Time To Choose.

To Have And To Hold: And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. 

TO BE POLITICAL in the fourth quarter of 2023 is not easy. Yes, New Zealand has just passed through a general election, but the outcome of that contest was signalled well in advance by the polls. That the government lost came as no surprise, even if the vehemence of the electorate’s judgement came as a shock to many of the defeated party’s supporters. But, it wasn’t Labour’s thrashing, and the victory of the Right, that made politics so hard. The explanation for the souring of political discourse here, and around the world, may be traced to Southern Israel, Hamas’s hideous rampage of 7 October, and the furious reaction of the Israeli state.

These events have hacked a bloody line through religious faiths, political movements, parties, families and friendships. Where people stand in relation to that dividing line is determined by many factors. Their understanding of history. Their perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of their hate. The strength of their love. The persuasiveness of their fear.

Significantly, the line runs horizontally, not vertically. Where one stands on the Israel-Hamas War is not a straightforward matter of Left versus Right. On both sides of the classical divide, friends and comrades draw away from each other: blue and white above the line; red, white, green and black below.

Discussing the times and the morals with an old comrade, just a few days ago, we reflected on the fast decreasing utility of the terms “Right” and “Left”. He recalled the ease with which, as much younger men, we were able to sort the issues of the day into neat ideological piles; separate the protagonists from the antagonists; and know a kind of ontological peace. Now, he told me, the only political idea with which he still identifies unequivocally is Democracy. In the past, he proudly proclaimed himself a socialist. Today, he would own to being a “radical democrat” – nothing more.

And now, as if the malevolent spirit of the times has not destabilised our world enough, New Zealanders’ adherence to the values and processes of democracy is being put to the test. Once again, the dividing line is horizontal, not vertical, with the “decolonising” project of Māori nationalism sundering the supporters of democracy from the partisans of ethnic exceptionalism. Like Palestine, the meaning, purpose, and future of Te Tiriti O Waitangi has become an issue over which an amiable ‘agreement to differ’ is no longer possible.

The day that was always going to dawn has arrived. The day when the unmandated revision of the meaning, purpose and scope of the Treaty of Waitangi runs into the numerical majority of New Zealanders who, according to the pollsters, have run out of patience with the “Treatyists” insistence that ‘Non-Māori’ have an open-ended obligation to acknowledge and fulfil what are now their unabashedly revolutionary constitutional claims. This loss of patience has taken the form of the Act Party’s democratic counter-revision of the Treaty: a political formula it seeks to ratify with a referendum involving – and binding – the whole adult population of New Zealand.

The political leadership of Maoridom, and their Pakeha supporters, have been quick to declare their opposition to any resolution of Treaty differences by way of counting votes. The former Minister of Māori Affairs, Willie Jackson, has warned that elements within the Māori world are willing to “make war” on any attempt to re-write the Treaty’s meaning. (That the Waitangi Tribunal and the Judiciary have been doing exactly that for the best part of 50 years appears to have slipped the former minister’s mind.)

Considerably less ferociously, the distinguished Treaty historian, Dame Anne Salmond, has also taken up an anti-referendum position. Writing for the Newsroom site, she argues that “the idea of putting the ‘principles of the Treaty’ to a popular vote is unjust and unwise, and should not be entertained by any responsible government ….. a referendum on ‘the principles of the Treaty,’ given its populist appeal to the majority and its inflammatory potential, is not the right (tika) way to conduct this kind of discussion. It would be unjust and divisive, inciting extreme views in all directions and fostering misinformation, anger and ill-will.”

The central difficulty with Dame Anne’s position is that it fails to acknowledge that the manner in which the (re)interpretation of the Treaty has been carried out since the passage of the Waitangi Tribunal legislation in 1975 has not been all that “tika” either. The re-conceptualisation of New Zealand’s democratic system of government was undertaken by institutions and individuals not subject to the judgement of the citizenry. Attempting to re-construct the nation’s constitutional edifice without reference to those obliged to live within it was always a very risky venture.

Dame Anne is not alone in her view that holding a referendum on the Treaty would not be wise. Rather than leave the decision to the electors, the former National Party Defence Minister, and present Law Commission member, Dr Wayne Mapp, argues for a Royal Commission of Inquiry “charged with coming up with an acceptable set of ‘Principles of the Treaty’, that could form the basis of legislative definition of the principles. The term itself is a creature of statute but it has never been statutorily defined. So over the last 36 years the Courts have fulfilled that role, supplemented by the bureaucracy.”

