Sage Decisions Unwisely Over-Ruled.

Overruled: The joint decision of Finance Minister, Grant Robertson (Labour) and his Associate Minister, David Parker (Labour) arguably the two most powerful ministers in Jacinda Ardern’s government, to grant OceanaGold the consents which Land Information Minister, Eugenie Sage (Greens) had earlier denied them, offers bitter proof of how hard fighting Climate Change is going to be.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, several hundred young Wellingtonians laid siege to the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) on Stout Street in the heart of the capital. Their Extinction Rebellion protest was the first in a noisy series of similar demonstrations set to take place across the world. Had they known that two senior Labour ministers would, the very next day, over-rule the anti-mining decision of the Greens Land Information Minister, Eugenie Sage, their protest might not have been so good humoured.

The joint decision of Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, and his Associate Minister, David Parker (arguably the two most powerful ministers in Jacinda Ardern’s government) to grant OceanaGold the consents which Sage had earlier denied them, offers bitter proof of how hard fighting Climate Change is going to be.

In refusing the company its consents, Sage had argued that the mine’s proposed expansion was “inherently unsustainable, will increase emissions, and will provide only moderate employment benefits relative to winding down the operation and remediating the site”.

If Climate Change is to be fought successfully, judgements such as Sage’s will have to be issued by the thousand. Businesses large and small, in the cities as well as in the countryside, will have to be told, bluntly, that what they are proposing has become unacceptable. That the days of companies making profits, by passing on the environmental costs of those profits to future generations of taxpayers, are over. That the facts of economic life have changed.

A progressive government that was serious about its promise to make Climate Change the nuclear-free moment of its generation, would have stood behind Sage’s decision. If only to demonstrate that the painful but necessary decisions it would increasingly be required to make could not be undermined, second-guessed and generally got-around by hiring expensive lobbyists to whisper scary stories in senior ministers’ ears. Leading the charge in this respect should be the Finance Minister. No one else can speak to the business community with such authority.

But, what did the Finance Minister and his Associate Minister actually do? How did they express their solidarity? Well, in their media release of Tuesday, 8 October, they expressed it like this:

“In August 2019, Land Information New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office (OIO) received two new applications from OceanaGold to buy the parcels of farm land totalling approximately 180 hectares near its current Waihi mines.

“In respect of the new applications the ministerial decision making roles were transferred to Ministers Robertson and Parker, who have policy responsibilities under the Overseas Investment Act, to ensure a fresh analysis of the application.

“The OIO considered the new applications under the benefit to New Zealand pathway of the Overseas Investment Act and recommended to Ministers the applications be approved.”

Ministers Robertson and Parker duly approved the OIO’s recommendation. OceanaGold’s investment, they said would: “benefit New Zealand because of the retention of about 340 full-time jobs over nine years and exports valued at $2 billion over nine years.”

It is hard to think of a more naked admission by this government that, when confronted with a choice between acting to save our environment and “business as usual”, it will unfailingly choose “business as usual”. Robertson and Parker have stripped away all the star-dusted rhetoric, and thrust forward the unadorned reality for everyone to see. Jobs and export earnings: the very same drivers that have persuaded government-after-government to put off saving the environment until tomorrow, on account of the heavy political costs associated with saving it today, clearly remain as powerful as ever.

Is this what the Greens signed-up for? To see their ministers humiliated? To have their policies ignored and their decisions over-ruled? To have the threat of corporate legal action trump any and every attempt at climate action?

In the light of this decision, the Greens must surely reassess their position vis-à-vis Labour and NZ First, Those among them (yes, we are looking at you James Shaw) who argued that ministerial portfolios would allow the party to do things that shouting from the side-lines could never achieve, stand rebuked by Robertson’s and Parker’s ruthless intervention. They have made it clear that any Green Party ministers who believe themselves free to act independently, according to the evidence, should think again.

And so should Extinction Rebellion, because, clearly, MBIE is the least of their worries.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2019.

Fighting Monsters.

Freedom Of Speech? The Säuberung (cleansing by fire) was the work of the German Student Union which, on 10 May 1933, under the watchful eye of the Nazi Reichminister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, consigned 25,000 books to the flames in a ritual exorcism of “un-German thought”. According to the logic of the authors of the Open Letter protesting the University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor's refusal to censor Action Zealandia, however, the Nazi-inspired students' actions constitute free speech.

