Recognising Palestine.

The Road Not Taken: Palestine’s half-completed parliament is still there, a dark and cavernous testimonial to diplomatic and moral failure. The building’s grey concrete walls are stained, as if by the tears of all those on both sides of the conflict who were forced to abandon their dream of a peaceful two-state future.

CHRISTOPHER LUXON has announced that by late-September 2025 New Zealand might be ready to recognise Palestinian statehood. This curiously equivocal statement contrasts sharply with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s firm commitment to recognise that unfortunate entity. Australia’s pledge matches those already given by France, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Of New Zealand’s ‘Five Eyes” partners, only the United States stands unequivocally behind Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s list of reliable allies grows thin.

But, does New Zealand’s reticence merit the criticisms levelled at it by supporters of the Palestinian cause? When the Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, can tell journalists that Australia is moving to recognise Palestine “while there is still a Palestine to recognise”, then, surely, New Zealand awaiting the outcome of the monstrous events currently convulsing Gaza and the West Bank bears all the hallmarks of wisdom?

It might also be prudent to ascertain exactly what sort of “state” New Zealand is being called upon to recognise. If we are talking about the partitioned territory offered to the Palestinians in 1947, the boundaries of which the Palestinian authorities, such as they were at the time, emphatically rejected, then the harsh truth of the matter is that, within those boundaries, there is precious little left out of which a recognisable state of any kind could be fashioned.

As anyone who watches the news networks is only too aware, the Gaza Strip (as it was known in 1947) has been turned into a grey waste of dust and rubble. In their biblically ferocious quest for vengeance, the Israeli Defence Force has done its best (and its best is terrifying) to leave not one stone standing upon another. Indeed, not since Rome conquered Carthage has the victors’ determination to utterly destroy their enemy been so openly displayed.

The Roman historian Tacitus famously observed that “Rome makes a desert and calls it peace.” Benjamin Netanyahu goes one better. He will not even talk of peace until he has made a desert out of Gaza – and strewn it with the bones of Hamas’s fighters.

The West Bank is larger than Gaza, but only marginally more favoured. Bisected by walls, bedevilled by endless checkpoints, its people are hemmed in on every side. Israeli soldiers and their bulldozers flatten whole blocks of the West Bank’s beleaguered towns – pour encourager les autres. The flower of Palestinian youth: those whose slingshot stones have not been repaid with the explosive bullets of Israeli snipers; rot in Israeli jails. Their grandparents’ olive groves burn in the night, their livestock are driven off. Those who venture out bravely in search of their stolen goats are beaten, stabbed, shot.

Because not all the hills of the West Bank have been disfigured by the Israeli occupation. Cascading down some hillsides are the gleaming homes and lush gardens of the settler communities. As beautiful as they are illegal these settlements are peopled by fanatics every bit as bright-eyed and implacable as Hamas. When it comes to their Palestinian “neighbours”, there is only one state these settlers are looking forward to recognising – their absence.

There was a time when the “two-state solution” promoted by the United Nations seemed a viable prospect. So much so that, with generous donations from the backers of a free, democratic, and independent Palestine, its presumptive rulers commenced constructing an impressive parliamentary complex for its legislators to sit in.

Elegant of line, impressive in its austere functionality, the structure took shape in Abu Dis a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem – the designated capital of the Palestinian state. In 2003, however, construction ceased. The Second Palestinian Intifada (uprising) was in the process of suffocating the Oslo Peace Accords in tear-gas, shrapnel and blood. The Israelis responded by building their infamous “Separation Wall”.

From the river to the sea there would be only one state.

Palestine’s half-completed parliament is still there, a dark and cavernous testimonial to diplomatic and moral failure. The building’s grey concrete walls are stained, as if by the tears of all those on both sides of the conflict who were forced to abandon their dream of a peaceful two-state future.

