vast and impossibly complex economic machine, and it absolutely does not care what we think or say – only what we buy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 14 March 2023.

Parliamentary Sovereignty And Its Discontents.

Saving The People From ... The People: The strangest aspect of the mass Israeli protests, from a New Zealand perspective, is that the judicial reforms proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would only confer upon Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, powers which the New Zealand House of Representatives has not only exercised for decades, but which have also been seen, by an overwhelming majority of Kiwi legislators, as critical to the health of New Zealand’s democracy.

BEGINNING IN LATE JANUARY, Israel has been rocked by a series of massive weekly protests against planned judicial reforms. Concentrated in Tel Aviv, Israel’s former capital and easily its most secular city, these protests have become increasingly disruptive. So much so that the far-right coalition government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, appears poised to suppress them by force. Political commentators in Israel have begun to speak of the protests as evidence of a fundamental disagreement over the core nature and purpose of the Israeli state. About the only thing both sides can agree on is that Israel cannot survive such deep-seated divisions.

The strangest aspect of the Israeli protests, from a New Zealand perspective, is that the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu’s government would only confer upon Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, powers which the New Zealand House of Representatives has not only exercised for decades, but which have also been seen, by an overwhelming majority of Kiwi legislators, as critical to the health of New Zealand’s democracy.

The problem which the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu and his far-right colleagues seek to address is the Israeli judiciary’s current power to restrain, or, in extremis, overrule, the actions of both the Israeli Executive and the Knesset. In other words, these reforms seek to confer upon the Knesset what New Zealand’s House of Representatives already possesses – and jealously guards – parliamentary sovereignty. Netanyahu wants the Knesset to become what our House of Representatives already is: the highest court in the land.

What makes this whole constitutional stoush even more interesting, from a Kiwi perspective, are the similarities between New Zealand and Israel. Neither country has a written constitution, preferring to be guided by a set of basic laws and rights. Israel and New Zealand also lack an upper-chamber empowered to initiate, review and delay legislation. This unicameral system gives the legislators of both countries the sole right to make the laws. Both countries also operate under an electoral system of proportional representation– although, to be fair, Israel has a much purer variant of PR than New Zealand’s MMP. Israeli MPs do not represent electorates, all Knesset seats are allocated from party lists. Israel’s representation “threshold” (the share of the popular vote that must be won before seats are allocated) is 1.5 percent, compared to New Zealand’s 5 percent.

Where the two legislatures diverge, however, is over the status of the law conferring fundamental human rights upon their respective citizens. Legislation and/or Executive Orders which contravene Israel’s “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” may be (and have been) struck down by Israel’s Supreme Court. The author of the “New Zealand Bill of Rights Act”, Labour’s Geoffrey Palmer, wanted New Zealand’s highest court to be invested with similar authority, but so deeply entrenched is the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in this country that he was unable to persuade his colleagues to confer such decisive constitutional powers upon New Zealand’s judges.

Apart from the very obvious objection that unelected judges should not be given the power to overrule the elected representatives of the people, New Zealand legislators’ refusal to countenance judicial intervention can be traced back to two deeply ingrained Kiwi prejudices.

The first is class hostility – a phenomenon intimately bound up with New Zealanders long-standing self-identification as egalitarians. Judges are (rightly) perceived by “ordinary” New Zealanders as being drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-echelons of New Zealand society. The objection to these “posh bastards” overruling a Parliament made up of “ordinary people” like themselves dates all the way back to the Liberal Government of 1891-1912 and its presiding populist master, Richard “King Dick” Seddon. The rise of the Labour Party and the growing parliamentary strength of its working-class caucus only dug the anti-posh prejudice deeper into the nation’s collective political psyche.

The second factor is racial hostility. Repeated attempts by dispossessed Māori Iwi to seek redress through the New Zealand courts, though mostly unsuccessful, planted in the minds of Pakeha legislators the necessity of preserving Parliament’s privileged status vis-à-vis the Judiciary. The idea that the achievements (and the depredations) of the “Settler State” might one day be found wanting by the courts, aroused the most atavistic fears among Pakeha politicians of every ideological persuasion. What had been won by the gun, must never be reclaimed by the gavel.