A MURDEROUS, ANTISEMITIC terrorist attack, live-streamed in chilling imitation of the Christchurch Massacres, has shocked and dismayed the German nation. Proof, if any was needed, that strict legal prohibitions against the iconography and language of far-right extremism confers no special protection against the deadly designs of its adherents. No country is more assiduous in banning hate speech and Nazi paraphernalia than the German Republic, and yet, the impulse to murder Jews and Muslims has not been thwarted.

Sadly, that is not the lesson which the Censorious Left has been inclined to draw from this latest tragedy. Almost immediately, sophomoric statements appeared on social-media deploying the horror of the attack against the defenders of free speech. The latter were accused of supporting the right of homicidal Nazis to debate their views openly in the marketplace of ideas. Perhaps intuiting that this accusation was unlikely to be taken seriously, the Censorious Left’s opted to advance the (marginally) more moderate suggestion that while the philosophies of the Right may not in-and-of-themselves be objectionable, exposing vulnerable individuals to their malign influence under the rubric of free speech could only end with homicidal Nazis shooting up synagogues and mosques.

But, this line of argument leaves the Left as exposed to censorship as the Right. If granting right-wingers a platform is a bad idea because giving free rein to right-wing ideas will only end in murder, massacre and genocide, then granting platforms to the Left must also be forbidden. If the logical terminus of right-wing thought is Auschwitz, then the logical terminus of left-wing thought must be the Gulag. For every Babi Yar advanced by the anti-Nazis, the anti-Communists can produce a Katyn Forest. Clearly, the only sensible solution, if society is to be kept safe from all forms of ideological extremism, is to stop talking about politics altogether!

Except, of course, the Censorious Left has no intention of allowing itself to be silenced. That much was made clear by the 1,300 academic staff and students of the University of Auckland who signed the Open Letter condemning their own Vice-Chancellor’s defence of free speech on campus. As the anonymous author/s of the letter put it:

“If these posters [pasted-up by the ‘radical nationalist’ group calling itself Action Zealandia] constitute ‘free speech’, the same can be said of the actions of individuals who remove those that they encounter.”

Clearly, the person/s who wrote those words is no historian. No one having the slightest acquaintance with modern history would have exposed themselves so completely to the obvious rejoinder that their definition of free speech, if accepted, must render its extinction inevitable. Was it not the very Nazis the Censorious Left purports to condemn who bequeathed the world what is surely the most compelling depiction of intolerance, intellectual aggression and censorship ever recorded on film?

The Säuberung (cleansing by fire) was the work of the German Student Union which on 10 May 1933, under the watchful eye of the Reichminister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, consigned 25,000 books to the flames in a ritual exorcism of “un-German thought”. Into the bonfire illuminating the square in front of the Berlin Opera House, hundreds of radical nationalist students hurled the works of Jewish, Socialist and Communist authors. As the burning books cast their grotesque shadows over the crowd, horrified foreign journalists recalled the words of the nineteenth century German poet, Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will too in the end burn people.”

Not that the Censorious Left possesses the slightest grounds for objecting to this infamous historical spectacle. After all, those German students were simply behaving in the way recommended by the author/s of the Open Letter to Vice-Chancellor McCutcheon 86 years later. What else was the Säuberung but the ritual obliteration of material considered by the staff and students of Germany’s universities to be offensive and harmful to the wellbeing of the German volk? In confronting this “hate speech”, they were guilty of nothing more than exercising – exuberantly and dramatically – their right of free speech!

Perhaps if the Censorious Left knew a little bit more about the tactics of the historical movement they so loudly condemn they would be less inclined to imitate it. Those so outraged by the presence in Auckland of right-wing provocateurs Cheryl Southern and Stefan Molyneux that they were willing to frighten the owners of prospective venues for the duo’s public lectures into refusing them access, were clearly ignorant of the fate of the classic anti-war film, All Quiet on the Western Front.

