Sabre-Rattling.

Putin’s Thunderbolts: What message was the devastating arrival of the Russian Federation’s nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

THE IMAGES BROADCAST ON CNN were terrifying. Out of a glowing circle of dim light, multiple bolts of fire, moving at astonishing speed, burst from the lowering clouds and, in a thundering series of shattering explosions, struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

It was a sight very few people, other than the weapons-scientists of the Cold War superpowers, had ever witnessed. Simply put, the arrival of MIRVs – Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles – was never intended to leave any witnesses.

How so? Because, at the tip of each independently-targeted re-entry vehicle was a nuclear warhead. Wherever they landed, destruction would be absolute.

Delivered by an ICBM – Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile – MIRVs were the ultimate doomsday device. Travelling at hypersonic speed, impossible to interdict (notwithstanding the claims of President Ronald Reagan’s notorious “Star Wars” programme) the MIRV innovation represented the apotheosis of the MAD – Mutual and Assured Destruction – doctrine. ICBM-delivered MIRVs were never supposed to be deployed, because their deployment signalled the imminent demise of human civilisation.

The man who ordered the strike on Dnipro, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, has told the world that what it witnessed was a new weapon: hypersonic, deadly-accurate, and devastating.

He should not be believed.

Russia has been firing its “new” hypersonic ballistic missiles at Ukraine for more than two years. Never before, however, has the launch of such missiles been preceded by a “heads-up” call to NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Russia’s notification was necessary because NORAD’s satellite surveillance system is well aware of the difference between the “signature” of a hypersonic missile-launch, and that of an ICBM. Without the heads-up, NORAD would have had to treat the ICBM launch as the commencement of a nuclear attack.

Putin and his military commanders are not yet ready to initiate a countdown to Armageddon. So, what were they doing? What message was the devastating arrival of all those nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

Part of the answer to that question was supplied in the simultaneous confirmation of the Russian Federation’s latest protocols relating to the use of nuclear weapons. Whereas, in the past, the Federation declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons only in response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

The Federation’s new nuclear war-fighting doctrine represents a significant lowering of that threshold. The deployment of nuclear weapons may now be contemplated in circumstances where military aggression by a non-nuclear state, acting “with the participation or support of a nuclear state” (a clear reference to Ukraine) threatens to inflict an unacceptable degree of devastation upon the people and infrastructure of the Russian Federation, and/or that of its close ally, Belarus.

Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has expressed his alarm at this latest Russian attempt to pressure the USA and its Nato allies into forcing the Ukrainian government to suspend its recently-sanctioned deployment and use of American and British long-range ballistic missiles against targets hundreds of kilometres inside the Russian Federation’s borders.

On Friday, 22 November 2024, Tusk warned that: “The last few dozen hours have shown that the threat is serious and real when it comes to global conflict.” New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and its Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, have yet to offer a substantive response to Russia’s terrifying demonstration of the MIRVs’ destructive potential.

New Zealand investors, by contrast, appear to be in exuberant spirits. While bourses across the European Union wobbled uneasily, the NZX50 closed out the trading week with a 2 percent surge to 13,017. Either the prospect of global conflict does not bother Kiwi investors, or they have already filed Russia’s threats under “sabre-rattling”.

Russia’s use of an ICBM equipped with MIRVs is not, however, an excuse for either indifference or exuberance. Taken together, the Dnipro attack and the changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine are nothing more nor less than a direct threat to Ukraine, the USA, Nato, and the rest of the world’s free peoples – including our own.

Narrowly justifiable when issued in retaliation for an unprovoked nuclear attack, the threatened use of nuclear weapons is completely indefensible in the context of Ukraine’s conventional defensive response to the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of its sovereign territory in February 2022. That Nato declined to offer a more robust response to Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling of more than 1,000 days ago can only, with the benefit of hindsight, be viewed as a dangerous dereliction of its duty to protect Europe and the wider world.

That New Zealand has been content, ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to take cover behind the broad shoulders of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, is also a kind of dereliction.

Since 1985, New Zealand has proudly declared itself nuclear-free, incurring thereby the profound disapproval – bordering on the wrath – of our traditional Anglophone allies. Internationally, successive New Zealand governments have advocated strongly for both nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. In doing so, we have acted in accordance with the argument advanced by David Lange during the famous Oxford Union debate of 1 March 1985:

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive.