Nations that present the recognition of Palestine as some sort of panacea, should be made to argue their case from the cold concrete platforms of that doomed and gloomy monument. Hopefully, Christopher Luxon knows better than to sit there with them.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 August 2025.

Vox Populi: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Old Baldy was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“THEY BOOED HIM.”

“Booed who?”

Hannah, the bar manager, couldn’t help overhearing the banter of her two favourite Boomers, right-wing Laurie and left-wing Les. She paused in her rounding-up of empty glasses and dirty plates to listen.

“Luxon, Laurie, the Prime Minister turned up to the netball final, and the crowd booed him. Since when did New Zealanders start booing their prime ministers at sporting fixtures?”

“Oh, come on, Les, your memory’s not that bad. Jacinda Ardern wasn’t our prime minister that long ago.”

“And if I recall rightly, Laurie, she received more abuse than any other New Zealand prime minister. But, it was only a certain sort of Kiwi who came after her. And, the hate they had for her was out of all proportion to her actual conduct as their prime minister. There was something quite deranged about Ardern’s enemies’ animosity. Looking back, I reckon she wasn’t vilified on account of who, or what, she actually was, but on account of the huge event she was conflated with – the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

“Spoken like a true Labour man, Les! But, you try running that line on those who were kept from the bedside of a dying parent. Or, the people who lost their jobs because they refused to be injected with a hastily developed RNA vaccine. Tell it to the retailers who watched their life’s work sicken and die. Tell it to the schoolkids fretting alone at home. Truthfully, Les, I think Jacinda’s ‘actual conduct’ merited quite a lot of animosity.”

“I think you’ve just proved my point, mate!”

“Touche! Les. But Ardern still isn’t the only New Zealand prime minister to have been monstered by her fellow citizens. Have you forgotten the 1984 incident when David Lange was set upon by a mob of Otago cockies? His driver and protection officers had to throw him into the back of the prime-ministerial limousine and power away before the furious farmers could tear the nation’s newly-elected leader limb-from-limb.”

“Hell’s bells, Laurie, I’d forgotten all about that! It was just after Roger Douglas had announced the abolition of all agricultural subsidies. A lot of those cockies faced economic ruin.”

“Not happy chappies, Les, that’s for sure!”

“And it reminds me of an even earlier incident – 1977, I think it was – when Rob Muldoon’s limousine was dented all to hell by the boots of a dozen or so sturdy Dunedin cops trying to hold back an angry throng of Otago students and trade unionists calling themselves ‘The July Front’. The constables had turned their backs to the crowd, linked arms, and, bracing themselves on the prime minister’s car, expedited his entry to the Dunedin Town Hall – where the National Party was holding its annual conference.”

“Let me guess, Les, you were there.”

“Might have been, Laurie. It was a long time ago. As you say, my memory’s not what it was.”

“Proves my point though, doesn’t it? Luxon’s very far from the first prime minister to be poorly received by the voting public.”

“Okay, but it also proves my point, Laurie. Ardern, Lange, Muldoon: they all came under fire from aggrieved minorities. Victims of the Covid regulations. Farmers stripped of their state support. Students and unionists venting their left-wing spleens at Rob’s Mob. But, being booed by the audience at a netball game? That’s a bit different, isn’t it? I mean, these were just ordinary Kiwis out for a night of sport. They hadn’t come to protest, they’d come to cheer. But, when they saw Old Baldy they just saw red – or, in his case, blue – and started booing. That’s got to mean something, surely?

“Could mean a lot of things, Les. It could mean the fans were just pissed-off at Luxon trying to muscle-in on a sporting fixture which, were he not the prime minister, he’d never dream of attending. Maybe they were annoyed at being used, quite cynically, as the backdrop for yet another National Party photo-op.”

“Yeah, well, when you put it like that.”

“And, I’ll offer you another explanation, Les. It was a netball final.”

“So?”

“So, who follows netball – mostly?”

“Women and girls.”