At the film’s Berlin premiere in December 1930, Nazi stormtroopers harangued and jostled the audience as they entered the cinema, released stink-bombs in the auditorium and called-in real bomb threats. Goebbels pledged to do the same in cinemas all over Germany if the film – which the Nazis declared anti-German and offensive to all Great War veterans – was not withdrawn immediately. Terrified cinema-owners, fearful that people and property would be harmed, mostly succumbed to the “thug’s veto”. All Quiet on the Western Front was not scheduled again for general release in Germany until after World War II.

This is how Nazis exercise their freedom of speech.

Perhaps the Censorious Left should heed the advice given by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 11 October 2019.

Let’s Hear It For Up-Close-And-Personal, Hard-Copy Democracy!

The Best Way: Missing from the on-line voting debate is any reference to the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The system that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

WHY ARE RETURNING OFFICERS coming out so strongly for on-line voting? Of all the people in the world willing to advocate for a system of voting so absurdly vulnerable to interference and corruption, returning officers should be the very last. And yet, all week, as fears of a record low voter turnout in this latest round of local government elections have grown, it is returning officers who are among the keenest to give on-line voting a try.

The curious fact about this clamour for on-line voting is that its proponents are offering it as a cure for declining voter participation. Young people, notorious for their poor record for joining-in the democratic process, are seen as the group most likely to benefit from this supposed panacea. Missing from the debate, however, is the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The one that involves citizens making their way to a polling station, marking their ballot-papers privately in a polling-booth, and then depositing them personally in a sealed ballot-box.

This was, after all, the way New Zealanders used to vote in local body elections. Why was it abandoned? Ironically, because voter turn-out was falling, and it was thought that allowing people to fill out their ballot papers at home, over a fortnight, and then pop them in the post, would make the whole process easier, less stressful and more efficient. Predictably, there was a slight up-tick in electoral participation, followed by another slow decline in voter numbers.

Interestingly, the obvious weaknesses in postal voting were never taken particularly seriously by its proponents. That it essentially did away with the idea that casting a vote was something every citizen had a right to do, alone, in a polling-booth, where they could be safe from the influence of husbands, wives, other family members, and (thinking once again of younger voters) flatmates, was not considered a serious enough defect to rule postal voting out of contention.

The thought that a domineering husband and/or authoritarian mother might commandeer their family’s voting papers and cast them all themselves never appears to have crossed the reformers’ minds. Nor, apparently, the possibility that a flat full of apathetic youngsters might simply invite the one member of the household interested in politics to cast their votes for them.

Exactly the same indifference to the possibility that an election’s final outcome may not be an accurate reflection of the electorate’s will is noticeable in the campaigners for on-line voting.

Similar indifference has been shown by those in charge of the 2019 local government elections to the steadily declining efficacy of the New Zealand Post Office. When postal voting was introduced in 1992, the Internet was largely restricted to boffins and geeks. The mail was delivered on every day of the week except Sunday, and a posted letter could travel from one end of the country to the other more-or-less overnight. Over the course of the last 27 years, however, the time taken for a letter to reach its addressee has increased from one or two days to approximately a week. Likewise, the time taken for ballot papers to be delivered and returned. It will be interesting to discover how many 2019 ballot papers, posted no later than 5 days out from the vote-count (as advised) nevertheless arrive after mid-day on Saturday, 12 October. Since NZ Post no longer date stamps letters, it will be impossible to sort out which ballot papers should be counted and which disallowed. There is a real possibility that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of citizens will end up being disenfranchised by New Zealand’s sclerotic postal service.

The nation’s returning officers will, of course, object that anyone who forgets to post their ballot papers can always deposit them by hand in one of the ballot boxes situated in the local library and at the town hall. In other words, to overcome the growing challenges associated with running an efficient postal voting system, our returning officers have set up what are effectively polling-booths to cater for the stragglers.

Honestly, it’s enough to make you wonder why we just don’t admit that postal-voting, never a particularly good idea, has failed, and return to the original – and by far the most secure – method of discovering the electorate’s will. It could hardly be worse than the present system, and it certainly beats the heck out of sending your vote into the void of cyberspace, where neither you – nor the returning officers of the nation – have the slightest notion of where it has been sent, what happened to it there, and on whose behalf, before it ends up as a configuration of pixels blinking mindlessly on some private-sector contractor’s computer screen.