Just how animated this racial rationale for parliamentary sovereignty remains was demonstrated very forcefully by the House of Representatives’ reaction to the Court of Appeal’s 2004 judgement on the foreshore and seabed. Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark, and her Attorney-General, Margaret Wilson, lost little time in reminding Māori, and the Judiciary, exactly who controls New Zealand.

The bloody circumstances of the State of Israel’s birth in 1948, and the mutually hostile ideological and religious groups that assisted it, encouraged Israel’s legislators to deny their parliamentary opponents the opportunity – albeit at some distant point in the future – to transform their narrow vision of Israel into law. The Basic Law relating to human dignity and liberty was, therefore, to be interpreted and enforced by a highly-qualified and non-partisan Judiciary. That way, no party, or collection of parties, commanding a temporary Knesset majority would be able to legislate their way into a position of permanent dominance.

The wise old Socialist-Zionists who founded Israel were only too aware of how quickly extremist minorities can become proscriptive majorities. They understood that the Israeli Supreme Court’s gavel was their best protection against the extreme Zionists’ legislative guns.

Unsurprisingly, young, well-educated, and increasingly secular Israelis are terrified by the plans of Netanyahu (himself under indictment for corruption by Israel’s courts) and his far-right allies to recreate in Israel the soft authoritarianism perfected by Hungary’s Viktor Orban. They are only too aware that moves to limit the authority and independence of the courts are proof positive that the shift to “illiberal democracy” has begun. The moment the defence of human dignity and liberty is placed in the hands of a temporary parliamentary majority of religious and nationalist extremists, there can be little doubt that neither principle has long to live.

Nor is it any longer an axiom that New Zealand parliamentarians are united in their determination to preserve the House of Representatives as New Zealand’s highest court. With so few MPs now drawn from working-class backgrounds, and so many of them in possession of legal qualifications, the possibility of the House being over-run by passionate, marginalised, justice-seeking populists from the wrong side of the tracks has ceased to be the progressive prospect it used to be. What might such a mob, unconstrained by a written constitution, an upper-house, an interventionist Judiciary, or even a progressive ideology, not descend to?

Members of Parliament who looked down with horror upon the fiery violence unleashed in Parliament Grounds by the great unwashed on 2 March 2022, and contemplating the possibility that people only marginally less extreme could one day constitute a majority in the House of Representatives, might be forgiven for shifting their gaze across Molesworth Street to the Supreme Court building, and whispering: “Why not?”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 13 March 2023.

Pruning The Consultancy Money-Tree.

In Need Of Pruning: Small wonder the National Party chose the massive government spend on consultants as its most promising source of savings. Ceasing to pay these parasitic characters $9,000 per week, and then applying the money saved to something as wholesome as reducing child-care costs for Kiwi families battling inflation, must have struck Christopher Luxon as an absolutely crackerjack idea.

THE NATIONAL PARTY has demonstrated considerable political skill in funding its new “FamilyBoost” policy by savagely pruning the consultancy money-tree. I’m sure I’m not the only New Zealander who has scratched his head at the shocking figure of $1.7 billion spent on consultants by this Labour Government. Why would they do that?

New Zealand’s present over-reliance on consultants raises all sorts of questions about the quality of its public service. Is it really so bereft of talent and expertise that outside advisers must be brought in to show them what to do? And, if that is the case, then why hasn’t the government recruited the talent and expertise its short of, rather than renting it for a few months at exorbitant expense?

All those additional public servants Labour has hired since 2017 – roughly 14,000 of them – surely they should have reduced the need for expensive consultants? And yet, the government goes on injecting them into the body politic with all the desperation of a drug addict.

Small wonder, then, that the National Party has chosen the massive government spend on consultants as its most promising source of savings. Ceasing to pay these parasitic characters $9,000 per week, and then applying the money saved to something as wholesome as reducing child-care costs for Kiwi families battling inflation, must have struck Christopher Luxon as an absolutely crackerjack idea.

