NATIONAL continues to fight its political foes using the tactics of the last war. Nowhere was that made plainer than last week on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Although, historically-speaking, the image of Polish cavalry charging German tanks in September 1939 is a false memory, it remains a powerful metaphor. It is most unwise to fight today’s woke enemies with the weapons of yesterday’s polite conservatism. As the French commander observed of the Light Brigade’s suicidal charge at the Battle of Balaclava: “C’est magnifique, mais ne pas guerre!” (It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war!)
From the moment she opened her mouth, it was clear that National’s Nicola Willis believed that what she had to say would embarrass the Associate Housing Minister Marama Davidson. By using words like “racist” and “classist” in relation to Willis’s press release about the conduct of people in emergency housing, the National List MP was convinced the Green Party co-leader had gone too far and could be shamed into executing a humiliating backdown.
How Willis could have so misread Davidson’s political temperament is baffling. The idea that the most woke member of the House of Representatives would apologise for calling-out the “racism” and “classism” of a National Party MP was fanciful. That she would, instead, double-down on her accusation, turning Willis’s question into an opportunity to make rhetorical hay at the Opposition’s expense, should have been obvious. National’s failure to anticipate Davidson’s response, speaks to the severity of its ideological disorientation.
Willis and her colleagues remain wedded to the outdated notion that people who use terms like “racist” and “classist” are outlandish political fringe-dwellers. National is clearly of the view that all it need do is draw such terms to the attention of the general public and their outlandishness will compel the woke lefties employing them to make a very public show of repudiating their use. The idea that such terms might be in daily use at the highest levels of the state has yet to sink in.
National appears to have learned nothing from Vodafone’s removal of Sean Plunket from MediaWorks’s line-up of talkback hosts. While “wokeness” is still a bit of a joke in conservative circles, out in the “real world” it has become the modern corporation’s – and the modern political party’s – standard operating procedure. Managers and professionals may not much like this state of affairs, but it takes extraordinary courage to stand up and oppose it.
When Davidson read Willis’s parliamentary question she must have rubbed her hands in glee. It would have been clear to Davidson that her interlocutor had no idea of the political opportunity she was offering.
How could the anxieties of Wellingtonians forced to interact with the residents of emergency housing possibly be subjected to sociological critique?
Since when could the “feelings” of decent, law-abiding, middle-class white people simply be set aside by a Maori Minister of the Crown?
The mere suggestion that the complainants might be dealing with gang members should, on its own, have been enough to secure Davidson’s automatic support.
Davidson would have seen immediately where Willis was coming from – and primed her rhetorical cannons.
When it came, Davidson’s reply was devastating: “I am accusing a National member of this House of attempting to stigmatise a group of people with little access and resourcing, of attempting to whip up stigmatising and dehumanising narratives around groups of people who need our support.”
The cheers from the Government benches should have alerted Willis and her colleagues to just how decisively the rules of the political game have changed. That the Speaker of the House then declined to force Davidson to withdraw and apologise for deploying epithets which, a decade or so ago, would certainly have prompted such an instruction, should have confirmed it. But, no. In response to her parliamentary shellacking, the best Willis could muster was bluster. Davidson was limply taken to task for ‘throwing cheap attacks at opposition MPs”.
Willis and her Opposition colleagues would be wise to prepare for many more such attacks. They need to get it into their heads that the Right is now where the Left once stood – on the naughty step.
For the best part of a century, left-wing parliamentarians were forced to find suitable synonyms for socialist terms. Those whose job it was to regulate the vocabulary of the status-quo rigorously excluded all kinds of revolutionary language. Those who spoke it anyway – like Labour’s unashamedly socialist leader, Harry Holland – were dismissed as dangerous extremists.
It was a particularly effective way of stifling genuine debate on the big issues of the day. Imagine Labour’s disadvantage through all those years when National was happy to grant visas to sporting teams from Apartheid-era South Africa: when successive Speakers ruled the term “racist” unparliamentary. No matter how blatant their prejudices, National MPs could not be called out for their behaviour without the person responsible being required to stand, withdraw and apologise – or leave the chamber.
How times have changed. To be on the Right in 2021 is to be presumed guilty of racism, sexism, classism, and all the political phobias – Trans, Homo, and Islamo – until proof of innocence is provided.
That a majority of New Zealanders may harbour identical conservative beliefs will not avail National – not while “The Establishment” continues to embrace the wokeness of “progressive” New Zealanders . (Oops, excuse me, Aotearoans.) “Re-educating” the elites out of their attachment to the “social-justice” of identity politics will be no easier for the twenty-first century Right, than persuading the bosses to abandon free-market capitalism was for the twentieth century Left.
National will just have to learn to meet the accusations of the likes of Marama Davidson head-on, by using the Left’s own arguments against them. What Nicola Willis, confronted with charges of “racism” and “classism” should have said is something like this:
“Is the Associate Minister of Housing able to enlighten us as to which is the more racist: the party raising concerns about the behaviour of homeless New Zealanders crammed into motels and boarding houses; or, the party which, having failed utterly to build the desperately needed social housing it promised, sees fit to dump them there: out of sight, out of mind?”
And/Or,
“Is the Associate Housing Minister willing to concede that it is classist in the extreme for this Labour Government to allow ordinary working people and their families to bear the burden of an overheated housing market owned and operated by middle-class investors able to reap more tax-free capital gain in a few weeks than an honest, tax-paying, working-class New Zealander can earn in a year?”
It is long past time National’s cavalry learned how to drive a tank.