Presumably, Dr Mapp is channelling the wisdom of King Solomon, since nothing less would be required to select a panel of Royal Commissioners acceptable to all the parties involved in the Treaty Debate. Any line-up receiving the thumbs-up from Iwi leaders, Te Pāti Māori and Willie Jackson would, almost certainly, get the thumbs-down from David Seymour and Winston Peters. Which is, precisely, why a referendum is necessary.

Dr Mapp is not convinced. “The reason why I oppose a referendum is that it will be an explicit removal of minority rights. Māori are a minority, mostly contained in the 18%. They will not agree to an ACT imposed definition of the principles of the treaty. I am well connected to Māori views on this matter, primarily through my wife [Denese Henare - C.T.]. I know the level of response and division that such a referendum will cause.”

Once again, the apparent absence of concern at what manner of response and division might ensue when those Mapp describes as “conservative senior politicians” are successful in persuading Christopher Luxon to rule out a referendum. Clearly, the levying of war against the Crown is something only Māori have the wit to threaten.

And, therein, lies the conundrum Luxon will have to face. If he bows to Māori threats to “make war” on his coalition government by scotching Act’s referendum proposal, then what’s next? What does he suppose will be the lesson drawn by those Māori determined to persist with co-governance, with Three Waters, with the Māori Health Authority?

“The last thing National needs over the next 3 years is an intemperate ‘debate’ over the principles of the Treaty.” Opines Dr Mapp. “There is a smarter approach to this issue.” So the Crown has insisted, ever since the 1980s, when it became frightened of what Māori might do if it dared to say “No”. But, it was those “smarter” approaches, driven by fear, that prompted the decisions that have led us, concession by concession, one legal judgement inspiring and empowering the next, to this present position. Thus we find ourselves located, dangerously, between a rock and a hard place.

But, being political has never been easy – not even when one takes the easy way out. The moment always arrives when a choice has to be made. Democracy? Or Ethnic Exceptionalism? And what determines the choice? That, too, does not change:

Our understanding of history. Our perception of what politics should, and should not, permit. The reach of our hate. The strength of our love. The persuasiveness of our fear.

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

Threatening “Consequences”.

Warning Shot: The former Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, predicted civil unrest on a scale “five times, ten times” worse than the 1981 Springbok Tour protests if the Act Party’s referendum on Te Tiriti O Waitangi goes ahead.

“CONSEQUENCES” – it’s a word that acquires an ominous quality in the mouths of political radicals. As in: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences. Or, as Te Pāti Māori’s Debbie Ngarewa Packer expressed it, when asked what would happen if the Act Party secured its referendum on Te Tiriti from its new coalition partners: “We have always said there will be consequences.”

In both contexts the word is freighted with menace. It is impossible to miss the threat which the word is now required to bear. What the political radical is saying to the person about to avail herself of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all human rights is chilling.

“Of course you can speak out on this issue, but you are surely not so naïve as to believe that your little speech will be the end of it. Giving voice to such opinions cannot help but leave a very black mark on your record. It’s the sort of thing that goes down in an employee’s personal file. Your chances of promotion may be limited very seriously by giving voice to such views. Still, it’s entirely up to you. Just remember, though, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences.”

If you were a public servant harbouring serious doubts about the wisdom of enshrining “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” at the top of your ministry’s priorities, and you had let it be known that it was your intention to speak out against the idea at the next staff training day, and your supervisor delivered that not-so-subtle warning to you the night before, would you go ahead with your plan? Or would the consequences of going ahead with your “little speech” cause you to scrap the whole idea?

Are we really free to express ourselves if, by doing so, we place our livelihood, our entire future career, at risk? If that’s what’s at stake, then doesn’t the exercise of our freedom of expression take on a fraught, almost existential, character? Like the German citizen of the Third Reich who, in obedience to his Christian faith, conceals a Jewish family in his attic. Simply by showing compassion for his fellow human-beings, that man is risking arrest, imprisonment and death. When those are the outcomes of displaying human compassion; of obeying the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbour”; is it not reasonable to suppose that the exercise of love and compassion will diminish?

