Geoff Parker: When Graciousness Is Used as Power

The Hastings marae controversy has been wrapped in the language of kindness. “A councillor was told he will ‘always be welcome.’ He was offered an ‘open invitation’ and a chance to ‘start his journey.’” The tone is gentle, patient, even magnanimous.

That is precisely the problem.

This kind of graciousness is not neutral; it reeks of insincerity. It is strategic. It establishes a moral hierarchy in which one side speaks from assumed virtue, and the other is cast as deficient — uninformed, unempathetic, or morally lagging. Once that frame is set, disagreement no longer needs to be answered. It only needs to be corrected.

The move is familiar. Opposition is not treated as a competing civic view, but as a personal shortcoming. Dissent becomes something to be educated away.

This is how the moral high ground is seized without argument.

The councillor in question was not accused of racism or hatred. He was treated as someone who simply “doesn’t understand yet”. The implication is clear: with enough exposure, enough ritual, enough guided experience, he will eventually arrive at the ‘right’ conclusion. Until then, his objections carry less weight.

That is not dialogue. It is moral management.

True graciousness allows disagreement to stand. It does not pre-emptively downgrade dissent by reframing it as ignorance. Nor does it offer welcome that doubles as instruction, or patience that masks expectation of eventual compliance.

The language of inclusion is doing a great deal of work here. To be “inclusive” is now presented as participating on pre-set cultural and moral terms. Those who resist are not excluded outright — that would look harsh — but are instead enveloped in concern, sympathy, and invitations to be improved.

This is a far more effective form of power.

There is also a quiet inversion of democratic norms at work. When citizens or groups have an issue with an elected official, the convention is simple: they request a meeting with the official in their civic role, in their office, under neutral conditions. The official does not travel into the complainant’s cultural or ideological environment to be corrected. Yet here, the expectation runs the other way. The elected representative is invited — graciously — to enter someone else’s domain in order to be instructed. That is not engagement on equal terms; it is authority being subtly re-centred. 

What makes this tactic especially potent is that it is difficult to challenge without appearing churlish. To object is to risk being portrayed as rejecting generosity itself. But generosity that cannot be declined without reputational cost is not generosity at all.

It is obligation with a smile.

In a healthy democracy, moral authority is not inherited or culturally conferred. It is earned through persuasion. Civic equality requires that disagreement be treated as legitimate in itself — not as a temporary error awaiting correction.

When one side positions itself as “endlessly patient, welcoming, and morally secure”, it quietly places the other side on probation. Their views are tolerated, but not respected. Their presence is allowed, but their dissent is provisional.

That is not reciprocity that binds all citizens. It is ideological gatekeeping.

If New Zealand is serious about pluralism, it must resist the temptation to govern by moral theatre. Graciousness should soften disagreement, not settle it. And ‘welcome’, if it is to mean anything at all, must include the right to say ‘no’ — without being morally downgraded for it

Geoff Parker is a long-standing advocate for truth, equal rights, and equality before the law.