This country’s obligation to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine is all the greater because the Ukrainians belong to that tragically small number of peoples who possessed nuclear weapons and gave them up.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the newly independent state of Ukraine was prevailed upon by the US and its allies to surrender its nuclear arsenal. In return, the United States, alongside the newly-minted Russian Federation, undertook to preserve and defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity – by force if necessary.

New Zealand has singularly failed to draw the correct lesson from Ukraine’s fate. We have cosied-up to our Five Eyes partners in the belief that, as a tiny country, we stand in need of large and powerful friends. But where were Ukraine’s large and powerful friends when she needed them? Tragically, they were in the same place they were in when the men and women (especially the women) of Afghanistan needed them.

If the invasion of a strategically-located European nation, a nation the United States had solemnly promised to defend, was not enough to persuade Uncle Sam to lock-and-load, then what possible reason could New Zealand possess for expecting him to lock-and-load on its behalf?

At the very most we might anticipate Uncle Sam being willing to arm us, and then watch us fight to the last New Zealander. Just as he was willing to (under)arm Ukraine and watch it fight to the last Ukrainian.

Putin is rattling his nuclear sabre in its scabbard for the very simple reason that, to date, it has worked.

Having staged aggressive manoeuvres on Ukraine’s borders for weeks prior to the February 2022 invasion, the Russian President had observed no instantaneous and unreserved mobilisation of Nato armies to the borders of Russia and Belarus; heard no announcement from the White House that America intended to honour its guarantee to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and expected the Russian Federation to do the same; and observed no commitment on the part of the smaller members of the United Nations (which New Zealand could have led) to augment, as far as they were able, Ukraine’s right to self-defence.

All those measures, all those declarations, may not have been as terrifying as Putin’s demonstration of what a nuclear attack looks like; but every lesson to be drawn from the Russian bully’s career points to them being terrifying enough.

We can only hope that Donald Trump, soon to inherit America’s sabre – and its scabbard – is learning how to rattle it like mad.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 November 2024.

No Cheers For Democracy.

Sic’em! The silver-tongued demagogue whips up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the nation’s decline and their own immiseration. He then proceeds to direct his mesmerised followers against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

HOW WILL YOUNG AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES, after registering painfully the second coming of Donald Trump, assess the value of democracy? The political choices of more than half their fellow citizens have dashed their hopes in ways that a great many of them will find it impossible to forget – or forgive. They will ask themselves: “Can progressive ideas and policies ever endure under this system?” Many will be sorely tempted to answer: “No.” Some will give up on politics and progressivism altogether. Others, taking in the new political order through narrowed eyes, will give up on democracy itself.

For most of the post-war period, in the United States and across the Western World, democracy has been celebrated as an unequivocally good thing. This is hardly surprising, given the ghastly nature of the political ideology that the democratic nations of the West were required to defeat in the Second World War.

And not just the West. Even the totalitarian communist regime of Joseph Stalin felt obliged to at least pretend to be fighting for the American President, Franklin Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms”.

The “United Nations” (as Adolf Hitler’s enemies described themselves) promised an exhausted and traumatised humanity that the post-fascist world would be one in which there was Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. As depicted by the American artist, Norman Rockwell, this new world of freedom promised to make all the wartime sacrifices worthwhile.

In 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill prophesied that the ultimate defeat of Nazi tyranny would allow the life of the world to move out of peril and into “broad sunlit uplands”. Even if the British Empire, which Churchill loved so dearly, and defended so doggedly, would not long survive its epic victory over the Third Reich, this last grand gesture of democratic defiance was, indeed, its “finest hour”. In the words of former Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar: “There are worse epitaphs than: ‘Died fighting fascism’.”

All of which explains why democracy, and the freedoms it enshrined, had, by 1945, become the desideratum of every existing and aspiring nation-state. Everyone valued it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone defended it – at least in public. For those experienced in the ways of power, however, democracy has always been regarded as an inherently volatile, and potentially highly dangerous, political system.

To remain safe and stable, democracy has to be accompanied by a substantial degree of social and economic equality, backed by a solid political consensus in favour of preserving and, where possible, increasing that equality.

For those generations unlucky enough to have been born too late to enjoy their benefits, the institutions and policies of these post-war “social-democratic” societies must seem quite fantastical. What must be understood, however, is that they were constructed to reward and absorb the millions of young men returning from the War with expectations of the peace that could not safely be denied. Highly trained and experienced in the use of weapons, and imbued with the combat virtues of solidarity and comradeship, these were not the sort of citizens to be disappointed – and they weren’t.