Attaching dire consequences to any aspect of human behaviour must be seen as a means of reducing or eliminating that behaviour. If speaking out against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” in a government ministry could cost the speaker their career, then the chances of it happening will be reduced dramatically. A climate of fear and compliance will be created in which the only safe speech is that which conforms to the policies and plans of the people in charge. The language of consequences all-too-easily shades into the language of totalitarianism.

It is difficult to attribute anything other than an intention to intimidate the incoming government to Debbie Ngarewa Packer’s statement to RNZ. Or to Willie Jackson’s comments to Jack Tame on TVNZ’s Q+A current affairs programme. The former Māori Development Minister predicted civil unrest on a scale “five times, ten times” worse than the 1981 Springbok Tour protests if the Act Party’s referendum goes ahead. Both politicians are laying out the consequences of a coalition partner making it possible for citizens to cast a vote on the role and scope of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. It is suggested that massive civil disturbances – quite possibly violent in nature – will be the result if this classically democratic mechanism is employed to resolve significant differences in the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Compare the response of these two Māori nationalists with those of the people who opposed the introduction of proportional representation, assisted dying, and decriminalisation of cannabis. Did the “anti” side of these debates, or the “pro” side for that matter, threaten massive civil disturbances if their will was thwarted by the democratic process? No, they did not, because the referendum is generally acknowledged by all those who adhere to the democratic values of New Zealand society to be the best method of resolving controversial issues rationally and peacefully.

What other conclusion can be drawn from the statements of Debbie Ngarewa Packer and Willie Jackson, except that they reject the principle of majority rule that underpins the entire democratic system of government. And, if that is true, then New Zealanders will find it difficult to resist the conclusion that these two politicians’ preference, and the preference of the Māori nationalist movement generally, is for a system of government that accords the right of veto to a minority of the population.

Because, what else is being demanded here but the right to prevent certain political policies from being implemented? Not by virtue of winning an election fought, at least in part, on the political policies in dispute, Not by winning a referendum called to determine, finally, which course of action should be followed. But by warning of the consequences of allowing the offending policy to be implemented over the minority’s objections. Or, in the language of the mafioso enforcer: “Nice little country you’ve got here, it would be a real shame if something happened to turn it into a hell-hole of civil strife.”

How, then, should the incoming government respond to this threat of consequences? The largest party of the coalition currently in formation, National, has rejected Act’s policy of a Treaty referendum as “divisive and unhelpful”. But this is nonsense. A great many of the policies espoused by National, Act and NZ First are “divisive and unhelpful” – not least their pledge to abolish Fair Pay Agreements. But, the fact that a great many people are opposed to National-Act-NZ First policies will not prevent them from being implemented. It’s one of the principal reasons for holding democratic elections, to provide governments with the mandate needed to proceed with their policies over the objections of the opposition. The question, therefore, is not whether Act’s policy is “divisive and unhelpful”, but whether it is justified.

And, if it is justified, then the incoming government must decide how to respond to the threatened consequences of allowing Act’s referendum to be put before the people. The answer to this question is as clear as it is daunting: no government can allow its conduct of national affairs to be determined by threats of massive civil disturbance and/or political violence.

Successfully applied once, the minority’s consequences – its veto – will be applied again, and again, and again, until the political will of the majority has been set at nought. Either that, or, unwilling to be ruled by the minority, the majority will develop a sequence of consequences intended to secure results considerably more to their liking.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Monday, 6 November 2023.

Taking Charge: Luxon Must Demonstrate That He Can Not Only Win – But Govern.

Tough Assignment: The first lesson Christopher Luxon will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long.

CHRISTOPHER LUXON has shown himself to be a fast learner when it comes to mastering the skills required to win. Now, having won, he cannot avoid revealing how quickly he can master the art of governing.

The first lesson he will have to learn is that being Prime Minister is not at all the same as being CEO. Political power is always and everywhere a matter of negotiation. Even dictators discover how dangerous it is to try and rule arbitrarily, and alone. Those who tried did not remain dictators very long.

And, it won’t be long before New Zealand’s new leader’s ability to manage change is put to the test. We must all hope that Luxon takes to governing as readily as he took to campaigning.