“Exactly! And who, by a scarily wide margin, favour Labour over National?”

“Women and girls!”

“Old Baldy, as you call him, was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“Go it in one, mate”, muttered Hannah.

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 August 2025.

Fighting Monsters.

A Friend In Deed: Surrounded by allies and friends on the UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, not only felt free to accuse Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, but also to claim that they were profiting hugely from their victims’ destruction. She did not, however, feel under any obligation to respond to the angry challenges of Israel’s defenders. 

IT WAS HER LITTLE SMILE that said it all. UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, appearing before the UN Human Rights Council on 3 July 2025, had not only accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, but also of profiting hugely from their destruction.

Her report to the Council was warmly welcomed by the League of Arab States, Venezuela, Palestine, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Qatar. But, when Hillel Neuer from the United Nations Watch organisation demanded to know why, in her entire report, there wasn’t a single mention of the October 7 massacre, Hamas, Hezbollah, or that leading sponsor of terrorism across the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ms Albanese had nothing to say.

Surrounded by allies and friends, the UN Special Rapporteur was under no compulsion to answer Neuer’s questions. Hence her brief, but highly communicative, little smile.

Israel’s fury at the rest of the world’s failure to call its enemies to account is easily understood. Less easily forgiven is the Israeli state’s apparent loss of interest in trying to appraise the rest of humanity of its enemies’ ultimate purpose.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies clearly prefer to concentrate all their nation’s resources upon securing the complete destruction of Hamas and its allies. Very early in the Israel-Hamas War a decision was made that civilian casualties would no longer be permitted to impede Israel’s extirpation of Palestinian terrorism.

Previous forays into Gaza had been restrained by Israel’s sensitivity to global opinion. It understood that the civilian population of Gaza had become Hamas’s human ammunition against “The Zionist Enemy”. The more casualties inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, the less international support there would be for the Israeli state. Hamas knew this. Indeed, Hamas was counting on it. The Israelis might slap its face, but they were not prepared to endure the consequences of cutting off its head.

The horrific atrocities and the unprecedented death toll – 1,200 people – of the October 7 2023 pogrom put an end to Israeli restraint.

On paper, Israel’s winning move was to do nothing. It should have refrained from firing a single bullet into Gaza, and from dropping a single bomb. Borrowing from Hamas’s own strategy, Israel should, instead, have taken on the role of victim, and used the massacre as a grisly illustration of the true nature of Palestinianism.

On paper.

But October 7 2023 did not unfold on paper. Rather than allowing the world to discern the true nature of Hamas, Israel opted, instead, to avenge its dead and abducted citizens by destroying the terrorist organisation completely – regardless of the civilian cost.

The warning of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche: “Have a care when fighting monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself”, went unheeded by Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty Zionist allies. Month by month, the breadth of their vision narrowed, until they could no longer perceive how decisively world opinion was being turned against Israel by a Hamas enemy whose supply of human ammunition – claims of Israeli genocide notwithstanding – showed every sign of being inexhaustible.

As Gaza was steadily transformed into an trackless waste of rubble, and the body-count climbed inexorably towards 60,000, it became increasingly plausible for the likes of Francesca Albanese to prosecute their charges of genocide. Certainly, the Muslim world raised no objections to such claims.

Israel was now in the terrifying predicament of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Seized by that grim realisation, Israel plunged on. Soon its bullets and bombs were pummelling Lebanon – and then Iran.

Darkness now gathers around Israel as, methodically, Gaza is being flattened out. In the desolation that used to be Rafah, the IDF is preparing to build a “Humanitarian City” of tents for 600,000, rising to two million, Palestinians. Around these tents the Israelis propose to string coil-after-coil of razor-wire. Doubtless, there will be searchlights and watchtowers. Certainly, once the Palestinians are driven into this terrible encampment, they will not be suffered to leave.