Nor were their children. The great “boom” in babies that followed the return of the men in 1945 both prolonged and intensified the social-democratic policies of successive post-war governments. With little to choose between the policies offered by the parties of the Left and the Right, elections soon became low-stakes affairs for everybody but the candidates.

By the 1970s, democracy and prosperity had become fused in the minds of most Westerners. Certainly, the capitalist democracies outperformed the “peoples democracies” and “democratic republics” of “actually-existing socialism”. Up against the Four Freedoms, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism turned out to be anything but competitive. The outcome of the Cold War was always a foregone conclusion. To emerge victorious, all the capitalists had to do was wait patiently – and carry a big ICBM.

The serpent in this social-democratic Garden of Eden turned out to be the debilitating impact of egalitarianism on the wealth and power of capitalism’s ruling-classes. Since the War’s end, the relative strength of the upper-classes of the western democracies, vis-à-vis their middle- and lower-classes, had been steadily declining. If democracy and equality continued marching in lock-step, then the very survival of capitalism, along with the skewed distribution of economic wealth and social influence that kept it functioning, could no longer be assured.

Accordingly, and for the next fifty years, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual resources of the Western ruling-classes were poured into one, all-encompassing political project: to break-up the partnership between democracy and equality. In accomplishing this system-busting objective nothing was ruled out-of-bounds.

The new social movements born out of the steady expansion of equality in the 1960s and 70s: the civil rights movement; feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights; environmentalism; all were transformed into cultural battlegrounds upon which the forces of tradition clashed with the rag-tag armies of social progress.

Both sides quickly discovered the efficacy of mobilising citizens on the basis of racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms. The Four Freedoms ceased to act as unifiers, becoming instead the bitter pretext for zero-sum arguments over whose speech, whose God, whose resources, and whose security ought to be accorded priority.

The Ancient Romans dubbed this strategy divide et impera – divide and conquer – and it proved no less effective in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries than it had in the First and Second.

With society divided, and the forward march of universal – as opposed to sectional – equality halted, the capitalists’ next project was to persuade people that they had more to gain by identifying themselves as producers and consumers than they did as citizens. It was, they argued, through the relentless balancing of supply and demand, and the unerring democracy of the marketplace, that life was made better or worse. Dollars equalled votes in this never-ending global election. Except, in this contest, no one cared how many you cast.

It was no accident that with every significant advance in the acceptance of this new doctrine – neoliberalism – the redistribution of wealth and power from the bottom of society to the top gathered pace. The state was transformed into a mechanism for ensuring that as little as possible was done to impede the upward flow of money and influence to those least in need of either.

The societies fashioned for the men and women who had defeated fascism in the 1940s, and their children, were fast becoming unrecognisable. Nothing worked, nothing was repaired, and no one paid the slightest attention to the victims of the system’s spectacular dysfunction.

The same parties that had once competed to develop and deliver the most effective social-democratic policies, now find it more expedient to compete for the praise and patronage of the reinvigorated ruling-class. Such promises as the centre-left and the centre-right see fit to make to western electorates are seldom kept, and even more infrequently delivered on time or to budget. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance is fast disappearing.

Precisely the moment of maximum peril, argued the first political philosophers more than 25 centuries ago. With democracy and equality diminished, and opportunistic oligarchs redirecting society’s wealth into their own treasure-chests, a disoriented and increasingly distraught citizenry stands ready to succumb to that classical harbinger of doom – the demagogue.

Recalling the golden age that was, but which is now no more than a bitter memory, this silver-tongued devil will whip up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the state’s decline and their own immiseration. The demagogue will then proceed to direct this mesmerised mob against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

There are many progressive young Americans who see their country poised at exactly this point – between demagoguery and tyranny. Tragically, at this moment of maximum danger for the American republic, the only ideology capable of rescuing it, egalitarian democracy, is being rejected as the racist, sexist, trans-phobic, and generally deplorable author of all its woes. Confronted with the genuine tyrannical potential of Donald Trump and his populist Republicans, the Democratic Party shows every sign of wishing to install, by whatever means its billionaire donors care to make available, its own, unassailable, tyranny of the pure.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Tuesday, 12 November 2024.

Hearing Ourselves Think.