Stealing a hard-copy election is surprisingly difficult and very hard to hide. Stealing an on-line election, however, is a much easier proposition. If it’s done properly, no one but the people who paid for the hack will ever know.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 October 2019.

Taking Control Of The Nation's Story.

Fatal Contact: With the arrival of Captain James Cook on this day in October 1769, the islands of what would become New Zealand ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the world’s history.

THE MAORI NATIONALIST assault upon the historical meaning and reputation of Captain James Cook is entirely understandable. With his arrival in October 1769 these islands ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the world’s history. It is this sudden and irreversible transformation that presents such a formidable obstacle to the Maori nationalist cause. Its proselytisers know that once Cook’s map of New Zealand was added to the global stock of human knowledge, the world of the Maori was doomed.  Small wonder that the outspoken Maori nationalist, Dr Arama Rata, recently described Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, as “a death ship”, and characterised his arrival as an “invasion”.

Maori nationalism is not, however, about mourning the loss of the pre-European world that Cook’s arrival made inevitable. It’s partisans are not so reactionary as to suppose that the restoration of the status quo ante is either possible or desirable. No matter how loudly they might lament the loss of life that accompanied the first encounters between Maori and Pakeha, they are well aware that no Maori would thank them for magically uplifting their children from twenty-first century New Zealand and dropping them into eighteenth century Aotearoa. No, what Maori nationalism seeks is a reversal of political fortunes: the creation of an Aotearoa-New Zealand in which Pakeha will no longer call the shots.

A radical revision of New Zealand and, indeed, of global history, is crucial to achieving this political reversal. The cultural and scientific achievements of the European peoples, especially their dramatic expansion into, and eventual subjugation of, practically every other significant land mass on the planet, must be re-cast as an horrific tale of murder, rape and theft - undertaken by that global human scourge which Dr Rata calls “white people”. Only when the general perception of European civilisation has become one of technological prowess unmitigated by compassion or restraint, and the colonisation process is presented as uniquely oppressive and destructive of land and people, will the nationalist cause enter its next and most important phase – that of radical constitutional transformation.

When it comes to effecting that transformation, a surprising amount of faith has been vested by Maori nationalists in demographic change. Surprising, because in their hopes of overtaking the Pakeha population at some point in the reasonably near future, the nationalists are showing a confusing degree of confidence that the rapacious colonisers will simply stand back and allow the balance of democratic power to shift irrevocably in favour of the tangata whenua. That this is most unlikely to happen is demonstrated by the fact that, for the last 30 years, the “White Settler Government” has presided over an immigration regime which saw the “Asian” population rise from fewer than 5 percent of the population to 15 percent – a figure rivalling that of Maori New Zealanders.

Was it purely a matter of chance that this rapid reshaping of New Zealand’s demographic structure coincided with the flowering of the “Maori Renaissance”? Or, is it evidence that the Maori population will never be permitted to rise to a level where the dominance of European political and economic models is threatened? Have Maori nationalists not noted the change in the official terminology used to describe New Zealand society: from “bicultural” to “multicultural”? The determination of the New Zealand state to integrate its domestic economic institutions ever more inextricably in the global economy renders the Maori nationalist project ever more problematic.

From the nationalists’ perspective, the only hopeful aspect to the present situation is the enormously high level of historical ignorance in the New Zealand population – especially in the young. Forty years of failure to present a coherent historical narrative to successive generations of students has left young New Zealanders prey to the anachronistic blame-gaming of Maori nationalists. Descriptions of Cook as a “colonialist” and, even more risibly, a “white supremacist”, have been swallowed whole by those Pakeha disposed to range themselves against the negative effects of racism and colonisation on contemporary Maori. If Maori nationalist historians can seize control of the new, soon-to-be-compulsory, history curriculum, then the necessary ideological preparations can be made for a radical constitutional transformation. Only thus can the historic reversal of Maori fortunes, which began on the day the Endeavour arrived off the New Zealand coast 250 years ago, be overturned.

But only if the “White Settler State” is a great deal less determined to maintain its power and privilege than the Maori nationalists have, so far, been willing to admit.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 October 2019.

