Bring It On! So much grist for Mr Jones’s populist-nationalist mill! With it, he will grind and grind and grind. The “population policy” debate, which Mr Jones is relentlessly stoking with his inflammatory rhetoric, is NZ First’s last shot at garnering sufficient electoral support to secure its return to Parliament.
WHAT SORT OF PEOPLE do you suppose Shane Jones wants to come
out swinging over his anti-Indian remarks? Is he hoping to be roundly rebuked
by his friends and whanau in the impoverished North? Would a blistering
broadside from hard-working tradies in the provinces fit the bill? What about
elderly Pakeha voters with cherished memories of a time when the only ethnic
group they had to keep their eye on were the “Maarees”? The answer, of course,
is “None of the Above”.
Indeed, if he found himself under attack from the groups
listed above, Mr Jones would be forced to entirely re-think his own – and NZ
First’s – strategy for re-election. Fortunately for the Minister in Charge of
the Pork Barrel, this will not be necessary. So far, the sort of people
objecting to Mr Jones’ remarks are exactly the sort of people he was hoping to
make hopping mad.
Not only has Mr Jones’s carefully crafted denigration of
Indian university students triggered all the usual suspects on Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram, but they have also succeeded in hooking three much
larger fish: a Race Relations Commissioner, a Vice-Chancellor and a Professor.
From each of these representatives of New Zealand’s cultural
and bureaucratic elites have come great dollops of outrage.
“While this is not the first time prominent figures have
resorted to xenophobic dog-whistle politics in an election year,” finger-wagged
the Vice-Chancellor and the Professor, “the Christchurch atrocity highlighted
the very real dangers of allowing such narratives to go unchallenged.”
Jackpot! In their social-liberal rage, Jones’s critics have
associated him with the man alleged to have gunned down 51 Muslims in
Christchurch on 15 March last year. Mr Jones’s audience, who are, it is pretty
safe to say, members of the same “beer drinking, plain speaking, red meat
eating” fraternity to which the Minister, by his own admission, belongs, will
wax indignant at this association. In their eyes, at least, talking frankly
about immigration is not even remotely in the same ball-park as mass murder.
These same folk will respond with equal indignation to the
remarks of the Race Relations Commissioner, who blasted Mr Jones for his
“irresponsible” comments which, he insisted, “emboldened those who held racist
and xenophobic views”.
No more than the Vice-Chancellor and the Professor, could
the Commissioner forbear from referring to the Christchurch Massacre. The
anniversary of the 15 March Christchurch mosque shootings was, he said, “a
reminder of the ugliness of racism and hate”.
So much grist for Mr Jones’s populist-nationalist mill! With
it, he will grind and grind and grind. The “population policy” debate, which Mr
Jones is relentlessly stoking with his inflammatory rhetoric, is NZ First’s
last shot at garnering sufficient electoral support to secure its return to
Parliament. That it has every chance of succeeding is not only because there
are hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealanders who are alarmed and dismayed at the
unprecedented scale and speed of this country’s demographic evolution; but also
by the blank refusal of the “elites” to give them any say in the matter.
Oh, how Mr Jones must have rubbed his hands in glee when he
read the Vice-Chancellor’s and the Professor’s penultimate admonitory sentence:
“Today, all states are confronted by security, economic and
environmental challenges that do not respect territorial borders and cannot be
resolved by populist-nationalist politicians promising to ‘take back control’
of national sovereignty in New Zealand or anywhere else.”
This is precisely the sort of sneering, condescending, “we
experts know best” rhetoric that gave the world Brexit and Trump. The sort of
behaviour that demonstrates as nothing else can the sheer vastness of the gulf
that separates the guardians of this deracinated, globalised culture, from its
victims.
Populist-nationalism has always been NZ First’s
stock-in-trade. In the past, its expression has generally possessed a
tongue-in-cheek quality that allowed New Zealand to steer clear of the dark
pathways down which the populist-nationalists of Europe and the USA have
descended.
In the general election of 2020, however, NZ First finds
itself fighting for its life. Which is why, in the eyes of NZ First’s political
strategists, those dark pathways are fast taking on the appearance of escape
routes.
Race Relations Commissioners, Vice-Chancellors and
Professors need to wise-up – and quickly. Heaping vitriol on Shane Jones won’t
kill his “racist and xenophobic views”, it will only make them stronger.
This essay was originally published in The Otago
Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 March 2020.
