Penn Raine: Fair suck of the sav

At his leaving party in London a NZ friend was told by his co-workers that they thought ‘Kiwi’ stood for Keen, Interested, Without Intelligence. He said he thought it was a joke. Probably. When working there I too was told something similar, that Brits in general thought that we’re nice, co-operative but just a bit thick.

This view of us is not one that stereotypically we hold of ourselves. I used to have students write with dismal regularity that we’re globally renown for being the clean and green country belonging to God. That we are celebrated for being first in giving women the vote (the century before last I pointed out) and Everest. Then there’s the AB’s, occasionally, with the more widely read having mentioned Ernest Rutherford.

Hurrah then, for Ardern’s government, Covid and the huge contemporary up-tick for our national self-esteem! Once again world leading, at the front of the queue for vaccines and almost free of infections (don’t mention the MIQ lottery) and under the care of the world’s kindest leader and beneficiaries of all that openness and transparency.

Mystifyingly, somewhere near the end of 2021 the sugar-rush from all that global admiration and national hubris began to subside and the lockdowns’ spirit-of-the-Blitz turned to grumpiness. How could this be, wondered pollies like Michael Wood, who early in the game had thought to silence the hiss of dissatisfaction from north of the Bombays with the bauble of a cycle bridge. Surely the merry game of colour-coded restrictions and surprise lockdowns wasn’t wearing thin! Was it the spooky creep of secret legislation to disenfranchise the majority? Or perhaps the edict of ‘no jab, no job’ and the kindly PM’s publicly made statement that, yes, she was endorsing a two-tier society?

If asked by people from Somewhere Else what sums up our national character I would agree partially with those witty Londoners: keen and nice, yes, often, and tolerant too, until we feel that someone’s taking the mickey. That our tolerance had run out was evident in February 2022. From across our country people who had had enough gathered at our Parliament, the home of our democracy to protest, as was their right, about vaccine mandates, about losing their jobs and, if truth be told, about the suppurating sore of sly Labour policies.

Who of us would have predicted that this government so cacophonously a supporter of diversity and inclusion would have so harshly branded this demonstrably diverse group as misfits, terrorists, as a ‘river of filth’? Recent government funded media such as Penfold’s propagandist Fire and fury, and Ferguson’s podcast Undercurrent are at pains to characterise our citizens as stupefied followers of imported social media tropes. The claim goes something along these lines: the weight behind the Parliament protest came from a mere six social media accounts and that those players were not home grown but probably influenced by a US Trump-ist rabble or worse.

Never mind that Hannah’s Auckland Uni-based Disinformation Project has infiltrated your social media group and that you, I, and anyone reading this is already on a re-education list compiled by ninth-floor wonks, the worst part of this narrative is that we are incapable of thinking for ourselves.  The elusive but persistent phantom of Labour’s beefed-up ‘hate speech’ laws which, according to officials, could make the expression of a political opinion shared around the dinner table a criminal offence has the potential to turn our society into the most grimly imagined dystopia. In this new world any comment made to another if not explicitly complimentary could be construed as hurtful, (of course even an explicit compliment can in the current grievance-obsessed climate be an insult), and the opportunity for us all to have permanently wounded feelings is limitless - unless we don’t belong to ‘a protected group’.

 With the twin intentions of preventing fragile sensitivities from feeling unloved and shielding all of us from unsuitable conclusions about the political establishment, the proposed laws hope that we will become the ‘nice, co-operative’ citizens that some nations think we already are. Despite this Pollyanna-thinking, polls on the proposed laws suggest that New Zealanders believe that they might turn us into a nation of unintelligent thickos who are not allowed to and can’t think for themselves. State funded individuals and groups churning out propaganda should take a hard look at how the populace has reacted to the rancorous spin of the last five years about what is true and what is manipulation. They should wonder whether we will willingly continue to swallow lies and distortions such as Hipkins’ assertion last week that the vaccine was never compulsory. Labour’s slide into the electoral abyss should suggest that the majority have remembered the saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’. They should figure out that we want to be free to decide ourselves what we believe which may involve scrutiny of the approved narrative. Please stop conflating rabid violent outbursts and ‘rape-adjacent’ posts that surveillance is uncovering as representative of all of us.

Arguably, no protest arises in a vacuum. Mao remembered Marx and Marx glanced back at the French revolution and any objectors anywhere are entitled to look at how others have pushed back against oppressive politics. After the protest Māori activists said that Māori who were present had been persuaded there against their better judgment by unscrupulous white people. Oh please! Don’t insult your own people this way, in fact, don’t insult any of us as not able to think for ourselves. And while it’s probably true that some protesters were bad, and some mad, most were justifiably pissed off.  Just acknowledge that ordinary people have reached the end of their tether and are not the dupes of international right-wing extremists on social media!

And if you’ve been wondering when journos who didn’t stand on Parliament’s balcony like cowed royals would take a clear-eyed look at what kind of people we really are, watch Gaylene Barnes’s feature doco River of freedom and it’ll be clear that we’re just looking for a fair suck of the sav, Trevor.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.