No Longer Silent: The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind. Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar addresses the Free Speech Union AGM held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

ARE WE LIVING in a world where, increasingly, “noise” is drowning out “sound”? A world in which it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the discrete voices of reason from the angry roar of the crowd. Where we are assailed by the deafening racket of bad political actors determined to drown out any and all opinions but their own.

Political “noise”, and its impact on society’s ability to “hear” itself, was brought to life vividly by Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar from Oxford University in his keynote address to the AGM of the Free Speech Union, held at the Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

Pilloried by the Woke Left for daring to express the heretical view that colonialism wasn’t an unalloyed evil, and that the British Empire, in particular, wasn’t all bad, Biggar recalled the 2016 Oxford Union debate concerning the fate of Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. The enemies of colonisation were determined to remove this memorial to one of Nineteenth Century Britain’s greatest imperial swashbucklers (think Elon Musk with a Maxim gun) and Biggar was on hand to argue that it makes more sense to understand your country’s history than to cancel it.

Every time an anti-Rhodes speaker sat down, Biggar told the surprisingly large audience of between 200-300 AGM attendees, the venerable debating chamber would erupt into wild and sustained applause. To the casual observer, support for the removal of Rhodes’ statute would have seemed overwhelming. Looking around the Chamber, however, Biggar noticed that the number not cheering and clapping was almost as large as the number who were. The “anti-colonialists” simply made a lot more noise. (The “Rhodes Must Fall!” motion was eventually carried 245/212.)

This is what political noise does. It renders nuance and subtlety impossible. It makes the voices of dissenters appear weak. Most importantly, deliberately amplified political noise causes those holding dissenting views to doubt the efficacy of their own judgement, intimidating them into inaction and silence. Political noise thus achieves the same result as switching-off an opponent’s microphone. The sounds made by individual contributors are lost in the deafening noise of the mob.

That Prof. Biggar’s speech to the FSU’s AGM, and the introduction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill to Parliament, occurred in the same week could be seen as a happy coincidence. In the week ahead, a Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will set off from the Far North for Wellington. As it wends its way south, the ratio of noise to sound promises to be politically instructive.

According to the latest poll, conducted by Curia Research between 3-7 October 2024, 46 percent of those surveyed support the Treaty Principles Bill, 25 percent oppose it, and 29 percent are “unsure”. When compared to Curia’s first poll on the Bill, published on 14 March 2024, these latest results indicate a substantial drop in the number of respondents indicating assent. Back in March, the supporters of Seymour’s legislation outnumbered its opponents 3:1.

What caused this drop, from 3:1 to 2:1, has become a matter for debate. When Curia’s first poll was taken, Seymour’s principles possessed an admirable clarity. By October, however, the second of the three fundamental principles had been complicated considerably by the Bill’s drafters – to the point where its meaning was no longer readily intelligible to the ordinary voter. This would certainly explain the 7-point rise in the number of respondents indicating uncertainty.

The 7 percentage point rise in those indicating opposition to the Bill may also reflect the confusion created by the revised version of its second principle. There is certainly quite a difference between March’s Version 1:

The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property.

And October’s Version 2:

The Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in legislation, Treaty settlements, or other agreement with the Crown.

The hitherto staunchest supporters of Seymour’s legislative initiative may well consider the revised version of the Second Principle to be altogether too “Treaty-ish” in its wording and intent to be worthy of their continuing support.

Alternatively, the relentless demonisation of Seymour’s bill by all major media organisations, the overwhelming majority of political journalists and columnists, and – most effectively – by the nation’s leading political cartoonists, may be convincing an increasing number of the Bill’s supporters that they are indeed guilty, as charged, of being on “the wrong side of history”.

By preventing its supporters from hearing either themselves, or the clear plurality of other New Zealanders who share their views, think, the deafening political noise generated by the Bill’s institutional opponents, particularly the universities and the Waitangi Tribunal, may simply, through grinding emotional attrition, be turning the numbers around.

This is the bet that National and NZ First have taken. That, by the time the six months of select committee hearings have concluded, conservative New Zealanders will have grown heartily sick of the whole business.

It could be a shrewd bet, because the select committee hearings will doubtless be drowned out by the relentless cacophony of the Bill’s opponents. What’s more, the constant and public vilification of the Bill’s supporters will not only encourage their shell-shocked withdrawal from the debate, but also convince an ever-increasing number of New Zealanders that the political game is no longer worth the candle.