There will be some who dismiss National’s latest policy as crude populism. As if giving people what they need is a bad thing? But what is so bad about delivering the greatest good to the greatest number? Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be all about? Who could possibly object to that?

Except, anyone posing that question seriously clearly hasn’t been paying attention to the way this country has been run for past 40 years. Responding to public needs; delivering the greatest good to the greatest number; that’s what New Zealand politics used to be about. Political parties might squabble about the best way to do these things, but very few politicians disputed the idea that they had to be done.

The problem which eventually grew large enough to make politicians question their most basic democratic assumptions was: How to meet public needs that never seem to grow smaller? Or, to put it more crudely: At what point does the cost of delivering the greatest good to the greatest number become fiscally unsustainable?

Forty years ago, this was the question keeping New Zealand politicians awake at night. The top tax-rate was already at 66 percent, inflation seemed untameable, and “fiscal drag” was causing even relatively low-paid workers to squint hard at their pay-slips. Business leaders complained that the country was unnecessarily swaddled in controls and regulations. Workers complained that their unions couldn’t keep pace with the constantly rising cost of living.

Labour’s new leader, David Lange, thundered: “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!” His finance spokesperson, Roger Douglas, had written a book called There’s Got To Be A Better Way. There were many who agreed with both sentiments.

Those Kiwis who voted out Rob Muldoon’s National Party Government in 1984 weren’t to know that Roger Douglas’s cure for what ailed New Zealand would be much, much worse than the complaint. Too few of them thought through the consequences of not responding to public need, or of ceasing to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number, but to a handful of obscenely wealthy businesspeople instead. Even fewer grasped the disturbing truth that if democracy is, indeed, about responding to the people’s needs and wants, then it is politically incompatible with lower taxes, less regulation, weaker unions, and fewer public servants.

Which brings us back to those expensive consultants – the most costly of whom are employed by giant multinational accountancy and investment firms. They are brought in by governments not because our public servants are bad at their jobs, but to prevent our public servants from doing their jobs.

If the medieval Catholic Church was a transnational institution dedicated to preserving the Christian faith, then so, too, are these massive global consultancies. They are contracted to ensure that no heretical policy initiatives are ever permitted to disturb the orthodoxy of the Neoliberal Church.

Christopher Luxon may cut back on some consultants, but not the ones that cost – and count – the most.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 March 2023.

The Revolution Has Begun.

Whose Country? The ideology driving New Zealand’s latest top-down revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethnonationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society. 

IF NEW ZEALAND’S educational curriculum was dedicated to condemning capitalism and uplifting the working class, would that signal a revolution? If working-class culture was elevated above the cultural achievements of the upper and middle classes, would that signal a revolution? If representatives of the trade unions exercised a decisive influence over the editorial direction of the news media and the content of university courses, would that signal a revolution?

Of course it would.

Nearly forty years ago, as the newly-elected Fourth Labour Government was pursuing its nuclear-free agenda, organising women’s forums, and preparing to destroy the achievements of the First, Second and Third Labour Governments, a handful of young trade unionists – Labour Party members all – lobbied the then Minister of Labour, Stan Rodger, for a daily bulletin of trade union news on Radio New Zealand.

Way back in 1984, New Zealanders could keep abreast of what was happening on New Zealand’s farms by tuning-in to “Rural News” Or, keep up with the machinations of industry and finance by listening to “Business News”. There was even a weekly programme called “Focus on Politics”. But, the only time New Zealanders ever got to hear about what was happening in the country’s factories, warehouses, offices and shops was when workers went out on strike.

“So, how about it, Stan, why not a daily, or weekly, round-up of news about the issues confronting working-class New Zealanders?” Now to give Stan Rodger his due, he gave us a fair hearing. Indeed, I think he was personally quite excited by the idea, because, eventually, a short series of programmes entitled “Working Life” did make it to air. But a daily round-up of news from the perspective of those working on the factory floor, or driving a truck, or standing at the check-out counter? Not a chance.