Who’s going to test him? Not Winston Peters. The leader of NZ First is in the box seat – and he knows it. Without NZ First’s 8 votes, Luxon cannot inform the Governor-General that he has the confidence of the House of Representatives. No, the person most likely to test Luxon’s political abilities is the biggest loser from the final vote count, David Seymour.

National needed the Act Party to do much better than it ended up doing in the 2023 General Election. In the final tally, Act’s Party Vote, at 8.64 percent, was only 1.05 percentage points higher than the party’s 2020 total. The actual result was well short of the support it was racking-up in pre-election polls – which climbed as high as 14 percent.

No one needed to tell Seymour who was responsible for Act’s collapse from double to single figures. Winston Peters campaigning skills (not insignificantly boosted by several large donations to NZ First) did not take long to manifest themselves – not once the triennial Joker in the pack got back out on the road. It was a test. Could Seymour maintain his winning political persona in the face of Peters’ superb demonstration (best ad’ of the campaign) of just how comfortable he was in the saddle? The answer turned out to be: “Only just.”

The first sign of Seymour’s jitters was his truculent response to the discovery of one or two questionable candidates on Act’s Party List. It was a nothing story. By the time the airwaves were carrying their names, the “unacceptable” candidates were no longer standing. The incident, responded to sensibly, could have reaffirmed Seymour’s impressive control over his party. Yes, someone had blundered, but just look at how quickly the problem was solved. That’s the sort of leader New Zealand needs!

Truculence – bordering on petulance – was a new look for Seymour, and the voters didn’t like it. One didn’t need a degree in political science to join the dots. As NZ First continued its relentless rise towards electoral viability, the Act leader was showing dangerous signs of losing his political composure altogether. How else to explain his otherwise inexplicable threat to get rid of the statutory holiday after New Year’s Day? No one was asking for it. No one wanted it. Act appeared to be going doolally.

Seymour’s threat to take his party onto the cross-benches and restrict its support for National to votes of confidence – but not supply – received much criticism, but it was exactly what Act needed. It served as a jarring reminder, not only to Luxon and National, but also to all right-wing voters, that Seymour and his party were not the sort of politicians to be taken for granted. They may not be able to ride horses, but they sure-as-shit could shoot them.

Christopher Luxon would be wise to bear that in mind as he and his negotiating team flit between Act and NZ First in search of sweet harmony. Seymour absolutely cannot be made to look like an MMP cuckold: watching the object of his political affections lavishing generous concessions upon a third party. Making Act look impotent would be the surest way of making Seymour prove to the whole world what a hard bargainer he can be.

The issue most likely to ensure that Act and its leader become the centre of attention is the future of Te Tiriti. No other policy is more likely to test the mettle of New Zealand’s new prime minister. No other policy is more likely to make National jump the wrong way.

Luxon’s advisers are practically certain to tell him that this is not an issue which engages the concern of more than a very small percentage of New Zealanders, and that exposing his new government to the barrage of abuse that was bound to follow any major concession to Act on Te Tiriti would be a catastrophic mistake.

Luxon should ignore his advisers.

No other issue speaks as clearly to the political and cultural divide presently separating New Zealanders than the current definition of Te Tiriti, and all the highly controversial policy decisions mandated and empowered by its constitutionally transformational elements. If National refuses to address this issue, humiliating Act in the process, then two very dangerous things will happen.

First. Among a significant percentage of the electorate (the people who no longer tell pollsters what they truly believe) the perception will take hold that Luxon lacks the courage to accept the mandate which his election victory has bestowed upon him. At the heart of that mandate is a commission to confront, head-on, the constitutional and cultural assumptions of the judicial, bureaucratic, academic and media elites, as they have grown and developed since 2017, and to roll them back. To make it clear from the very start that “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” are not among the priorities of the incoming government. If Luxon encourages the perception that National is “wimping out” on his mandate, then National’s political hegemony will be put at serious risk.

Second. Any attempt by National to rule out a referendum on Te Tiriti, will leave Seymour and Act with no option but to seize the mandate, which Luxon has spurned, for itself. That can only mean taking up an independent position on the cross-benches, and forcing National and NZ First to win Act’s support for every single item on their legislative agenda.