Alternatively, the actions of the Treaty Principles Bill’s opponents may provoke the same sort of angry public backlash that followed the violent end of the anti-vaccination mandate movement’s occupation of Parliament Grounds.

The Police are expecting upwards of 25,000 Māori protesters and their allies to descend upon the Parliamentary Precinct on Tuesday, 19 November. Among those allies, Police anticipate having to deal with a large number of gang members intending to defy the legal ban on public displays of gang insignia. It is also thought that a contingent of activists determined to link the “anti-colonial struggles” of Māori and Palestinians will be part of the Hikoi.

The Hikoi leaders have assured the Police that its demonstration of opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill will be peaceful. But the level of political noise, and the passions it can hardly avoid arousing, may outstrip the ability of the leaders to keep their followers under control. If the whole thing turns pear-shaped, then National and NZ First will lose their bet.

In the aftermath of the American elections, the Coalition Government would be unwise to position themselves too closely alongside a noisy – let alone a violent – minority. The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 November 2024.

Beyond Question?

Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, there were 15,000 in 2004. Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour Government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

Twenty years later, on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, the number was 42,000 – a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament Grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, nine days earlier, on 11 November, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition. After all, no party represented in the House of Representatives – apart from Act – is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its Second Reading debate.

Seymour’s proposed legislation is a dead man walking. It will not be enacted during the current parliamentary term. Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law – thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content – have already won.

How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live, has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won – why are they still fighting?

They are still fighting because they know that David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 35,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered:

Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?

Another way of framing that question is to ask:

Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it – i.e. the New Zealand of today – be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically, and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s Nineteenth Century Māori signatories?

But that question immediately raises another – and this one is much more dangerous.

With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty, or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the Nineteenth Century’s most powerful states?

Which, in turn, raises another.

Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities, and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the Twenty-First Century?

It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked – let alone answered – that Māori are so determined to “Kill the Bill”. It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the Justice Select Committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty “defenders”: everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel. The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want, is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.

David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.

The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.

Leaving us with one, final, question:

Is 42,000 enough to stop him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2024.

Unstoppable.

Too Big To Fail: Forty-three years after the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, Maori defenders of te Tiriti, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, are poised to descend on the capital with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

THE ORGANISERS OF THE Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are predicting record-breaking numbers. As the advancing column of runners, marchers, and cars approaches the capital, its numbers are expected to swell into the hundreds-of-thousands. If these predictions are borne out by events, then the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will, indeed, be the largest protest demonstration in New Zealand’s political history.

Although no single demonstration associated with the 1981 Springbok Tour came anywhere near 100,000 participants, the 56 days of the Tour, and the months leading up to it, indisputably witnessed in excess of 100,000 protesters on New Zealand’s streets.

Significantly, the convulsions of 1981 and the record numbers participating in the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are not unrelated historically. The lessons drawn from 1981 by an entire generation of progressive activists have, in the intervening 43 years, resolved themselves into a seemingly unstoppable ideological narrative. That narrative now constitutes the driving-force behind the movement toward decolonisation and indigenisation.

The nationwide campaign to end sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa began as a fight to see the guarantee of human equality embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights upheld by the New Zealand Government. The Republic of South Africa had been suspended from the UN in 1974 for its refusal to observe the principles enshrined in the Declaration. Playing Rugby with a side purporting to “represent” South Africa was, accordingly, condemned by many New Zealanders as morally indefensible.

In New Zealand’s churches, universities, professional associations and trade unions, this opposition to the 1981 Springbok Tour was deeply entrenched. In the New Zealand of the early-1980s, however, the nation’s demographic structure more-or-less guaranteed that a very large percentage of the population would remain unmoved by the arguments of the Tour’s opponents. Rugby was hugely important to New Zealanders, more than half of whom, according to the opinion polls of the day, were anxious to “keep politics out of sport”.

These New Zealanders had a powerful champion in their country’s National Party prime minister, Rob Muldoon. Presenting himself as the defender of the “ordinary bloke”, he cast the Tour’s opponents as, at best, snobbish intellectuals, and, at worst, subversive communists. In this he could rely upon the nation’s news media, both private and public, to take such accusations seriously. The instincts of most publishers, broadcasters and editors in 1981 were deeply conservative. Many of them regarded protest demonstrations as potentially dangerous attempts to apply extra-parliamentary pressure upon the nation’s democratically elected representatives.