Imagine the terror of the Gazans, as they shuffle under the tutelage of Israeli firepower towards the gates of this hellish place. We can only pray that, when they lift their eyes, they do not read the words: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The Gates of Auschwitz.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 July 2025.

Legislating For Liberty.

Revolutionary Intentions: The Regulatory Standards Bill sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives - it is anything but.

FOR A BILL set to transform New Zealand into a libertarian nightmare, it has an extremely boring name. The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives. Not because anyone in particular wants it, but because those whose job it is to monitor the efficacy or otherwise of government regulations declares it to be necessary.

MPs protesting to their respective Party Whips that they know absolutely nothing about this sort of bill’s content, are told that participation in such debates is good for them. Speaking for ten minutes about something one knows absolutely nothing about is key political skill. Without it, no politician should expect to do more than shepherd boring bills through a nearly empty House for the rest of their (short) political career.

The RSB may sound like one of those bills, it is anything but. According to one critic, the Bill will “neuter the ability of lawmakers to consider anything outside of individual liberty and property rights”.

That this proposed piece of alleged legislative dynamite is the product of the Act Party is entirely unsurprising. David Seymour and his caucus are the most disciplined band of ideologically-driven politicians in our Parliament. Liberty and Property are their twin lodestars, and by them they navigate the choppy seas of New Zealand’s resolutely non-ideological politics.

Knowing exactly where they want to go has made it much easier for Act to determine, often with alarming and near-revolutionary clarity, what they ought to do. Boiled down to its essence, Act’s political mission is captured in the French expression laissez-faire – loosely translated as “let them do it”.

If the actions of individuals cause no harm to others – let them do it.

If those actions involve only their own property – let them do it.

Contrariwise, if some individuals seek to compel other individuals for any reason other than preventing them from causing harm to others, then don’t let them do it. And if that compulsion involves regulating the use of other individuals’ private property, then definitely don’t let them do it!

Understandably, socialists are not (and never have been) great fans of laissez-faire. The collective welfare is (or used to be) their lodestar. Individuals determined to put themselves, and their property, ahead of measures designed to serve the common good should not be allowed to do it.

Obviously, a great deal rests on how “harm” is defined.

If your dairy farm is polluting the streams and rivers that others are accustomed to fishing and swimming in, does that constitute harm? And, if it does, then, surely, the state is entitled to regulate your farming practices? That is to say, restrict the ways in which you can legally use your private property.

Alternatively, if a friend undertakes to sell you a few grams of cannabis, what business is it of the state’s? Why should smoking weed, which most medical scientists have determined to be essentially harmless, be punishable by law? Why shouldn’t individuals, if they’re old enough to assess and accept the consequences of using cannabis, and it causes others no harm, be allowed to do it?

If pressed, Act will always put the liberty of individual New Zealanders and the sanctity of their private property, well ahead of the nation’s collective welfare. With National and NZ First’s backing, Act’s leader hopes to enshrine his party’s guiding principles in the RSB.

If it becomes law, then all regulatory legislation will be weighed carefully by an appointed board against the claims of Liberty and Property. And, if Parliament, in its wisdom, elects to override the Board’s advice, then, as is already the case with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, it will be required to do so in the basilisk glare of public scrutiny.

Naturally, environmental groups, iwi, trade unionists and the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of NGO-land regard the RSB with horror and dismay. They no doubt believed that, having been soundly defeated several times already, such libertarian legislative forays were things of the past.

The Left, generally, is flabbergasted and outraged that the Coalition remains committed to the RSB’s passage. And, boy, are they making a fuss. To hear them talk, the Bill might have been co-sponsored by Sauron and Voldemort.

But, don’t be alarmed. One parliament cannot bind another. If the RSB looks like transforming Aotearoa-New Zealand into Mordor, then the next government can simply repeal it.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 June 2025.