An Open Letter From Closed Minds.

Ivory Folly? The University of Auckland’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, upheld the right of the radical nationalist group, Action Zealandia, to exercise their freedom of speech – no matter how distasteful that speech might be. A wiser community of students and scholars would have nodded their agreement and moved on. But, no: the position taken by the Vice-Chancellor was immediately challenged by his own staff. Into the valley of censorship and suppression rode the four-hundred!

FEW SPECTACLES are more tragic than those in which a community destroys its core values in the misguided belief that it is upholding them. The 400+ academics who put their names to an open letter condemning racism and white supremacy on the Auckland campus undoubtedly did so with the best of intentions, but in signing the document they have either deliberately, or unwittingly, endorsed a document of profound illiberality. They have placed their reputations at the disposal of extremists whose exhortations will only exacerbate the intolerance they purport to condemn.

The Open Letter begins by invoking the idea of the university as a community of scholars and students: a place “dedicated to the creation, preservation and sharing of knowledge”. This fine beginning is marred almost immediately by the jarring claim that the university is also a place where: “We build our collective understanding of the world and ourselves, while nurturing innovation and maintaining what is best in our society.”

This transformation of knowledge: from the fruits of work undertaken by individual scholars; to a collectivist endeavour undertaken for the maintenance of “what is best in our society”; is as sinister as it is tendentious. By this definition, the university is a place where individual insights must be subordinated to those which, in the collective judgement of the individual’s peers, constitute “what is best”. Ignored completely in this formulation is the fact that “what is best”, both in and for “our society”, has been a matter of continuous disputation since at least the time of Socrates and Plato.

In case we were in any doubt, the Open Letter declares it to be the opinion of the 400+ signatories that “racism and white supremacy have no place at the University of Auckland”.

No place? Not even in the disciplines of Anthropology, History, Philosophy and Sociology? Is it truly the case that the ideas and behaviours constitutive of so many of the characters and cultures of the University of Auckland’s students (and staff) are unworthy of academic scrutiny? Is the ideology of white supremacy, potentially so dangerous when driven underground, not to be interrogated and analysed? Is the near ubiquity of racism in everyday human behaviour not something to be investigated and discussed?

Apparently not.

The Open Letter makes it clear that its authors have already investigated the website of those responsible for postering and stickering the Auckland campus – the casus belli of this little culture war – and, in their own words: “have no difficulty in identifying this group and such displays as white supremacist in nature”.

It is most unlikely that “Action Zealandia”, the proprietor of the website and publisher of the offending posters and stickers, would disagree. These “radical nationalists” (as they prefer to call themselves) make no attempt to disguise their belief that a reassertion of European male supremacy is “what is best” for New Zealand society.

Many New Zealanders would assume that such an obviously anachronistic political organisation would not present much of a threat to a university full of highly-educated men and women. Surely, a group of confused young men, nostalgic for the lost social and political verities of the nineteenth century, are more to be pitied than feared?

That was certainly the opinion of the University of Auckland’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, who upheld the right of those putting up the posters and stickers to exercise their freedom of speech – no matter how distasteful that speech might be. A wiser community of students and scholars would have nodded their agreement and moved on. But, alas, throughout the twenty-first century academic world such expressions of tolerance (and intellectual maturity) are as rare as they are inflammatory. The position taken by the Vice-Chancellor was not to be allowed to stand unchallenged. Into the valley of censorship and suppression rode the four-hundred!

The world-view of the Open Letter’s authors merits every bit as much scrutiny as that of Action Zealandia’s – if only because both display an equal measure of ideological vehemence. Enveloping the academics’ critique is the Tiriti O Waitangi, serving here as the incongruous stand-in for New Zealand’s yet-to-be-written bi-cultural constitution. As such, it becomes the principal tool for delegitimating not only Action Zealandia and its by-right-of-conquest arguments for the hegemony of European males in Aotearoa, but also un-reconstructed Vice-Chancellors.

According to the Open Letter, these colonialist throwbacks are guilty of taking the “absolutist” position that “freedom of speech extends to the right to speak in ways that are hateful.” Hateful to whom? Ah well, that’s not a question that can be responded to straightforwardly. To answer that question required this little masterpiece of what the unkind might call “woke-speak”. (Or, what the even more unkind readers of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would call “Newspeak”.)

