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Thursday, April 14, 2022

Karl du Fresne: New Zealand’s cultural upheaval


My wife and I recently spent two weeks on a road trip around New Zealand’s South Island. It’s a spectacularly beautiful corner of the world that was recently exposed to an international audience via Oscar-winning director Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, in which the Central Otago region stands in for the wilds of Montana.

It was a good time to be touring the island because the roads were virtually free of traffic, a state of affairs likely to come to an abrupt end now that New Zealand is reopening its doors to international tourists after two years of economically crippling isolation.

But the trip was also a therapeutic experience because in the South Island – or to give it its more poetic Maori name, Te Wai Pounamu – you’re geographically removed from Wellington and Auckland, the epicentres of the culture wars. For those two weeks it was almost possible to delude ourselves that we were back in the familiar New Zealand we knew.

Alas, it wasn’t so. Tuning in even briefly to the TV and radio news was a reminder that the country is in the grip of a cultural revolution reminiscent in tone, if not in scale, of the one that convulsed Mao’s China in the Sixties and early Seventies.

There are days when I barely recognise New Zealand as the country I was born in and where my family has lived for generations. The transformation since the re-election of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government in 2020 has been breathtaking in both its speed and its reach.

Note that I say re-election. Ardern became Prime Minister in 2017, but for the duration of her government’s first term Labour was in coalition with the socially conservative New Zealand First party, which served as an ideological handbrake.

In the 2020 election, voters rewarded Ardern for what they thought was her competent handling of the Covid-19 crisis by giving Labour the power to govern alone. Suddenly the handbrake was released.

The resulting upheaval isn’t measurable so much by legislative change as by a profound shift in the political and cultural tone of the country. Ardern’s re-election was like an injection of steroids for the leftist cabal that now exerts control over all New Zealand’s institutions of power and influence, including the media and the craven business sector.

This university-educated and predominantly middle-class neo-Marxist cabal is distinct from New Zealand’s dwindling old-school socialist/communist Left, which ironically now finds itself aligned with conservatives on issues such as free speech and identity politics. But the New Left wields far more power than the comrades of the Old Left ever dreamed of.

How is this leftist cabal’s influence manifested? Chiefly through the divisive phenomenon known as wedge politics, and most provocatively through the promotion of 50-50 co-governance between representatives of the European majority and a minority consisting of people with Maori ancestry.

There are now effectively two levels of citizenship in New Zealand, one of which confers entitlements not available to the other. This is evident across a range of public policies that include compulsory Maori representation on local councils, the appointment of Maori activists to positions of power and the splurging of vast sums of money targetted exclusively at people who happen, by what is effectively a genetic accident, to have a proportion of Maori blood.

All this is predicated on the notion that people of part-Maori descent are entitled to redress for the baneful effects of colonisation. These deleterious effects presumably included the introduction of democratic government, the rule of law and the end of cannibalism, slavery and tribal warfare.

‘Decolonisation’ is a fashionable catch-cry among the metropolitan elites and one the government does nothing to discourage. Whether decolonisation includes rejecting such innovations as literacy and Western medicine isn’t clear, since the advocates of decolonisation are careful not to spell out exactly what they mean.

Maori co-governance is already well advanced in health and education with virtually no critical scrutiny from the media. However Ardern’s government is facing stiff resistance over an audacious ideological project known as the Three Waters plan, which would transfer control of the country’s water infrastructure from local councils to opaque new entities in which unelected Maori tribal interests would wield equal power with representatives of the wider community.

That may prove to be Labour’s undoing as opinion polls show a pronounced swing in favour of the centre-right National party and its newish leader, Christopher Luxon. It’s a measure of the country’s anxiety – or should that be desperation? – that voters now seem prepared to put their faith in a politician who has never publicly expressed an original thought and whose vision doesn’t seem to extend beyond lowering taxes.

The Three Waters plan is effectively a test run for a radical re-interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the country’s founding document. Under the proposed new model, people of Maori descent, representing 16.5 per cent of the population, would be given an equal say in government across the board – an idea clearly incompatible with the basic tenets of democratic government. The stark choice facing New Zealand voters at next year’s general election will be between democracy and a different form of government for which we have no name.