Highway Twenty-Nine: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“It’s in the air, mate. Anger, cruelty, bitter rage. We’re taking it in with every breath, like some colourless, odourless, poisonous gas. But where’s it coming from? Whose making it? And how the hell do we turn it off? Because it’s killing us?”

THE TEA TOWEL, the glistening pint glass, and the hands holding both, fell still. Hannah’s attention was fixed on the table in the corner, and the rising volume of the quarrel that had just erupted. Two old mates, pub regulars, looked ready to trade blows. Not good.

Suddenly, both men were on their feet.

Hannah strode towards them.

“Laurie! Les! What the hell?”

But Laurie was already threading his way through the tables, making for the door. His face set hard in the rigor of wrath. Les watched him go.

“Don’t just stand there you old fool – go after him! You guys have been mates since before I was born. Get out there and set this right.”

Les scowled, gulping down what was left of his ale.

“I’ve had it with that right-wing prick,” he hissed, reaching for his cap. “Had it up to here!”

“No you haven’t, Les”, said Hannah softly. “I know how much you two look forward to your bouts of political jousting. So don’t you try and tell me this is about politics. Get out there and find out what’s really upsetting the two of you. Go on!”

Les’s shoulders slumped. He sniffed. “Alright, alright. Just bring us out another couple of ales, will you.” The ageing Boomer breathed deep and followed his friend out onto the wet wooden deck.

Laurie was standing at the rail, staring blankly into a landscape made indistinct by autumnal rain. The day’s palette of sombre greys, thin blues, and deep greens, matched the men’s now flattened emotions.

“Sorry, mate.” Les stood woodenly at Laurie’s side, his eyes locked, like his friend’s, on the middle-distance – a blurred composition of hills and trees. “That was uncalled for. I don’t know why I said it. It isn’t true.”

Laurie nodded imperceptibly. “Apology accepted, old friend, but unnecessary. I’d been needling you all afternoon.”

“Yeah.” Les’s voice was without rancour.

“It’s in the air, mate. Anger, cruelty, bitter rage. We’re taking it in with every breath, like some colourless, odourless, poisonous gas. But where’s it coming from? Whose making it? And how the hell do we turn it off? Because it’s killing us?”

“You don’t blame the Internet?”

“Of course I blame the bloody Internet! Everybody blames the bloody Internet! But that’s too easy – isn’t it? Sure, it carries our rage far and wide – but does it make our rage?”

Les turned to take the glasses of ale that Hannah had carried out to them on a tray. Acknowledging her approving expression with a wan smile.

“Some say that it does, by using algorithms, whatever they are. They reckon social media software somehow reads our emotional state and amplifies it. Apparently, a rarked-up audience is more profitable to these tech billionaires than a placid one.”

Laurie shook his head.

“How can that be true, Les? Every ruler throughout history has preferred placid subjects to angry ones.”

“Maybe. But, it’s also true that those in charge would rather have the masses at each other’s throats than clamouring for their heads. Maybe the anger and division encouraged by social media is a feature – not a bug?”

“Perhaps. But I think the rage was there long before the Internet. Long before social media. Long before smartphones.” He paused. “You’re a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, right?”

“Huge fan.”

“Do you recall his song ‘Highway 29’, about a pair of doomed lovers, and a bank robbery that goes horribly wrong? That second-to-last verse, when the guy says something like: ‘I told myself it was something in her. But I knew it was something in me. Something that had been coming for a long, long time. Something that was with me now on Highway 29’.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s off ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ – one of his best albums.”

“Yes, that’s right, and I agree, one of his best. And you know, Les, when I look at our country today, I think about those words. We are all so keen to put the blame on those who are travelling with us. Those who aren’t responsible for our crimes. But we’re wrong to do that. Because what’s emerging now has been working its way out of us for a long, long, time.”

Laurie sighed, and put down his glass.

“Les, I’ve got an awful feeling we’re on Highway 29.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 May 2025.

Making Deserts.

