NZCPR Newsletter: A Counter-Revolution

The National Party has performed poorly in opinion polls for the past two years. The question has been whether this would improve once their major policy platform of economic recovery became more apparent, or whether their slump is indicative of a wider malaise affecting conservative parties globally.

The latest TVNZ Verian poll appears to have answered that question. From 38.08 percent support on election night in October 2023, National dropped to a low of 29.6 percent, before rebounding to 36 percent. With ACT on 10 percent and New Zealand First on 9, the Coalition’s combined support of 55 percent, would comfortably win an election if it was held tomorrow.

Meanwhile Labour’s revival also continues with the party climbing to 35 percent, while the Greens fell to 7, and, the Maori Party, in the midst of self-inflicted chaos, dropped to 1.

While polls are little more than a snapshot of public sentiment at a particular moment in time, the Maori Party’s result is a stark reminder that nothing corrodes public trust in a political party faster than internal conflict and leadership rows.

This is a lesson National cannot afford to ignore – especially given the leadership debate that has dogged the Party in recent months. Whether the unrest reflects genuine supporter concerns or has been orchestrated by opponents to destabilise the Party and undermine public confidence, it will inevitably have had a detrimental effect on their poll ratings.

Furthermore, while Labour alliances tend to be firmly anchored in socialist ideology and stabilised by union discipline, conservative movements, as broad coalitions of wide-ranging interests from business and farming, to religious and traditional family values, are inherently more unstable.

In fact, it’s not hard to find countries where they have fractured almost beyond repair. Defeated in elections by left wing governments, conservative parties in Australia, Canada, and the UK, have found it virtually impossible to build sufficient support to retake their Treasury benches.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator is Liz Truss, the former British Conservative Party Prime Minister, who replaced Boris Johnson and was replaced by Rishi Sunak, explained what she believes is going on in a recent speech in Australia and called for a counter-revolution:

“I think we have to ask why are our countries, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and until recently the United States, in such a dire mess? And the answer is that the left has been working on a 50-year campaign pushing neo-Marxist ideology: wokeism, transgenderism, Islamism, mass migration, net zero zealotry, Keynesian economics… They started off by capturing our universities. They moved to capturing our bureaucracies. They then started capturing our corporations and they captured our media too.

“They have been utterly relentless in their pursuit of ideological dominance. They fundamentally want to undermine Western civilization. They want to undermine our way of life. They want to undermine the things we believe in: Christian values, free speech, the nation state.

“And they have been very effective in the way they have captured our organisations. I saw this myself as a Minister in the British government for 10 years. I saw that power that used to sit in the hands of Ministers had been handed to the Judiciary. It had been handed to over to our unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. It’s what the Americans call the ‘deep state’. It’s what we in Britain call ‘the Blob’.

“They haven’t just stopped at capturing our institutions. They have used every tactic in the book to try and undermine not just conservative values but the values of Western civilization itself.

“We are not up against rational people who want to have a debate. We are not up against people who are prepared to compromise. We are up against ideologues who are literally prepared to do anything to implement their distorted vision of the world.

“And that is how we have to approach it – as Charlie Kirk said: ‘The left have never played by our rules. Only we play by our rules. Our rules are what keeps our side from winning.’

“And the reason that we have been losing on the right – and we haven’t just been losing for 10 years, we’ve been losing for decades – is that we are playing by our rules and the left has completely ignored them. And this is why we need a major change in tactics.

“The public have had enough. They are fed up of not being told the truth by politicians and having a political class running our country that is not taking control and delivering what they want to see happening.

“These institutions cannot be viewed as neutral anymore. We have to take them on and achieve a genuine counterrevolution to reverse the Marxism that has become part of what they are.

“There are too many people on the nominally conservative or liberal side who have accepted things like transgender ideology, Keynesianism, extreme environmentalist ideology… If we are to succeed, we need to part company with those people.

“The second thing we need to do is we need to change the way our countries are governed. We are not in the 1980’s or 1990’s anymore where we had impartial civil servants. Civil servants have been radicalised. Their organisations have been radicalised. They are not the same anymore. And we either need to make sure that all of those people are accountable to the leaders who have been elected or they are abolished. Those are the only two choices.

“We need to defund the BBC… and make sure we build an independent media that is entirely free of the Blob.

“But what we need is that revolutionary spirit.  So let’s resolve today to fight… It’s a battle to reverse the takeover by the leftists of our institutions, of our media. And it will be tough. It will be hard. But we need to fight.”

As Liz Truss has pointed out the conservative movement in the US is an exception – but so too is President Donald Trump. Although previously holding office, he is still regarded as an outsider who is fighting the establishment. As such he vows to do the things that voters want but that most conservatives shy away from – such as “slashing the bureaucracy”, “draining the swamp”, “and “dismantling the deep state”.

Looking at New Zealand, these sorts of reforms are desperately needed here.

The Coalition was elected to undo the damage caused by six years of Labour. It’s what we expected them to do. And while they claim to be addressing the issues – and to be fair, repairing a severely broken country is not a minor fix – there is widespread frustration that they continue to fall short.

In particular, they are failing to rein State activism – of the sort Liz Truss described.

The reality the Coalition faces is that when Jacinda Ardern was in office, she embedded political loyalists deep within the machinery of government. Her focus on identity politics – that cultural-Marxist framework that divides people by race, gender, and sexuality – led to a rapid expansion of radicalised public servants. Many of the 20,000 additional staff hired over that period were committed activists.

Axing this army of radicals – and the programmes they run – would not only save taxpayers more than $1.5 billion a year in wages alone, but it would significantly curtail the extremism that infects much of the State sector.

A recent Official Information Act response from Health New Zealand is indicative of the problem. Asked to identify woke leadership job titles of the sort that flourished under Labour – which included terms such as “diversity”, “equity”, “inclusion”, “sustainability” and “climate change” – thirteen positions were identified. They included a National Climate Risk and Adaptation Principal Advisor,  a Group Manager Diversity & Inclusion, and a Head of Sustainability. With salaries of up to $286,432, the estimated salary bill for this radicalised group is almost $3.5 million!

With such productivity-destroying jobs no doubt endemic throughout the State sector, these politicised positions will be ensuring the bureaucracy continues to deliver Jacinda Ardern’s agenda!

This again is the problem Liz Truss identified – where State bureaucracies become captured by left wing ideology. And in New Zealand, that’s in spite of all government employees agreeing to a Code of Conduct which demands political neutrality: “We mustmaintain the political neutrality required to enable us to work with current and future governments; carry out the functions of our organisation, unaffected by our personal beliefs; respect the authority of the government of the day.”

Being politically neutral and respecting the authority of the government of the day should mean that fundamental Coalition goalslike public services being prioritised “on the basis of need, not race”, that “co-governance” should be removed from public services, and that all work on “He Puapua” must stop, should be top priorities and well advanced.

Instead, State opposition to Coalition directives is commonplace.

The stouch that’s erupted following the decision to release school boards from their statutory requirement to “give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi” is a case in point.

Instead of welcoming the opportunity to focus their efforts on raising student achievement, the boards of more than 1,000 schools have supported a protest letter orchestrated by tribal activists opposed to the Coalition’s curtailing of their power base.

As Crown entities, however, school boards are part of New Zealand’s public sector and must abide by the requirement for political impartiality: “We act in a politically impartial manner. Irrespective of our political interests, we conduct ourselves in a way that enables us to act effectively under current and future governments. We do not make political statements or engage in political activity in relation to the functions of the Crown entity.”

Whether the Coalition will point out to that supporting the protest action of radical separatists is in breach of their Statutory responsibilities, remains to be seen.

Another glaring example is that in spite of the government’s promise to end race-based initiatives and “stop all work on He Puapua” – Labour’s radical plan to replace democracy with tribal rule by 2040 – they are pressing ahead with one of its key initiatives. He Puapua declared that “Maori data sovereignty recognises that data about Maori must be subject to Maori governance and control…” and it demanded “Maori‑led data governance structures”.

As a result, Statistics New Zealand is now carving out Maori data as a special category, building mechanisms that will eventually pass control of official statistics to tribal interests.

This can be seen only too clearly in an initiative just launched by Stats NZ: “Stats NZ invites expressions of interest from iwi, Maori organisations, Maori data practitioners, and individuals with expertise in te ao Maori, Maori data governance, or kaupapa Maori research, to join the Crown-Maori Statistical Design Forum.”

It was a so-called co-governance partnership between Stats NZ and iwi leaders established under Jacinda Ardern’s regime that led to private tribal interests being given the power to reclassify census data resulting in a significant  increase in the number of so-called Maori in New Zealand.

Increasing the numbers categorised as Maori doesn’t just expand social services contracting opportunities for iwi leaders, but it potentially leads to an increase in the number of Maori seats in Parliament. This is no doubt why the radicals want to control of the data!

With the Coalition Government’s commitment to stop all race-based and He Puapua initiatives, shouldn’t this data project be axed – and shouldn’t the Minister, Shane Reti, be held to account?

In the UK, the Reform Party has emerged with revolutionary zeal, promising to take the country back – by slashing the bureaucracy and dismantling the deep state. As a result, they are rocketing ahead in the polls, leaving the establishment parties for dead.

Could this happen in New Zealand? Is this what is needed to rid ourselves of the long shadow that the now exiled Jacinda Ardern and her radical Labour Government cast over our country?

Or will the Coalition step up?

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Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. The NZCPR website is HERE. We also run this Breaking Views Blog and our NZCPR Facebook Group HERE.