Contrast Muldoon’s strong opposition from the top in 1981 with the way in which the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been treated by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in 2024. National’s leader has been careful not to openly criticise or condemn the Hikoi – with whose bitter criticisms of the Act Party leader’s Treaty Principles Bill he claims to be in at least partial agreement. Luxon and his government have also been careful to affirm publicly the right of New Zealanders to engage in peaceful protest. No thought in 2024 of portraying the Hikoi participants as enemies of anything so retrograde as the “ordinary bloke”.

The behaviour of the mainstream news media in 2024 offers an even stronger contrast with the way events were covered in 1981. From the moment the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti began its long journey to Wellington, the nation’s largest media operations have presented it as something akin to the living embodiment of the nation’s best and truest instincts.

At least one editorial leader-writer has depicted the Hikoi as a powerful and much needed corrective to the “colonial” attitudes embodied in Seymour’s bill. The possibility that 100,000 angry citizens massed outside the New Zealand Parliament might constitute a serious threat to the safety and security of the country’s democratic institutions does not appear to have given the nation’s journalists pause. Or, if it has, then the prospect of Members of Parliament – especially ACT MPs – being sorted-out and set-straight by the people is not one that bothers them unduly.

Clearly, much has changed since 1981. Certainly, the three Treaty principles set forth in Seymour’s bill (the language of which carries strong echoes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) would have been warmly endorsed by the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders 43 years ago. How, then, has this extraordinary transformation: from multiple demonstrations against the denial of human equality, to a nation-spanning hikoi denouncing its legislative affirmation; been accomplished?

The big idea driving the shift, both here and overseas, in the 1970s and 80s was that white people are blind to their own racism. In biblical terms, Europeans are very good at drawing attention to the mote in other peoples’ eyes, all the while ignoring the whopping great beam that is in their own.

How is it, demanded the Māori who’d marched alongside Pakeha anti-tour protesters, that you could become so incensed by the racism of white South Africa’s apartheid system, but had so little to say about the racist foundations of your own nation?

You took our land, built a happy little colonial state on top of it, and left us to contemplate your generous legacy of ruin and loss. The strategies we adopted for our own survival, most of which reflected our need to avoid te Riri Pakeha – the anger of the white man – you interpreted as evidence of our easy-going good-nature, and patted yourselves on the back for presiding over the “best race-relations in the world” The treaty our ancestors signed in 1840, in which the British Crown promised to protect the autonomy and resources of our tribes, your Chief Justice casually dismissed, just 37 years later, as “a simple nullity”. You’ll understand, then, if we look at you Pakeha and see nothing but a bunch of bloody hypocrites!

It was a list of charges to which the progressive Pakeha Left had no convincing answers, other than to hang their heads in guilt and shame, and promise to do all within their power to right the wrongs of colonisation, and restore to the maximum extent possible the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous people.

That they chose to do this through the courts, rather than through Parliament, is a reflection of the fear and loathing many anti-tour protesters, university students in particular, took away from their encounters with supporters of the Springbok Tour. That these people were racists went without saying, but the vicious sexism experienced by female protesters came as a nasty shock. Male protesters were equally stunned by the homophobic slurs hurled at them by rugby supporters.

Obviously, from the progressive perspective, National Party voters could not to be trusted to do the right thing. But, sadly, neither could the party of the working class. Far too many Labour voters had been willing to abandon their democratic-socialist ideals for a game of footy. Long before Hilary Clinton came up with the description, New Zealand’s progressives made it their business to ensure that the important business of decolonising and indigenising Aotearoa was kept as far away as possible from such deplorable citizens.

A lot can happen in 43 years. New Zealand jurisprudence can be radically reoriented. The National Party can atone for the sins of Rob Muldoon by initiating the Treaty Settlement Process. Apart from its votes, Labour can give up expecting anything from, or doing very much for, the New Zealand working-class. Te Tiriti, itself, can cease to be regarded as a simple nullity and become New Zealand’s foundational constitutional document. From around 10 percent, Māori can grow to 20 percent of the population.

Most importantly, from being a noisy and morally aggravating adjunct to the anti-apartheid movement in 1981, Māori defenders of te Tiriti, in 2024, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, can descend upon New Zealand’s capital city with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

This essay was posted exclusively on the Bowalley Road blog of Monday, 18 November 2024.

This One's Just For You, Martyn.

 

Hard Hat & A Hammer

Alan Jackson

Video courtesy of YouTube

Posted on Bowalley Road on Thursday, 7 November 2024.