To avoid this political disaster – the most likely outcome of which would be a new election, throwing up a balance of parliamentary forces little changed from the present – Luxon must display the full range of his leadership skills.

If Seymour and Peters could be jointly commissioned by the Prime Minister with organising and encouraging the broadest possible discussion and debate about Te Tiriti, involving the broadest possible cross-section of the New Zealand population, then Act’s referendum would likely not be necessary. Such a genuinely democratic exercise would expose just how isolated the promoters of decolonisation and indigenisation are from the rest of the nation. Nothing could make clearer the elites’ lack of genuine political support. The revolutionaries embedded in the nation’s key institutions would have to come up with a new and improved strategy.

Luxon, himself, would likely emerge from this process as both a statesman and a peacemaker. Simply allowing Seymour’s plan to proceed, unmoderated, to the point of staging a binding referendum on the meaning of Te Tiriti, would provoke massive – and potentially violent – political resistance. Certainly, Te Pāti Māori and the Greens are gearing-up for a stoush which, according to Labour’s Willie Jackson, would be “five times, ten times” worse than the hugely divisive Springbok Tour protests of 1981. Opting, instead, for an open-ended, state-facilitated, and truly public discussion about the country’s constitutional future would cast Luxon as the wise and courageous champion of New Zealand’s liberal democracy. The last time National had a leader who made that his mission, it was in office for the next 12 years.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 November 2023.

This Land Is Mine - by Nina Paley.

NINA PALEY is a Jewish-American illustrator and animator. The video clip posted here is from her larger work, Seder Masochism, which may be reached here. Paley heightens the power of her clip by having each wave of invaders keep the song going. This land is mine, they insist - until there is no land left to own, except by the Angel of Death. A grim, but very pertinent message.

Video courtesy of YouTube

This post is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Failing The “Leftist” Litmus Test.

Palestinian Lives Matter: What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

LIKE THE WAR in Ukraine, the war in Gaza is serving as a remarkable litmus test for the Left. It is testing its moral compass, its understanding of international law, its grasp of geopolitical realities and, not least, its awareness of what the PR mavens call “the optics”. A substantial portion, even, perhaps, a majority, of the Left is failing all of these tests – badly. That this should be the case points to what would appear to be a dangerous cognitive weakness in contemporary progressivism – and to a West under siege.

The moral and geopolitical confusion over the Russo-Ukrainian War is more readily understood than Israel’s war against Hamas. For the so-called “Tankies”, abandoning the cherished image of the Russian people, Nazism’s destroyers, as the world’s saviours, was an emotional wrench. Rejecting the argument that the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was a justifiable response to US and Nato provocation proved equally difficult. None of these considerations excused the Tankies’ defence of Russian aggression, but one could at least see where it was coming from.

That is certainly not the case with respect to the devastating pogrom unleashed upon the Jewish inhabitants of Southern Israel by the Jihadist terrorist organisation, Hamas. To encounter its historical equal, it is necessary to travel back in time to the genocidal pogroms set in motion by the antisemitic citizens of the Baltic states in anticipation of the Nazi einsatzgruppen’s arrival in 1941. Here, too, one encounters the same indiscriminate and unsparing cruelty, the same savage delight in rape, torture and murder, that characterised the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023.

As was the case in 1941, it is quite impossible to look upon the atrocities of 7/10/23 as anything other than a deliberate turning away from all civilised conduct. Unless, that is, one has already been convinced that against the Jews/Israelis any and all crimes are permitted – and justified.

That this was the belief of the Nazis is well-documented. That a burning desire to rid the world of the “Zionist Entity” is equally evident in every act of Arab aggression towards the State of Israel since 1948. The important distinction being that, while Egypt, Syria and Jordan only wanted to drive the Jews into the sea, the Jihadists of Hamas are religiously committed to making sure that every last one of them drowns.

What is it then that permits those who self-identify as leftists to survey the horrors of 7 October 2023 and see only a glorious act of Palestinian resistance? How is it possible for those who cheered on Jacinda Ardern’s “politics of kindness” to absorb all the details of the rape, the torture, the killing – and not respond with fury and disgust?