Berlin 1945/Gaza 2025
“They make a desert, and they call it peace.”
 - Tacitus 56-117CE

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER doesn’t leave those demanding it very much in the way of wiggle-room. When President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the world that the Allied Powers would accept nothing less than the Axis Powers’ (Germany, Italy, Japan) unconditional surrender, he took the man sitting next to him, Winston Churchill, by surprise. Though the official history of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 insists otherwise, the journalists present were pretty sure that Roosevelt had caught Churchill on the hop. Ever the wily imperial politician, Great Britain’s wartime prime-minister was a great believer in wiggle-room. Now there was none.

Roosevelt had very good reasons for his decision to eliminate the possibility of compromise. The most important of these was the absolute necessity of convincing the Soviets, then fighting for their lives, that there was no possibility of the USA and/or Great Britain negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis.

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, whose paranoia was legendary, was fearful that Churchill, a convinced imperialist and passionate anti-communist, might prevail upon Roosevelt to transform the war into an anti-Soviet crusade. There can be little doubt that the thought, at least, had crossed Churchill’s mind.

No Wiggle Room: Franklin Roosevelt tells Winston Churchill, and the world, that the Allies’ war aim is Unconditional Surrender. 

Unconditional Surrender was Roosevelt’s way of reassuring Stalin that his fears were groundless. It was also intended to prevent his Soviet allies, whose backs had been against the wall since June 1941, from themselves negotiating a separate peace with Nazi Germany.

Beneath all this calculation, however, Roosevelt’s demand for Unconditional Surrender reflected his bedrock conviction that the evils of Nazism were too dreadful to be seated at any negotiating table. They could not be set aside in the interests of peace, because Nazism was the antithesis of peace. To end the war, Adolf Hitler and his creed had to be extirpated entirely. Nazi Germany’s surrender to the forces of civilisation had to be unconditional.

But, evil has a way of corrupting even the most noble of intentions – and the demand that it surrender unconditionally to the forces of righteousness is no exception.

When your enemy realises that there is no wiggle-room, the temptation to go on fighting to the bitter end is very hard to resist.

Equally hard to resist, on your own side, is the temptation to increase dramatically the level of punishment inflicted upon the enemy. If their stubborn refusal to acknowledge defeat persists, and the conflict is needlessly prolonged, then a steady escalation in the violence and destruction unleashed upon them is not only deemed morally justifiable, but also morally necessary.

Suddenly, the civilised distinction between combatants and non-combatants: soldiers and civilians; begins to blur. The commitment to waging Total War pronounced by one side, inevitably calls forth an answering commitment from the other.

Everybody and everything is to be considered a target. The sooner the enemy’s critical infrastructure, now deemed to include the houses – and the bodies – of their citizens, is reduced to rubble and torn flesh, the sooner peace will come.

This terrifying, though hardly novel, mode of thought was well understood by the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of his own great city-state: “They make a desert, and they call it peace.” In Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allies’ quest for unconditional surrender would create deserts of its own.

And the making of deserts, if not peace, continues.

In response to the evil of 7 October 2023, Israel demanded the unconditional surrender of Hamas, and the release of all the hostages taken on that dreadful day by its pitiless foe. Hamas was defiant. God loves martyrs, and Hamas has plenty to give him.

Eighty years after the end of the Second World War in Europe, the world watches in despair as those who set forth in righteous wrath to secure the unconditional surrender of evil, have ensnared themselves in the same remorseless escalation of violence and destruction that captured our fathers and grandfathers.

The focus over recent days has been on the grainy images of universal celebration. [The 80th anniversary of VE Day. - C.T.] More difficult to watch are the images of ruined German cities, and how closely they resemble the images of ruined Gaza. Like the Romans and the Allied Powers, the Israelis are determined to bring forth the flower of peace from the desert they are making.

But, surely, the evil whose unconditional surrender Israel should be seeking, is the evil of not knowing when to stop.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 May 2025.