Such a programme would have indicated a significant shift in social and economic power in the direction of working people. But, as we all know, the people running the Fourth Labour Government (not all of whom were democratically-elected politicians) were committed to shifting social and economic power in precisely the opposite direction – towards the bankers and the bosses. That’s why there was a vast expansion in the coverage of business affairs on Radio New Zealand – and right across the news media. That’s why, in just a few years, the ideology of neoliberalism permeated the whole of New Zealand society. There had definitely been a revolution – but not by the workers.

New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.

The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethnonationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of “indigenisation” and “decolonisation”. The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt.

The origins of the present ethnonationalist revolution may be traced back to the early 1980s – specifically the 1981 Springbok Tour. A very large and well-organised anti-racist movement against the Apartheid system in South Africa took to the streets to protest the presence in New Zealand of the Springbok rugby team. There they encountered not only the brutal forces of the state, but a vast number of New Zealanders who were not in the least bit shamed or shifted by the charges of racism hurled at them by the protesters. The Springbok Tour thus revealed a deep divide in New Zealand society, leaving many of the protesters feeling like strangers in their own land.

The modern Māori nationalist movement, which had taken form during the 1970s, was quick to draw a large number of these alienated liberal Pakeha into its orbit. Using tactics developed by radical social reformers in the United States, Māori activists accused the Springbok Tour protesters of caring more about Apartheid in South Africa than they did about the racism in their own country. “Learn your own history! Read about the violence done to Māori and the confiscation of their lands! Stop going on about racism in the abstract and pay heed to those who understand it from bitter personal experience! Surrender your privilege!”

It worked. The nationalist activists had created a movement towards “Māori Sovereignty” in which revolutionary Māori would lead, and guilty Pakeha would follow. Not that these guilty Pakeha represented anything like a majority of Non-Māori New Zealanders, far from it, but they did constitute a significant percentage of the well-educated and credentialed members of the Professional-Managerial Class – and that would be enough. The Guilty Pakeha’s “long march through the institutions” had begun.

And what a very long march it has been, but, 40 years after it began, the champions and fellow-travellers of the Māori nationalist movement can look back upon some stunning successes.

Fearing that the nationalists were about to unleash a mass movement of the most marginalised Māori against the “Settler State” – fears stoked by reports of Māori nationalists being feted in revolutionary Libya and Cuba – the Crown initiated the Treaty Settlement Process with Iwi Māori. Informed by President of the New Zealand Court of Appeal, Robin Cooke’s, landmark 1987 reinterpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi’s meaning and purpose, this process brought into being the Iwi-based corporations that gave birth to the phenomenon Elizabeth Rata calls “neo-tribal capitalism”. The sons and daughters of the original Māori nationalists now have the resources they need to carry their parents’ dream to fruition.

Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being “the social laboratory of the world” has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.

Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.

Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.

The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 7 March 2023.

The Pakeha Quest.

A New Beginning: Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his New Zealand Company may have dreamed of replicating Mother England, and all her proud injustices, in the South Pacific, but the story of Pakeha New Zealand is the story of the seekers, dreamers and political campaigners who constructed what foreigners would come to call (with a mixture of admiration and surprise) “the social laboratory of the world”. Artwork: “The Last of England” by Ford Madox Brown 1855.

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT the words “Pakeha theologian” that causes my hackles to rise. Not because I am averse to discussing theology – far from it – but because today’s Pakeha theologians almost never talk about the God of the Old and New Testaments. Their deity is te Tiriti o Waitangi. A god from whom all Pakeha New Zealanders are expected seek absolution for the colonial sins of their fathers.

In an article entitled “Pakeha Identity And The Treaty”, posted on the E Tangata website, “Pakeha theologian” Alastair Reese argues that those New Zealanders who are not tangata whenua can put an end to their “Pakeha existential dilemma” by acknowledging themselves tangata Tiriti – people of the Treaty.

Reece contends that: “Pākehā are gifted an identity in the Treaty, along with associated rights and responsibilities. Māori identity is affirmed in the Treaty, as are their rights and responsibilities.”

Did you spot the not-so-subtle distinction in Reese’s formula? Māori identity is “affirmed”, but the identity of Pakeha is “gifted”. Whatever the nature of the relationship Reese sees emerging from the Treaty “covenant” may be, it is not a partnership of equals.