“We also understand that the language of rights is complex and nuanced, recognising that such displays create an environment that brings harm to segments of our community, fraying the cultural tapestry that provides our diverse campus community with vitality and energy.”

Or, to render this unicorns-and-flowers circumlocution into plain speech: “Our students have become so fragile, psychologically and ideologically, that they fall to pieces when confronted by people who do not like them or the cultures they come from.”

Not that the authors of the Open Letter were above fraying a cultural tapestry or two of their own. How about this for a flowery way of calling the Vice-Chancellor a “pale, stale, male”?

“We also note that by virtue of their race, gender, class, country of origin, religious affiliation, sexual or gender identity, many people empowered to judge conduct on university campuses are less likely to be the focus of hate speech, and may be slower to recognise its impact on its intended targets.”

Upon further analysis, however, the humour of this sentence begins to fade. At its heart is the idea that credible political judgement derives purely and simply from one’s identity. Followed to its logical conclusion this variety of “identity politics” accords more weight to the opinions of a 19-year-old undergraduate woman from a non-European cultural background, than it does to a male Professor of Philosophy who has been teaching, writing and publishing peer-reviewed articles and books for the best part of 40 years.

This surrendering of expertise to identity is not the worst of it, however: not when one considers this remarkable sentence:

“However, ‘speech’ has many forms, including gesture and nonviolent protest. If these posters constitute ‘free speech’, the same can be said of the actions of individuals who remove those that they encounter.”

Um, no, actually, it can’t. Action Zealandia, in displaying its posters and stickers, is asserting its right to have its ideas considered, debated, and, if unable to convince its interlocutors, rejected. Bluntly, it is declaring: “We are here – so come and contend with us openly on the battlefield of ideas.” The only honourable answer that “any university worthy of the name” can give to such a challenge is: “Bring it on!”

No such luck. That is not the way the authors of the Open Letter roll. They are not really into contending openly on the battlefield of ideas. The only form of speech they’re willing to defend is the form that rips down posters and tears off stickers. The form that screams “STFU!” at everyone with whom it disagrees.

The anonymous authors of the Open Letter may wax eloquent about an “environment that celebrates free and open enquiry, teaches the lessons of the past, and builds a better future for all”, but their interpretation of “what is best” for society looks suspiciously like the one provided by every other totalitarian ideology: “What is best is what we say is best.” It may be the Academic Left that is ripping down posters today, confident that it possesses the power to silence all those who refuse to toe its line. But, times change.

Those insisting upon ideological conformity and suppressing dissenting opinion today may yet be given cause to look back upon the sentiments contained in this Open Letter and rue the day that the “critic and conscience” of society gave away the chance to expose the Right’s weaknesses in front of those who, 20 years later, are telling them that their left-wing ideas “have no place at the University of Auckland”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 4 October 2019.

Zealandia's Lost Boys.

Appealing To The Past: Action Zealandia, like so many of the organisations springing up on the far-Right, across what they call the “Anglosphere”, is born out of the profound confusion over what a man is supposed to be in the twenty-first century and, more importantly, what he is supposed to do.

THE STATUE OF ZEALANDIA, her upraised hand blessing the good people of Palmerston, North Otago, has always fascinated me. As far as I know she is the only one of her kind in the whole country. Like the UK’s “Britannia” and the USA’s “Columbia”, Zealandia is the personification of New Zealand. Not Aotearoa, of course, Maoridom would require a very different sort of representative: one quite unlikely to be got up in Zealandia’s Ancient Greek chiton for a start! The classical outfit is, however, entirely appropriate for someone intended to represent Pakeha New Zealand’s firm attachment to the iconography of European culture.

Zealandia never really caught on – at least not in the way Britannia and Columbia caught on. The First Labour Government conscripted her to serve in the Dominion’s centennial celebrations. In the Government’s poster of 1939-40 she’s sporting fewer draperies than Palmerston’s Zealandia, but there’s no disputing the fact that it’s the same girl.