But the cultural upheaval goes far beyond that, stoked by state-subsidised media that have abandoned their traditional purpose of seeking to reflect the society they purport to serve, and which instead bombard the public with indoctrination promoting the interests of attention-seeking minority groups.

The result is a society more feverishly divided than at any time in living memory – a phenomenon exemplified by February’s protest camp on the lawns of Parliament, which exposed deep sociological fault lines and ended in a violent showdown with the police.

This sense of polarisation is magnified by an authoritarian intolerance of dissent and by Stalinist-style denunciations of anyone bold or foolish enough to speak out against prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, Ardern floats above it all. She’s a shrewd enough politician to have remained largely aloof from the rancour her government has generated, and who avoids entanglement in any unpleasantness that might detract from her carefully crafted image as an empathetic politician. But she cannot disown responsibility for presiding over a government that is promoting the politics of division and destabilising what was previously an admirably cohesive and harmonious society.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz. This article was first published by the Spectator Australia HERE

7 comments:

Janine said...

I suspect those of us who were proud to be New Zealanders no longer feel the same pride in their country. Those of us who never sensed the difference in their family members or workmates being Maori or Non-Maori feel particularly aggrieved with the path a few greedy, disgruntled activists are taking us, backed up by the crusading public servants who are completely out of touch with their compatriots in the towns and provinces, as shown by their overreaction to the Wellington protesters.

Ardern might try and distance herself from the division she has caused but as the old saying goes " The buck stops here".

Boatman77models said...

Each and every decent citizen needs to speak out in ALL of their social interactions including family as the stakes are now very high. As far as I can see National may be less radical but seemed to have not opposed He Puapua. It may be that Luxon just wants to be all things to all people so as to get into power, before coming up with a plan to put things right and reverse the apartheid.

Doug Longmire said...

I share your concerns totally Karl.
We are watching our Western parliamentary democracy being destroyed. It is being replaced by a new model racist, apartheid system, ruled by 17% of the population that has some [as little as 1/32 in some cases] Maori ancestry.
We are being driven into racial disunity, and division. Inevitably it will become angry, aggressive and possibly violent.
Is this really what Comrade Ardern wants for our once proud nation?
Does she not have the insight to realise that she is actually destroying our country?

gregd said...

Doug you've got it right, maybe Ardern has got a 1/32 that will come out in due course or Clarke he might be the sleeper!

Auntie Podes said...

I have two comments, apart from supporting what has been said by Karl ...

Firstly, as a card-carrying communist, Ardern feels perfectly justified in disrupting what harmony exists in our divided nation as her dogma tells her that there must be revolution in order to install her vile regime. She believes that she needs to destroy our nation before re-building as she sees fit - as a totalitarian state modeled on Soviet Russia and Red China - where freedom simply does not exist.

Secondly, as Karl rightly says, she has bought the press - lock, stock and barrel. They have sold out their principals for a song. The Herald, once a fairly reputable paper, is now an organ for promoting the extreme left and adverts. It has even sold its name and front page to Harvey Norman. Its "reporters" have no balance whatever - they blatantly promote the Ardern with half-truths and leftist propaganda. The prime example of this is Simon Collins. The Harvey Norman Herald web site is every bit as bad. Immediately you "go there" you get an ad and the pseudo-news items are punctuated with more ads. It is also very noticeable that every item of "free news" is heavily slanted to the left while anything even remotely critical of Ardern or the left must be paid for.

Majority said...

"There are days when I barely recognise New Zealand as the country I was born in."

How sad. How true.

Tony said...

When Karl Mentions "It’s a measure of the country’s anxiety – or should that be desperation? – that voters now seem prepared to put their faith in a politician who has never publicly expressed an original thought and whose vision doesn’t seem to extend beyond lowering taxes"

To be fair to Luxon, what did we know about Ardern in the 6-8 weeks before she was plucked from Labour's back benches, having achieved next to net zero on anything (which is ongoing) & who the NZ public nearly not aware even existed to win the 2017 election based solely on a whim by Winston Peters?

Luxon has the gift of time when it comes to not having to drench us in policy. He just has to watch this Government implode.