One possible answer is that they have seen the images of Palestinians shot and killed for daring to oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine. They have watched, aghast, as Israeli aircraft, Israeli artillery, have pounded the houses and apartment buildings of Gaza to rubble. Seen, also, the tiny victims of such bombardment, and heard the anguished cries of their mothers. “Lex Talionis!”, they cry. “An eye for an eye!”

But the moral vacuity of this position was as obvious to a Galilean rabbi back in 30AD, as it was to the Gujarat lawyer who declared in 1920AD that “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind”. A leftist who turns her face in fury and disgust from the IDF’s brutality on the West Bank, cannot, either logically or ethically, refrain from doing the same in the face of Hamas’ murderous fanaticism.

That Pro-Palestinian leftists cannot see the deeply cynical purpose behind Hamas’ attack is similarly baffling. Notwithstanding the facts of international law concerning the responsibility of all those exercising state (or state-like) authority to protect their citizens from harm, Hamas committed its atrocities in the certain knowledge that Israel – fulfilling its own legal duty to protect its citizens – would feel compelled to destroy those responsible for organising and committing them. That this would entail air and artillery strikes on Gaza was obvious to the whole world. But, Hamas did not shrink from Israeli retaliation, it welcomed it.

Why? Because it knew that if the IDF was coming after them, then it would also be coming after the apartment buildings, the office blocks, the schools and the hospitals from which it launches its rockets, and under which it locates its storehouses, fuel dumps, arsenals, factories and command centres. Does Hamas know that this is a blatant breach of the Geneva Conventions – a war crime? Of course it does. Doesn’t it care that its own people will be “collateral damage” when the Israeli missiles strike their targets? Not at all. A steadily rising civilian death-toll isn’t a bug in Hamas’ strategy, it’s a feature.

There was a time when, to be regarded as a serious leftist, one was obligated to inform oneself as well as possible about world affairs – especially the geopolitics of great power rivalry and its consequences. No longer. One can be a fervent supporter of the Palestinian cause without ever pausing to wonder from whom groups like Hamas and Hezbollah get their military supplies, their military training.

Today’s leftists do not know, or do not care, that it is the hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran that is moving these terrorist pieces on the Middle-East chessboard. The same Islamic Republic that murders women and girls for refusing to wear the hijab. The same Islamic Republic that is committed to the utter destruction of Israel – and is rapidly acquiring the nuclear capacity to do exactly that. Today’s leftists simply do not realise that, if this was the Lord of the Rings, they’d be on the side of Sauron – they’d be cheering on the orcs.

Don’t they care about the optics of all this? When Jewish students in New York have to barricade themselves in their university library, against pro-Palestinian leftists, and all the antisemitic, misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic “allies” standing right there beside them, pounding on the door, trying to get in. Does it not occur to them that people looking at the video clip of that incident posted on X might be reminded of something? When a supposed “leftist” stands up in Auckland’s Aotea Square and urges the multitude waving their Palestinian flags to “Globalise the Intifada!” – i.e. Let’s have pogroms everywhere! – and is cheered to the echo. What does he suppose New Zealand’s Jewish community sees?

Not leftism, but fascism. And so does every other leftist who still understands the meaning of the word.

This essay was originally posted on the Democracy Project website on Tuesday, 31 October 2023.

The Demographic Fix.

Coffee-Coloured Cultural Moment: Pop group Blue Mink’s anthemic “Melting Pot”, released in 1969, was a product of that brief sunny moment in history when people genuinely believed the world would be a better place if all of its peoples could “just get together in a lovin’ machine” that turned out “coffee-coloured people by the score”.

IT COULD NOT BE RECORDED TODAY, let alone top the charts. Blue Mink’s anthemic “Melting Pot”, released in 1969, was a product of that brief sunny moment in history when people genuinely believed the world would be a better place if all of its peoples could “just get together in a lovin’ machine” that turned out “coffee-coloured people by the score”.

The problem was that, by 1969, the world had already moved on from the idea of a single human family. Dr Martin Luther King’s self-sacrificial creed of non-violent civil disobedience had died even before he did, replaced with the “Burn, Baby, Burn!” of ghetto insurrectionists and Black nationalists. In New Zealand, too, the rise of Nga Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panthers offered a strong challenge to the 1960 Hunn Report’s policy of integration.