About the only place you’re likely to encounter Zealandia these days is standing opposite the Maori warrior on New Zealand’s coat-of-arms. According to legend, the National Party Cabinet Minister, “Gentleman Jack” Marshall, instructed the Department of Internal Affairs to model the 1950s update of New Zealand personified on the American actress, Grace Kelly. (What that says about us, I’m not entirely sure, but it sure says something!)

Something is also being said by the anonymous band of young Pakeha males who have appropriated both the name and the iconography of Zealandia for the purposes of promoting a radical and far from respectable variant of New Zealand nationalism. “Action Zealandia” has been branded “white supremacist” by alarmed and aggrieved university students, after posters and stickers promoting the extreme nationalist “movement” began appearing on walls and notice-boards around the University of Auckland. That alarm turned to outrage when the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, citing the Bill of Rights Act, refused to declare Action Zealandia persona non grata on campus.

Putting to one side the debate over whether Action Zealandia should be accorded the right to freedom of expression, “banning” the organisation from campus would constitute a regrettable lost opportunity to bring some academic scrutiny to bear on the organisation and its allegedly growing membership.

One of the many peculiarities of Action Zealandia is its determination to foster “strong men” who are “physically fit independent thinkers”. Fair enough, the cult of masculine physical fitness has long been a staple of the far-Right’s ideological diet. If, however, women are to be excluded from the membership of Action Zealandia (what would the lady in the chiton say!) its antagonism towards “sexual deviancy” strikes me as a little counter-intuitive. After all, restricting the organisation’s membership to physically fit young men, seems a rather testing strategy for combatting the “vice” of homosexuality and other “negative influences”.

As Hannibal Lecter so astutely observes in The Silence of the Lambs:

“[H]ow do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? … . . No, we begin by coveting what we see every day.”

Action Zealandia, like so many of the organisations springing up on the far-Right, across what they call the “Anglosphere”, is born out of the profound confusion over what a man is supposed to be in the twenty-first century and, more importantly, what he is supposed to do.

In the nineteenth century, when Zealandia was born, it was so much easier. Everywhere a “white” man looked he saw reflected the institutional manifestations of his unchallenged power. In the family; in business; in the arts and sciences; in the church; in the state – men were the masters. Masculinity was the measure of all the things that mattered. To be anything other than a “strong man” was unacceptable. To be weak; to be vulnerable; to question in any way the unchanging verities of Caucasian manhood; made you something less. It made you female; it made you black; it made you queer; it took you out of the running. And if you were a white, heterosexual male – that was just fine.

But it isn’t fine any more. There are many more figures in our reflections now. Masculinity is no longer the measure of all things. Truth is, it never was. Even in the days of empire, the Goddess was always served.

Even when men called her Zealandia.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 October 2019.

Keeping The Hope Of “Delivery” – And “Jacinda” – Alive.

Don't You Dare Let Them Down, Jacinda! Many New Zealanders, especially young New Zealanders, continue to believe that change – real change – is possible. Do we have criticisms about the way in which Jacinda’s government has gone about “transforming” New Zealand? Of course we do. But the very fact that so many of us are critical of the way she and her government have set about their task, surely implies that a more direct route to transformation exists, and that there is yet a chance that a progressive government might find it?

AS THE “YEAR OF DELIVERY” draws to its end, what have Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues delivered us? Well, they have not delivered 100,000 affordable houses. Nor have they brought Climate Change to a shuddering halt. Child poverty has not been ended. Our rivers and streams remain unswimmable. New Zealand’s farmers have yet to assume a measure of responsibility commensurate with their contribution to anthropogenic global warming. The number of ticks on Jacinda’s “To Do List” is far from impressive.

And yet, unlike my friend, Bryce Edwards, I am reluctant to rebuke Jacinda too harshly. Why? because a surprising number of New Zealanders remain hopeful that what Jacinda promised to deliver remains deliverable. Many of us continue to believe that change – real change – is possible. Do we have criticisms about the way in which Jacinda’s government has gone about “transforming” New Zealand? Of course we do. But the very fact that so many of us are critical of the way she and her government have set about their task, surely implies that a more direct route to transformation exists, and that there is yet a chance that a progressive government might find it?

