Point of Order: Joanna Kidman

Finding out about Joanna Kidman – the tweets are private but her invective has not been removed from public view

A professor by name of Joanna Kidman seems to have caused a stir in political circles this week.

So what do we learn about her, if we put her name into the Google search system?

The first items listed, in response to our inquiry, were news stories which suggest she has been writing unkindly about the Luxon government.

In a statement reported by RNZ, for example, a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet spokesperson said Professor Kidman was employed by Victoria University and was not a public servant.

But the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet had conveyed to the university its concerns that Kidman’s comments may bring into disrepute the publicly funded but independent anti-extremism centre which she heads.

Below the news headlines we found …

Joanna Kidman Teaching Activities | Te Herenga Waka

Victoria University of Wellington

https://people.wgtn.ac.nz › Joanna.Kidman › teaching

View the Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington profile of Joanna Kidman. Including their publications, research, engagements and teaching …

Great. That should tell us what we want to know about the professor’s credentials for saying what she said about the government….

But no. We were advised:

Page not found

Sorry, the page you are looking for is not currently visible to public searches or no longer exists.

Please either try again later or start a new search by clicking the above logo.

Oh – and while checking our links in preparing this article around 4.50pm, we found the steer to that page was no longer where we had found it near the top of the list of “Joanna Kidman” responses earlier in the day.

The Bridget Williams Books link to Joanna Kidman was more productive:

Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) is Professor of Māori education at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity, Māori youth and settler-colonial nationhood. She has worked extensively in Māori communities impacted by the New Zealand Wars and looked into how these conflicts have shaped tribal and national memory, identity and history

Wikipedia reminded us that in early June 2022, Kidman and fellow sociologist Professor Paul Spoonley had been named as the directors of the new Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.

The aforementioned RNZ item – headlined Victoria University professor spoken to about anti-government social media post – steered us to the news that …

Victoria University is speaking to one of its professors about the language they used in an anti-government social media post.

This would have been something she has written, we supposed.

Whatever it might be, it was bound to show that Joanna Kidman has a flair for stylish writing which (we imagined) would have been inherited from her mum, the celebrated New Zealand writer Fiona Kidman.

Joanna’s rise to a professorship, just as surely, would have been enabled by a talent for erudite discussion.

And then we remembered.

She had engaged both her writing skills and her erudition when she sided with the critics of seven University of Auckland professors who had written a letter to The Listener challenging the notion that matauranga Maori should be accorded the status of science, as proposed by an NCEA working group preparing a new school curriculum.

Kidman twittered:

Oh settlers! Opened the Letters page of the Listener to find a bunch of University of Auckland professors, incl Liz Rata, denying that Mātauranga Māori is science. Where do these shuffling zombies come from? Is there something in the water?

When world-famous British scientist Richard Dawkins pitched into the debate on the side of the defenders of science, she twittered:

Richard Dawkins, OWG in excelsis, argues, with numerous factual errors about indigenous knowledge, that @royalsocietynz shouldn’t follow up on complaints made about its fellows In other, related, news, OWG barks at moon.

Could Kidman sustain the quality of this robust prose?

It turns out she could.

This week she is reported – as “the head of a publicly funded anti-extremism centre” – to have said the Government might be a “death cult” that “hates children”.

According to the Herald, she “lashed out at the Government on Tuesday night”in response to its announcement that the first military boot camp for young offenders would be running by mid-2024.

Kidman wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that she could “only assume that this Government hates children, most of whom will be poor and brown”.

“There is so much evidence that military-style youth boot camps don’t work and are expensive,” she wrote.

Alas, the professor’s writing henceforth will be savoured by a limited audience because:

Kidman has since made her X account private.

Oh – and if Kidman is in the running for an award for trenchant academic writing, it seems she has a strong rival:

The Herald went on:

It is the second social media spat involving Seymour after earlier this week, after he and Health Coalition Aotearoa co-chair Professor Lisa Te Morenga exchanged personal barbs over the Government’s free school lunches programme. Te Morenga said she viewed the coalition as a “fascist white supremacist Government”, while Seymour said she had “anger management problems”.

Seymour obviously has overcome his anger management problems – at least for now – and told the Herald:

“If people want to have arguments about the merits of the school lunch programme or the Government’s boot camps for prisoners, there’s lots of arguments they can make if they’d like to without getting into these kinds of personal attacks. Once you start doing that you’re actually promoting division and extremism.”

He also said he believed in freedom of speech and the Government “should never lock someone up for their opinion”, although if someone entered a private contract, they took on obligations in terms of behaviour.

He said people who took government funding were allowed to criticise the Government.

“If she wants to get into a rational debate about what to do with youth offenders, for example, we are very happy to have that debate. That level of name-calling is not actually advancing the debate. It is actually advancing a more divided society which is, ironically, the opposite of what she’s supposed to be about.”

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet funds Kidman’s centre through a charitable trust, which operates independently. The centre is not a government agency and funding for it for the year ending June 2024 was $1.325 million.

Some of Kidman’s critics uncharitably reckon that’s $1.325 million of savings the government could make.

That would make its existence somewhat brief

A press statement from Jacinda Ardern in June 2022 announced the launch of the Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, He Whenua Taurikura.

Kidman was named as one of the centre’s two directors.

Martyn Bradbury raised questions about her suitability for the job in an article on his blog headed Ummmm, isn’t Professor Joanne Kidman the worst person to appoint to an extremism taskforce?

He wasn’t alone.

But it’s the story of who wasn’t appointed that is fascinating.

This story was reported by the New Zealand Herald under the heading PM’s terrorism, extremism expert Prof Richard Jackson hired then dropped.

Point of Order picked up on that and reported it HERE.

This week we can judge for ourselves the merits of favouring Kidman for a project blessed by Jacinda Ardern to quash hatred and divisiveness.

Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton