Confronting Racism In 1981 – And 2019

Turning Their Backs On Fear: The students of 38 years ago didn’t run to the nearest authority figure tearful and distraught: they padded-up, put on crash helmets, and went out onto the streets; risking pro-tour fists and police batons to do all that they could to end the genuinely and murderously white supremacist regime that was Apartheid South Africa. (Photo by Alan Cumming)

HOW VERY DIFFERENT the university campuses of 2019 are from the campuses of 1981. Thirty-eight years is a long time. There will be lecturers and tutors on campus today who weren’t even born in the year the Springboks came to tour. To those whose job it is to look back into the darker episodes of our past, New Zealand must seem like another country. Just how much that other country differed from the New Zealand of today was driven home to me while listening to RNZ journalist Katie Scotcher’s story on this morning’s (24/6/19) edition of Morning Report.

At the heart of that story were the feelings of shock, horror and disgust that gripped a University of Auckland staff member, and her class, when, just five days after the Christchurch Shootings, a young, Pakeha, male student gave voice to his profoundly racist beliefs. The staff member in question was outraged that the University authorities, upon receiving her complaint against the student’s behaviour, counselled her to say nothing more concerning the incident until the complaints process had been completed. This, she asserted, amounted to the university “silencing” a staff member who was attempting to confront the presence of “white supremacists” on the Auckland campus.

I couldn’t help wondering how that staff member would react if she was somehow transported back in time 38 years to the University of Otago campus of 1981.

Rough-and-ready polling conducted during that year’s Orientation Week had indicated that while roughly 60 percent of the student body opposed the forthcoming tour of the Springbok rugby team from Apartheid South Africa, at least a third of the student body supported the tour.

Determined to organise this large percentage of the student body, a young post-graduate history student and tutor by the name of Michael Laws (later to become a controversial National Party, then NZ First, Member of Parliament, and, later still, an even more controversial talk-back host and Mayor of Whanganui) formed what he called the “Students Civil Rights University Movement” (SCRUM). As the months went by, the membership of SCRUM increased to number hundreds of highly vocal student supporters of the Springbok Tour.

All-too-aware of the sizeable number of pro-tour students on campus, I felt obliged, as the editor of the Otago University Students Association’s newspaper, “Critic”, to invite Laws to submit a weekly opinion column. He accepted with alacrity, and “Dragonfly” was born. The subject matter of “Dragonfly” was by no means limited to the Tour, Laws was equally vociferous on a broad range of social issues – all of them approached from a decidedly (and, at times, outrageously) right-wing perspective.

Though many of my comrades urged me to do so, I never once considered what we would today call “de-platforming” Michael Laws. The student newspaper was paid for by the student body, and a significant part of that body were staunchly right-wing in their opinions. It was always my view that, in spite of my personal distaste for conservative students’ opinions, they had a right to see them represented on the pages of their newspaper. Certainly, they had no less a right to representation than those students who, like myself, viewed matters from a radically left-wing perspective.

I can only imagine how the staff member in Katie Scotcher’s story would have responded to Michael Laws. A champion New Zealand debater, he would, I suspect, have made a considerably more cogent case for his views than the rather unfortunate-sounding young man in her class. Indeed, she would have been required to do what my old history professor, John Omer-Cooper, did when, in the early months of 1981, he squared-off against Laws, his former student, in the Main Common Room, in a white-hot debate on whether the Springbok Tour should proceed.

Omer-Cooper, in front of hundreds of students, won that debate. Not by silencing Laws, but by simply out-arguing him. The professor had spent much of his life in southern Africa. He knew of what he spoke – and everybody in the MCR that day could see that he did.

I have never forgotten the professor’s response to Laws’ crowning accusation that he was abandoning the right thing for the expedient thing:

“Sometimes, Michael,” the professor said quietly, “the right thing, and the expedient thing, are the same thing.”

It seems to me, still, even after the passage of 38 years, that Professor John Omer-Cooper’s command of the evidence; his obvious moral commitment to the cause of racial equality; and his quiet dignity (in the face of all the rhetorical slings and arrows Laws could hurl at him) provided that student audience with a truly magnificent example of what a university was – and still should be – about.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Scotcher’s story was the staff member’s statement that after the confrontation with the young “white supremacist” a significant number of her students stopped coming to class. The contrast between these students’ response to overtly racist behaviour, and the response of Otago students to the provocations of SCRUM and the violence of the Police and the “Rugby Thugs” off-campus, is stark. The students of 38 years ago didn’t run to the nearest authority figure tearful and distraught: they padded-up, put on crash helmets, and went out onto the streets; risking pro-tour fists and police batons to do all that they could to end the genuinely and murderously white supremacist regime that was Apartheid South Africa.

What a pity that the staff member in Scotcher’s story didn’t present the infamous “Dawn Raids” against Pasifika immigrants (which triggered the young man’s outburst) as proof of how far this country has come since the days of Rob Muldoon and his ilk. She could have reminded her students that, even then, in the 1970s, there were thousands of horrified New Zealanders prepared to challenge the racist policies of their government.

Because that, in the end, is the point. By joining together in solidarity with the victims of imperialism and colonialism; by facing down both the personal and institutional racism that is its toxic legacy; we can bring it to an end. Public outrage halted the Dawn Raids. Apartheid South Africa is no more.

The evil of racism, again on the rise, will not be defeated by hiding from it and issuing complaints, but by confronting it openly and fearlessly – as tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders did in the aftermath of the Christchurch tragedy.

In the words of that pioneer of African-American civil rights, the freed slave, Frederick Douglass:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 June 2019.

The Perfect Sting

The Smiling Assassin: Pete Hodgson's mastery of the dark arts of politics goes back a long way, but his latest scalp - Pansy Wong's - was taken in a 'sting' operation that came pretty close to perfection.

IN RETROSPECT, the year I spent editing the Otago student newspaper, Critic, probably did me no good. In terms of journalism, I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since. In terms of sheer fun and excitement, however, being the editor of Critic in the tumultuous year of 1981 was hard to beat.

As a sort of insurance policy against what I suspected would be a strong on-campus reaction to the mass protests planned for the Springboks Rugby tour in July-September 1981, I agreed to give a young, right-wing history tutor, Michael Laws, his own weekly column – "Dragonfly". Things were going to get ugly, and I wanted the students of Otago to know that their newspaper was open to all shades of political opinion.

After Critic I left varsity and got a job at the University Book Shop. Years passed. And while I was making my way up the ranks of the trade union movement in Dunedin, Michael was working in the National Party Research Unit in Parliament. His highly successful association with Winston Peters marked him out as "one to watch". Certainly, I had little doubt that he would enter Parliament within a very few years.

Another man on his way towards a parliamentary career in the 1980s was Pete Hodgson. When I first met Pete he was selling vegetables out of a barrow on the student union lawn, where "The Ancient & Royal Anti-Scurvy League" had become something of a fixture in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, Pete had left the barrow behind and was rapidly winning himself a reputation for formidable political craftsmanship as the Labour Party’s Otago Regional Organiser. Following the Labour victory of 1984, Pete’s talents were re-directed towards protecting Labour’s marginal seats.

What this meant only became clear to me one day in the mid-80s when Pete sauntered into the University Book Shop and asked me if I still had copies of Michael Laws’ "Dragonfly" columns from 1981. A little alarm-bell started ringing somewhere far off in the back of my mind, but as a loyal Labour Party member, I dutifully photocopied a complete set of Michael’s 1981 columns and handed them over to Pete.

In the 1987 General Election Michael Laws ran as the National Party candidate against Labour’s Bill Sutton in the highly marginal electorate of Hawke’s Bay. He lost, but only narrowly. Just 859 votes separated to two leading candidates.

When I asked him about it, many years later, Michael told me it had been a dirty campaign. Labour, he said, had dug up all sorts of embarrassing material from his past.

Ahh, but it’s a dirty business altogether, is politics – just ask Pansy Wong.

Pete Hodgson’s talents as a plotter, schemer and highly skilled political manipulator have seldom been better displayed than in the downfall of the Minister of Women’s and Ethnic Affairs.

The first act of the drama was to accuse Ms Wong of improperly using her ministerial title to support a private business contract involving her husband, Sammy Wong. An indignant Ms Wong denied doing any such thing. She’d simply added her signature to a Deed of Variation and given her occupation – quite correctly – as "Minister of NZ Government" and her address as "Parliament Buildings, Wellington, NZ".

At first it appeared as if Pete Hodgson’s rocket had misfired. The Cabinet Office absolved Ms Wong of any impropriety, and her husband rallied to her defence by publicly admitting that, with hindsight, he was foolish to embroil his wife in a private business deal.

Pete Hodgson was beginning to look like an utter (and seriously incompetent) cad.

But Pete’s rocket hadn’t misfired. In releasing the information about the Minister’s signature on the Deed of Variation, he had merely put a match to his rocket’s blue touch-paper.

Perhaps Pete began the final act of the drama by quietly prompting one or two friendly Press Gallery journalists to start asking questions about exactly who paid for the flight to China back in April 2008 (when the Deed was signed).

Or, maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe the final act began with him waiting for the spousal international travel rules ‘penny’ to drop of its own accord. Either way, his rocket was always bound to score a direct hit.

The moment anyone – journalist, Prime Ministerial aide, fellow Cabinet Minister, anyone – asked Pansy Wong if her husband’s travel costs had been subsidised on their April ‘08 "holiday" to China, her political career was over.

Allowing one’s spouse to do business on the taxpayer’s tab is a resignation offence.

All-in-all, it was pretty close to being the perfect ‘sting’ operation. Certainly, poor Pansy never saw it coming.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised at Pete Hodgson claiming yet another political scalp.

After all, he’s had plenty of practice.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 16 November 2010.

Treading On Their Patch

The Rule of Laws: By forcing gang-members to "surrender their colours", Laws' Law delivers a timely reminder of where power truly lies in a civilised society - with the State.

GANGS. Few words carry such menace. Just writing the word instantly conjures up a host of fearful images.

The biker gangs of the 1950s and 60s, cruising down the long straight highways of California astride their bellowing metallic steeds. The mechanised barbarian Huns of some denim-clad, post-war Attila.

Or, the Maori gangs of New Zealand. Black Power and the Mongrel Mob: distinguished by their blue and red bandannas; wrap-around "shades"; and steel-capped boots. In our mind’s eye we see them, standing shoulder-to-shoulder: twenty to thirty "brothers" advancing down the main street of some small North Island town in a terrifying slow amble, iron patu in their hands.

And surely, making us afraid is the whole point of the exercise. Whether it be the full-throated roar of twenty Harley-Davidsons; or the slow amble of thirty implacable brothers-in-arms; the purpose is the same: to terrify, to overawe and to intimidate all who encounter them.

And the icon of that terror; the object in which our fear finds its symbolic expression; is the gang "patch".

In essence the gang-member’s patch is no different from the eagle-topped standards borne into battle by Rome’s legions, or the regimental colours around which the Duke of Wellington’s Redcoats formed-up in protective squares on the field of Waterloo. Nothing is more important than these symbols of the group. They must never be surrendered. Men will fight – will kill – and, if needs be, will die, in defence of such symbols.

To capture a legion’s "eagle", or a regiment’s colours, or a gang-member’s patch, is to capture the vanquished’s honour, his manhood, his very soul. Anyone who has ever seen the film of the triumphant Red Army soldiers throwing down the captured regimental standards of Hitler’s legions in front of Lenin’s Tomb, while Stalin looks down from its summit with studied contempt, knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Or, perhaps, because the gang patch is such a personal symbol of power, a better comparison might be the commander of a defeated army surrendering his sword to the victorious General of the opposing side.

To give up one’s patch is, therefore, no small thing – as the history-graduate Mayor of Wanganui, Michael Laws, knows full well. And a law which requires every gang member to remove his patch before going into Mr Laws’ town – precisely because it mandates a very public demonstration of the gang-member’s acquiescence to the demands of the wider Wanganui community – is also no small thing. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more effective means of reminding the gangs about who, in the end, wields the power.

Perhaps Mr Laws, like me, is mindful that the only time the Nazi Party’s ability to intimidate the citizens of Weimar Germany was ever seriously curtailed was in 1932, when Chancellor Heinrich Bruning prohibited its "stormtroopers" from wearing their uniforms. Stripped of their brown shirts and swastika armbands, Hitler’s political enforcers could no longer be mistaken for anything other than the brutal street-thugs they’d always been.

By now you’ll have guessed that, unlike so many of my left-wing comrades, I’m not an opponent of Mr Laws’ Law. Quite the contrary, in fact. As far as I can determine, gangs are not so much manifestations of social need, as they are the straightforward expressions of personal greed. Young men don’t become gang-members because they’ve been badly treated, but because they’re willing to treat people bad.

Terror always has a purpose. In the case of the gangs, fear and intimidation are used to facilitate the commission of serious criminal offences. Each patched gang-member controls a platoon of eager apprentices, "prospects", who earn their own patch by "standing-over", stealing, and all-too-often killing to order. Once patched, the now fully-fledged gangster gains access to the extremely lucrative trade in illicit drugs such as "P" and Ecstasy – the Australasian value of which is said to exceed $5 billion per anum.

To put a dent in that trade – and all the human misery and waste that goes with it – I am willing to countenance the minimal curtailment of civil liberties which Mr Laws’ Law makes possible.

But Laws’ Law, alone, is not enough. With billions of dollars at stake, the gangs will not hesitate to jettison the fearsome symbols of their criminal infancy.

Treading on their patches is but one small step on a very long journey.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday 4 September 2009.

What's in a name?

"Wanganui" or "Whanganui"? History has dropped the "h".

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t allow this posting by Lew over at Kiwipolitico to pass without comment.

Waxing eloquent on the perfidy of Wanganui’s "grasping settler" community, and its refusal to change the name of their city to "Whanganui", Lew has this to say:

They live here, and they grasp, but generally they make few and feeble attempts to engage with tangata whenua, seeing them as outsiders, as enemies, and as competitors because on some level there is a recognition that they retain a moral claim to resources, discourse and authority. The settlers, despite this recognition, consider that it is their land, and their river and their town, and any arguments or evidence to the contrary are met with hostility and the rhetoric of assimilation.

Mayor Michael Laws:

"Wanganui is not a Maori name. It has assumed an identity, a heritage, a history and a mana of its own."

You’ll go far to find a more convenient statement of revisionist ignorance in NZ identity politics. This forms the sole and entire argument in principle against the name change; it’s been that way for ages, so the word no longer means what it once meant – or more plainly, it’s an old mistake so it’s no longer a mistake. If this were to hold everywhere, then the mis-transliteration or misspelling of any word would necessarily destroy any connection to the original in every case: a patently idiotic idea.

But is it?

Take the name of this blog as a case in point.

The proper noun "Bowalley" is a corruption of another proper noun, "Bewley", which is itself a corruption of the French adjective "beaulieu" meaning "beautiful view", which was transformed into a proper noun by Charles Suisted, the Swedish settler who, having acquired that part of the North Otago coast lying to the north of the Waianakarua River and east of Mt Charles in the 1850s, bestowed this name upon it. When, nearly a century later, the property was purchased by my father, "Beaulieu" was still its name.

By that time, however, the locals, who struggled with the correct French pronunciation of "beaulieu", had taken to referring to the property as either "Bewley" or "Bowalley" (the name given to the road that leads past the farm). Another variant of "Beaulieu" was "Baldie" – which eventually became "The Baldie", signifying the little creek which runs through the property, and empties, via a marshy delta, into the Pacific Ocean at the end of Bowalley Road.

The English-speaking peoples are notorious for this sort of linguistic mutation, it’s what lends such richness and colour to the landscapes in which they settle.

Lew castigates the people of Wanganui for daring to express a preference for the name their forefathers bestowed upon the town. But Michael Laws is right: history has normalised the spelling; "Wanganui" has become the name of the settlement. And yes, of course, we all know it's a corruption of the Maori whanganui – just as "Bewley" is a corruption of Suisted’s "Beaulieu" – but that’s just the way language works, and the way a culture evolves.

What’s more, Ken Mair’s demand that the pre-colonial appellation be restored is, I strongly suspect, part-and-parcel of a much more ambitious plan to reclaim his people’s sovereignty over the entire region. To do that, however, Ken and his people would have to fight the colonial wars of conquest all over again – this time emerging as the winners.

So perhaps the "grasping settlers" Lew condemns are smarter than he is willing to admit. Perhaps they see right through Ken’s seemingly harmless demand that the spelling of the city’s name be changed. Perhaps, by resisting this little challenge today, the Wanganui District Council and its Mayor can avoid resisting much more dangerous challenges tomorrow.