Bryce’s criticism of Jacinda’s performance on the international stage struck me as particularly unfair. Does he seriously believe that anyone would have been impressed by a New Zealand Prime Minister deliberately sabotaging her country’s relationship with the United States by criticising President Trump’s stance on Climate Change directly to his face? New Zealand’s diplomats have spent the best part of 35 years repairing the damage done to the US-NZ relationship by the Lange Government’s refusal to admit the USS Buchanan in 1985. What would she have gained for her country by rebuking publicly the most errant and volatile individual to occupy the White House in the entire history of the United States? When Trump’s inevitable retribution came – swift and devastating – wouldn’t the response of most New Zealanders have been: “What on Earth did you do that for?”

Nevertheless, Bryce insisted (in The Guardian, no less)  that Jacinda, as the political leader dubbed the “Anti-Trump” by a handful of globally-syndicated political commentators, had only two viable alternatives in New York. Not to meet with Trump at all. (Thereby preserving her progressive reputation at home.) Or, if she did meet with him, to “speak truth to power” by upbraiding him publicly for his refusal to come to terms with the reality of Climate Change. (Thereby enhancing her progressive reputation abroad.) That either course of action, if followed, would have proved diplomatically disastrous for New Zealand mattered less to Bryce than Jacinda forfeiting her “Anti-Trump” image. Fortunately, the opinions of political commentators are not the only ones prime ministers are obliged to consider. Equally fortunately, Jacinda was persuaded that foreign policy is much too important to be guided by nick-names.

Certainly, it is my view that Jacinda acquitted herself brilliantly in New York. In her meeting with Trump she did nothing to undermine the efforts of her key coalition ally (and Foreign Minister) Winston Peters to preserve and, if possible, enhance the laboriously assembled rapprochement between Washington and Wellington. Jacinda’s open and engaging personality clearly charmed the notoriously thin-skinned Trump. The process of initiating formal negotiations for a US-NZ Free Trade Agreement was nudged forward – much, it must be presumed, to MFAT’s delight. The President even had questions about the NZ Government’s gun buy-back scheme. Remarkable!

Bryce also comments on how unfortunate it was for Jacinda to follow Greta Thunberg (whom he dubs the “New Anti-Trump”) at the Climate Action Summit. Truthfully, however, it is difficult to see how anyone could have “followed” Greta. Moments like hers are rare in human history. The best any political leader can hope to do is respond to “the voice of a generation” with grace and dignity. Jacinda did not let her country down.

What Bryce did not devote anything like enough attention to in his commentary was the gap between Jacinda’s extraordinarily adroit performances abroad and her less-than-stellar accomplishments at home. In explaining this increasingly significant discrepancy, however, we cannot avoid touching upon the real cause of Jacinda’s domestic failures. This has much less to do with the Prime Minister’s alleged “flakiness” than it does with the fact that when she goes abroad Jacinda is in control. Success or failure is hers to determine: the product of her own wit and intuition. Back home, the situation is very different. Back home the Labour leader is not free to set and execute her own agenda – none of her Cabinet are. The Coalition Government simply cannot be more radical or innovative than its most conservative member – NZ First.

It will require every bit of her diplomatic talent, but Jacinda must, somehow, make it clear to Winston Peters, and his caucus that, by their decision to bring into being a coalition government with the Labour Party (supported by the Greens) NZ First was throwing its weight behind the cause of progressive politics in New Zealand. By the same token, the party’s repeated refusals to allow Labour’s and the Greens’ progressive agenda to be advanced – be it the Capital Gains Tax, Climate Change, Workplace Relations and, only this past weekend, Drug Reform – are making it impossible for the Coalition to advance together into the next General Election as a united force for change.

There are ways to protect NZ First from political oblivion (offering Shane Jones the Northland seat, for example) but if Labour is to do that, then it can only be on the strength of a solemn promise to give progressivism its head; to allow Labour and the Greens to be Labour and the Greens; and, most importantly, to let Jacinda be Jacinda.

If NZ First is to survive. If the progressive agenda of Labour and the Greens is to survive. If the amazing stroke of political good fortune that is “Jacinda” is to survive. Then the hope of “delivering” a more just, a more free, a more equal, and a more restorable New Zealand must not be allowed to die.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 30 September 2019.