There is something deeply offensive in the image of Pakeha New Zealanders, wracked with existential angst, drifting, like so many rudderless colonial ghost-ships, twelve thousand miles from “Home” in the terrifying vastnesses of the South Pacific. It is an insulting caricature of the men and women (my own ancestors included) who put all those dangerous miles behind them to find a better life, and to build a new and fairer society – one very different from the society they left behind.

Like many of the Scots who settled in Otago, my great, great, great, grandfather abandoned a Scotland whose hereditary clan chieftains were betraying and harrying their own people. While in the salons of London these great lords spoke movingly of the indissoluble bonds of duty that bound them to their dependents, their agents were busy evicting thousands of crofters from their homes to make way for the considerably more profitable flocks of Cheviot sheep.

This quest for a just society informs the history of Pakeha settlement in these islands. The impulse to build a “Better Britain”, where the injustices of the Clearances, and the state-sponsored violence of the “Peterloo Massacre”, could never be repeated. High on a hilltop, just 50 kilometres north of Dunedin, stands the memorial to John Mackenzie, Lands Minister in the Liberal Government of John Balance. It was Mackenzie who oversaw the breaking-up of the great landed estates belonging to the wealthy elites who historian Stephen Eldred-Grigg dubbed the “Southern Gentry”. Mackenzie had witnessed at first-hand what landed “gentlemen” could do.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his New Zealand Company may have dreamed of replicating Mother England, and all her proud injustices, in the South Pacific, but the story of Pakeha New Zealand is the story of the seekers, dreamers and political campaigners who constructed what foreigners would come to call (with a mixture of admiration and surprise) “the social laboratory of the world”.

Back in the 1980s my wife and I rented the upper-floor of the St Andrews Presbyterian Church manse, once home to Rutherford Waddell, the clergyman whose sermon against sweated labour, “The Sin of Cheapness”, sparked the formation of the Tailoresses Union of New Zealand. The Otago Daily Times itself led the campaign which culminated in its creation.

The quest for social justice, for a nation better than the benighted realms of Europe could ever hope to be, is woven into the fabric of Pakeha New Zealand. That it is being unpicked now by the very forces the Mackenzies and Waddells struggled against is the true tragedy of our times.

So, no thank-you, Mr Reese, Pakeha New Zealanders have no need of te Tiriti’s “gifts”. What we need is to break the neoliberal spell under which this country continues to languish – drifting without purpose or direction. That awakening will not be assisted by “historians” writing the achievements of the Mackenzies and Waddells, the Seddons and Savages, out of our children’s textbooks, and replacing them with decontextualised horror stories of colonial murder and mayhem.

The greatest gift of the Treaty of Waitangi was its pledge of equality for all New Zealanders. My identity as a Pakeha New Zealander is bound irrevocably to the fulfilment of that historical promise.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 March 2023.

F***ing Things Up.

Primal Fears: The relentless process of extremist escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to the minorities’ conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.

TWO DAYS AGO*, two brothers, Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank of the River Jordan were murdered by a Palestinian gunman. Hardly news, one might say. Over the past months upwards of 60 Palestinians and more than a dozen Israelis have died in a series of brutal confrontations in the occupied territories.

What elevated this latest incident above the commonplace, however, was the response of the Jewish inhabitants of the settlement from which the murdered brothers came. In the most shocking instance of communal violence since 2000, scores of enraged and armed settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Zaatara and set it ablaze. Thirty houses and dozens of cars were torched, and at least one Palestinian villager was murdered.

Naturally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, publicly deplored the violence and urged both sides to refrain from taking the law into their own hands. Within his coalition government (the most right-wing in Israeli history) however, other voices were raised which were very far from being conciliatory. One far-right MP declared that if Palestinians come to murder Israelis, then their homes should burn – “metaphorically-speaking”. No one on either side believed she was speaking metaphorically.