As the Seventies rolled into the Eighties, the First World’s adoption of what would become known as “Identity Politics” was already far advanced. On the Left of New Zealand politics especially, the claims (some would say the irreconcilable claims) of class, race and gender were poised to supersede the universalist principles that had driven the huge protest movement against the 1981 Springbok Tour. Indeed, the barbed wire had hardly been coiled up, and the batons stowed away, before the nascent Māori nationalist movement was demanding to know why leftists who recoiled from South Africa’s apartheid system, had so little to say about the dispossession and subordination of their own country’s indigenous population.

Whipped into a coherent doctrine by Donna Awatere in a series of essays entitled “Māori Sovereignty”, published in the feminist magazine Broadsheet, the Māori nationalists made it clear that the tangata whenua were not only seeking the return of their land, but also the restoration of their power. This was a revolutionary demand, and Awatere and her fellow nationalists knew it. In the early Eighties, however, the superior Māori birthrate had many nationalists looking forward to that moment when, in the not-too-distant future, the population of the indigenous people of Aotearoa would overtake that of the Pakeha descendants of New Zealand’s British colonisers.

The huge attraction of this notion was that it allowed the revolutionary changes required to restore Māori sovereignty to be achieved democratically. There was no need to outgun the Pakeha – not when Māori could simply outvote them. Provided Māori parents taught their children well about the changes they would soon be in a position to enact, and provided the dwindling number of Pakeha were properly prepared for the big cultural transition, everything could proceed smoothly – and, more important, peacefully.

At about the same time, either by accident, or design, the New Zealand state was contemplating a very different demographic future for its citizens. In the mid-1980s, Pakeha politicians, bureaucrats and academics, no longer willing to countenance what in practice, if not officially, amounted to a “White New Zealand” immigration policy, produced a policy review that “quite explicitly sought to ‘enrich the multicultural fabric of New Zealand society’”.

The pale-skinned immigrants of yesteryear would be joined by the peoples of East and South Asia. Chinese, Taiwanese, Hongkongers, South Koreans, Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis would take their place in the immigration queue alongside English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Canadians and Americans – not forgetting New Zealand’s highly valued (if poorly remunerated) “guest-workers” from the Pacific Islands.

Throughout the Nineties, the number of immigrants swelled significantly, dramatically altering the cultural “vibe” of a nation which had, for most of its history, been unashamedly Anglo-Celtic. Winston Peters made his populist bones decrying what he branded the “Asian Invasion”. Not to be outdone, and to the consternation of most New Zealanders (not to mention most geographers!) the National Party Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, described New Zealand as an “Asian Nation”. The economic and political changes of the next quarter-century would, however, make a prophet of Bolger. By the 2020s the Peoples Republic of China had become New Zealand’s largest trading partner.

What could not be disputed, as New Zealand plunged forward into the Twenty-First Century, is that the ambitions of the authors of the 1986 Review of Immigration Policy had been entirely fulfilled. New Zealand had become a multicultural society of enormous diversity and energy. By 2018, more than a quarter of those living in the country had been born somewhere else. What’s more, New Zealand’s population had grown to five million a full decade ahead of the demographers’ expectations. The impact of this rapid growth on the nation’s ageing and increasingly inadequate infrastructure, and New Zealand real-estate market, was massive.

But not as massive as its impact on the hopes and dreams of the Māori nationalist movement. Quite why they did not anticipate the “colonisers’” response to the prospect of a Māori majority – mass immigration to keep the percentage of Māori New Zealanders below 20 percent – is difficult to fathom. But, if they were caught by surprise by the “Asian Invasion”, they lost little time in coming up with a Plan-B.

Having been thwarted in their hopes of overtaking the Pakeha population, and thereby denied the opportunity of reclaiming their land and power democratically, it was necessary for Māori to come up with a plan that did not rely upon superior numbers and the democratic process for its success. Somehow, their being a minority of the population had to be rendered unimportant and irrelevant. Somehow, the mere fact of being Māori had to become a justification for being accorded equal authority with Pakeha.

Whether by accident, or design, the New Zealand Judiciary came through with all the legal and historical arguments necessary to transform what had been a Treaty-based relationship between the Crown, exercising full sovereignty over its legally subordinate-but-equal Pakeha and Māori subjects, and the territories they inhabited; into a relationship “in the nature of a partnership” based upon the “principles” of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which, expert testimony assured the nation, did not entail a cession of Māori sovereignty.