Mother Countries and Sentinel Sons.

Patriotic Appeal: Zealandia never really caught on. If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

NEW ZEALANDERS once referred to Great Britain as the “Mother Country”. This was no mere declaration of kinship or affection, it was offered in recognition of Britain’s status as the entity responsible for giving birth to, nurturing, and protecting the young New Zealand state.

Until relatively recently, the notion that Māori might also have had a hand in the creation of New Zealand, or that the Treaty of Waitangi might be viewed as the nation’s birth certificate, would have been dismissed out-of-hand. Obviously, Māori had a past, but beyond the military and legal efforts required to silence those benighted natives demanding a future separate and distinct from that of the Pakeha, it could have no bearing on the colony’s development.

New Zealand was a child of the British Empire. Of that its settlers were as certain as they were proud. The fact that Queen Victoria, titular ruler of an empire greater than any the world had hitherto encountered, was a woman, only reinforced the motherly metaphor.

But if most agreed that Great Britain was the Motherland, did New Zealand’s settler society feel the same way about the nation it was building? If pressed to provide an answer, would the settlers have stuck with the matrilinear option, or would they have opted instead to dub the entity that was rapidly emerging from the overwhelmingly masculine milieu of early colonial New Zealand, the “Fatherland”?

If the statue erected by the people of the little North Otago town of Palmerston in 1903 is any guide, the answer must be an emphatic “No.” This marble personification of the nation, arm uplifted to greet the new twentieth century, was Zealandia – and she was all woman.

Auckland and Christchurch boasted their own versions of Zealandia, and she even makes an appearance in the publicity material produced for the centennial of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1940. (Which, given the fact that she’s a lightly-clothed Pakeha, is ever-so-slightly, um, racist, and sexist, at least by today’s standards!)

Zealandia 1940

Does that settle the matter? Have Pakeha New Zealanders, guided perhaps by Papatuanuku, the Māori earth mother, always looked upon the nation as female? Or were our colonial forefathers merely aping their European betters? Most obviously Britain’s Britannia, but also France’s Marianne, the USA’s Columbia, and Germany’s Germania: all of them loosely-clad, somewhat stern young women, spoiling for a fight.

Except Zealandia never really caught on, did she? If asked, most Kiwis would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders. “Never heard of her, mate? Is she in a band?” Some might guess that she’s the Pakeha sheila carrying the flag, and facing the Māori warrior, on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. But, for the most part, Zealandia, an unoriginal Edwardian attempt at fostering national identity, is long gone.

Which is not something one could say about the scores of soldiers keeping watch over the dead of this country’s foreign wars in small towns and large cities all across New Zealand. Statues they may be, some carved out of marble, some cast in bronze, but for the families and friends of the fallen, whose names are often carved on the sides of the monuments they stand atop, these sentinels have kept the collective memory of sacrifice and loss alive for more than a century.

Memorial to the fallen of the Boer War, Oamaru, North Otago.

The first of these structures were raised in commemoration of the New Zealanders who fell “For the Empire” in the Boer War. Their statues strike heroic poses, as befitted their brutal imperial mission. Those of the Great War of 1914-18 embody less belligerent impulses. A soldier stands, rifle thrust forward, protecting his fallen comrade. As much a tribute to Anzac mateship, as martial valor.

New Zealand’s wartime Prime Minister Peter Fraser, believing the country had too many monoliths, to too many dead, opted instead to erect memorial halls to the fallen of World War II. Most still stand, places of community warmth and fellowship, rather than sad piles of cold marble and unflinching bronze.

No. New Zealanders will never refer to their nation as the Fatherland. The term sounds ridiculous – as inappropriate in 2025 as Mother Country. New Zealand is a nation built by daughters and sons. Like settler societies everywhere, it pushes the past behind it, and strides towards the future.

Māori, who have lived here longer, are waiting for us to turn around.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 25 April 2025.