This latest example of political stimulus and response from the troubled land of Israel/Palestine is merely the most shocking demonstration of the process of extremist escalation that is gathering strength all over the planet. Aggrieved minorities, many of them justifiably angry about their treatment at the hands of hostile majorities, move from remonstrance to protest, protest to overt threats and, ultimately, from overt threats to actual violence.

Often, this process of escalation is given added impetus by individuals, organisations, nation states, and even international bodies, expressing their support for these aggrieved minorities. Such moral approbation produces two, often deadly, effects. First, it contributes to the minority’s conviction that their cause is just, rendering their actions – no matter how heinous – morally unassailable. Second, it enrages the “oppressive” majority and inspires them to embark on their own grim journey of escalation.

One aspect, in particular, of this alleged “encouragement” of minority extremism infuriates the majority: the extraordinary double-standard which excuses or (much worse) celebrates the violence of “freedom-fighters”. The majority’s sense of grievance is only intensified when their administrative and/or military responses to extremism are not only condemned, but also presented as the reason for the minority’s “understandable” resort to extreme tactics. Rightly or wrongly, the impression is conveyed to the majority that their values, their institutions, even their lives, are worth less than those of the minority.

The anger generated by this misrepresentation of the majority’s position is often overlooked by those standing in solidarity with the “oppressed” minority. Being in “the wrong”, the majority’s feelings are dismissed as irrelevant by the minority’s defenders. This is a particularly short-sighted response on the part of those who believe themselves to be engaged in bending the arc of history towards justice. It encourages those dismissed as “deplorables” to discount altogether the moral arguments of their detractors as “fake news”.

A particularly moving analysis of this phenomenon was penned by the Chilean socialist and author Ariel Dorfman. Looking back at the conduct of himself and his comrades in the heady days of Salvador Allende’s radically left-wing Popular Unity Coalition Government (1970-73) this is what he wrote:

It was difficult, it would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us … [T]he people we called momios, mummies, because they were so conservative, prehistoric, bygone, passé … [W]e ended up including in that definition millions of Chileans who … were on our side, who should have been with us on our journey to the new land and who, instead, came to fear for their safety and their future.

Those are sentiments which the Pasifika poet, Tusiata Avia, might want to take to heart. Her poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser features a poem entitled “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”. Having celebrated Cook’s murder and cannibalisation, Avia fantasises about doing something similar to those who came after him:

These days
we’re driving round
in SUVs
looking for ya
or white men like you
who might be thieves
or rapists
or kidnappers
or murderers
yeah, or any of your descendants
or any of your incarnations
cos, you know
ay, bitch?
We’re gonna F… YOU UP.

Poetic hyperbole? An entirely justifiable symbolic rendering of the colonial experience from the point of view of the colonised? Maybe. It is equally arguable, however, that sentiments such as these, were they to become widely repeated, could very easily cause millions of New Zealanders to “fear for their safety and their future.”

It is worth remembering that it was the momios, those millions of Chileans who lived in “primal fear” of the Left’s programme, who gave General Pinochet the social licence he needed to overthrow Allende and his Popular Unity Coalition. Momios, too, this time wearing military uniforms, who shot him down in Chile’s Presidential Palace.

It is easy to believe that you are on the side of the angels when everybody who matters to you is cheering you on. No doubt the Palestinian gunman who opened-up on those two Israeli settlers as they attempted to get out of their car, which he had just rammed, believed himself to be fighting for his people’s freedom against Zionist colonisation.

But, that is not how the two brothers’ family, friends and neighbours saw it. That’s why they headed for Zaatara with their guns and their cans of petrol. That’s why the Israeli soldiers stood aside and let them pass.

So they could really F… THEM UP.

* Monday, 27 February 2023

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 March 2023.

Patriarchy, Identity Politics and The Will To Power.

A Hideous Strength: No matter where a man is positioned in the social hierarchy, there is one psychically empowering privilege which he shares with all who embrace the rules of masculinity – a lifetime exemption from the socially-constructed inferiority and insecurity inflicted upon the feminine. Artwork: “Colossus” by Francisco Goya 1815.