Meaning, that if Māori are equal “partners” of the Pakeha, by virtue of Te Tiriti, then their numbers, expressed as a percentage of the population, are entirely irrelevant. Their right to equal authority emerges from their relationship to the land, not to how many of them there might be at any given moment in history. That being the case, on all important matters pertaining to the Treaty “partners”, solutions should be arrived at through a process of co-governance.

It may not be the outcome envisaged in Blue Minks hit song. Blanding-out New Zealand’s vibrant multicultural society into a coffee-coloured uniformity, while a “right-on!” notion in 1969, would strike most contemporary New Zealanders as a terrible idea. For Māori New Zealanders, however, it must be difficult to avoid the conclusion that, since 1986, the demographic fix has been in. Co-governance, the Māori defence against being tyrannised by a majority that was either deliberately, or accidentally, manufactured by the institutions of the state, a policy for which no government has ever asked for, or received, a popular mandate, can only be regarded as masterful – as clever as it is controversial.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 October 2023.

Reaping The Whirlwind.

Mild-Mannered Avenger: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” - Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, 1942.

HAD IT NOT BEEN for the intervention of the Queen Mother, Arthur “Bomber” Harris would never have got his statue. While all the other great British commanders of the Second World War were showered with honours and had their likenesses cast in bronze, Air Marshall Harris became someone the British Establishment found it expedient to overlook. Why? Because Harris was responsible – at least in terms of his strategic decision-making – for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Harris’s “Bomber Command” rained down explosives in such quantities that, in the cities of Hamburg and Dresden, they created firestorms. A firestorm takes hold when the combustion site exhausts its supply of oxygen and begins drawing in the surrounding air to keep the inferno alive. The inrushing air soon acquires the speed of a gale-force wind. This not only fuels the flames, it fans them, increasing the size and heat of the conflagration to truly horrific levels. Without oxygen, those huddling in bomb shelters are asphyxiated. Those attempting to flee find their feet sinking into superheated asphalt as, all around them, the streets melt. So hot did it become in Dresden, that school-girls seeking protection from the intense heat in a water tank were boiled alive.

Harris was not in the least bit fazed. In a notorious address, delivered to the British people in 1942, at the start of his no-holds-barred bombing campaign, Harris chillingly declared:

Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Challenged to justify the huge civilian losses at Dresden, in the context of a war that was clearly only weeks away from being won, Harris responded:

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

It isn’t difficult to understand why Harris had to wait so long for his statue. But, those who turned their backs on him were the worst kind of hypocrites. In the context of an increasingly brutal global conflict, Harris distinguished himself by refusing to cloak the brutality of war in fine phraseology, or weasel words. The strategy of “carpet bombing” German cities was approved by Britain’s war cabinet because it worked. Home Office researchers had discovered that people coped better with losing their loved ones than they did with losing their homes.

People who say that bombing civilians doesn’t work are, quite simply, wrong.

Nor is it the case that New Zealanders can stand aloof from Harris’s cold-blooded destruction of human life. Six thousand Kiwis flew in those bombers, ofttimes navigating by the terrible red glow in the skies ahead of their aircraft. Nearly 2,000 of them never returned to base.

I rehearse these facts as the Israeli Air Force rains death and destruction upon the defenceless cities of Gaza. The world stands aghast at the horrific scenes filling the screens of its devices. “These are civilians!”, it cries, “Innocent women and children!” From the streets of the Middle East rises the grim accusation: “Israel is guilty of war crimes!”

But if the Israelis are guilty of war crimes, then so were my father’s generation – and my grandfather’s. It was “our side” that blockaded Germany for the duration of World War I. Like the other British Dominions, New Zealand was quite willing to have the Royal Navy starve Germany to death. It was war. You do what it takes to win.

“Bomber” Harris spoke the brutal language of military necessity. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Germany without killing Germans, he point-blank refused to indulge in moral humbug.

Sorting out the guilty from the innocent in the crimson fog of war is beyond the competence of mortal men.

Sir Arthur Harris (he was knighted in 1953) died in 1984, and his statue was unveiled by the Queen Mum in 1992. She was taken aback to hear the jeers and boos of the crowd.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 October 2023.