SIGMUND FREUD attributed the many maladies of human existence to traumatic sexual experiences in early life. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) attributed them to a different cause. According to Adler’s concept of “the will to power”, individuals – especially males – are driven by a determination to achieve superiority and domination over other human-beings. Assailed by feelings of insecurity and inferiority, emotional states which men are encouraged to associate with femininity, they embark on an unending quest for mastery. Of course, the will to power is not confined to men alone. Women’s all-too-real subordination in patriarchal society cannot fail to generate feelings of insecurity and inferiority – exciting the will to power in their own psyches.

Adlerian psychology, not much esteemed, it must be said, in the Twenty-First Century, nevertheless offers a useful way into the fraught world of Identity Politics. The practice of those promoting the politics of identity is driven by (some would say is utterly obsessed by) questions of power and privilege – who has it, who doesn’t, and what must happen if those without it are to get it. The answer would appear to involve an upward surge of resistance on the part of those for whom chronic insecurity and imputations of inferiority are a way of life, directed at those best positioned to claim superiority and exercise domination. In short, the question, repeated endlessly by identity politicians, is: “Who’s got the power?”

Obviously, the group with the most ground to gain from the quest for power through identity is the most powerless. Unfortunately, determining exactly who has the least power in society is an extremely contentious exercise. People of Colour may find themselves arguing with the disabled community about which of them is discriminated against most viciously. LGBTQ+ people may find themselves at odds with women over whose lives are the more insecure. It’s tricky. Fortunately, near unanimity prevails over who wields the most power and enjoys the most privileges: White, Heterosexual, Males (WHMs).

In practical terms, identity politics has only one clear goal: to depose the dominant identity group – i.e. WHMs – and strip them of their power and privilege. But, even allowing such a revolutionary goal to be feasible, it cannot avoid raising some hugely divisive political questions. To whom should the WHMs’ power be passed? With the formerly all-powerful WHMs no longer in control, which identity group is best placed to achieve superiority and domination over the human-beings below them? People of Colour? Women? LGBTQ+? The Disabled? And won’t whoever ultimately wins that struggle suddenly find every group below them striving to replace them? Won’t the winners instantly become the next target?

And what about those people who belong in more than one identity group. A WHM with a severe disability, for example? Or a Person of Colour who is also a member of the LGBTQ+ community? Or a White Lesbian? What happens when an individual’s advantages and disadvantages cannot be stacked in neat and tidy piles? Whose Will to Power should prevail in those circumstances?

Because there’s no point in arguing that as soon as WHMs are hurled from their privileged perches the struggle for superiority and domination will cease, and the will to power will miraculously fade from in the human psyche. Consciousness of privilege is well-nigh impossible to eliminate. Like the determination to defend one’s position in the social hierarchy, it is one of those human predispositions that are pretty much ineradicable. Awareness of those below cannot help but cultivate a sense of superiority. Just as knowing that the lower orders want what the powerful possess cannot help encouraging the ruling elites to keep them in check. And vice-versa. The Will to Power is as much about clawing-up as it is about kicking-down.

Patriarchy, the power structure that prevails across the planet, is no anthropological accident. The prehistoric overthrow of the daughters of the Earth Mother by the sons of the Sky Father made certain that human society was vertical rather than horizontal in its orientation. And the beauty of a vertical social structure, from the point of view of males, is that it makes it possible for all men to define themselves as essentially not-women. No matter where a man is positioned in the social hierarchy, there is one psychically empowering privilege which he shares with all who embrace the rules of masculinity – a lifetime exemption from the socially-constructed inferiority and insecurity inflicted upon the feminine.

The identity politicians’ obsession with power and privilege is understandable but, ultimately, futile. Even if the WHMs were cast to the bottom of the social hierarchy, how long would it be before they became the most vociferous challengers of the privileges enjoyed by all the identity groups above them? How long would it be before the cry – “Who’s got the power?” – became “We got the power!” “We” being all men: gay and straight, black and white, abled and disabled, rich and poor.

It’s hard to deny that old Alfred Adler was on to something with his Will to Power: repudiation of the feminine has always been the inexhaustible power-source of patriarchy.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 1 March 2023.