Stuff’s resident woke Karen, Verity Johnson reckons bashing the woke won’t win elections. I reckon she’s wrong:
So despite being woke-ish myself, I understand why everyone finds us so annoying.
Even I find us irritating, and I’m a young middle-class leftie. The holier-than-thou-ness. The Mom jeans. The moral certainty and evangelical clarity that clings to us like the smell of urine in a car park stairwell … it creates a public persona so grating it could chop a salad.
So of course Winston Peters’ resurrection speech last week picked up on this, laying into the woke-ification of NZ as a war cry for his return. Likewise, David Seymour didn’t disappoint either in his reaction to the hate speech law changes, laying predictably into cancel culture, woke elites, and the threat to free speech with the robotic reliability of a right-wing C3PO.
All this follows a clear political pattern among the Right that we’ve seen emerge over the past year. I first noticed it in March 2020, when I wrote about how Shane Jones had started to style himself as a working man against the bougie, PC, “Ngati Woke” brigade.
At the time it worried me, and ever since then our right wing has increasingly leant into the culture wars narrative to score political points. Reading closely from America’s playbook, they’ve now made woke-bashing a central campaign theme.
Stuff
And the way the woke wombles are carrying on it will be extremely profitable giving them the bash electorally. Verity Johnson thinks otherwise:
And I get it. They had to do something. Criticising the Covid-19 response last year proved difficult, the Government has an excellent PR strategy of smiling and saying nothing, and no-one’s been able to halt Jacinda’s charm crusade.
So, with increasingly few tactics left, they’ve started woke-bashing as their latest attack strategy.
But what’s interesting is the more they go on about it, the less convinced I am that it works.
Sure, it’s cathartic to whinge about wokeness. But it doesn’t hit deep reserves of fury and rage in middle NZ. (That’s still reserved for house prices, and the slow vaccine rollout.)
And unlike in America, where they’re quicker to jump to moral outrage, the dominant reaction of Kiwis to irritating things is to shrug and say, “Yeah, they’re idiots, but whatever…” And so the best you get is mild annoyance, which is hardly the deep anger needed to sway elections.
Well, she’s dead wrong. Three things have recently occured that have enraged middle New Zealand. They are the billion dollar bike bridge that a recent poll shows that 62% of people oppose, the draconian ute tax and the pushing of their EV future, and the hate speech laws.
By themselves these are small issues, but piled on top of each other they are electoral poison. Voters hate a Nanny State, they hate social engineering and they hate being told they are racist when they are not.
The other point that Verity misses is that each of the three parties and personalities opposed to woke bull dust can tackle it in differing ways. Winston Peters can rail against He Puapua and the Maorification of New Zealand until the cows come home without the woke being able to label the Brown Phoenix a racist. Act can continue to push down their free speech avenues and National can appeal to the soft under belly of middle New Zealand who are sick to death of the pretty commie running the country.
The Prime Minister won’t be able to heroically claim she saved us from the CCP Virus when each month shows we are last in the world with vaccinations. Nor will she be able to arrest the debacles building in housing, in Police or, now that Kris Faafoi has enraged the media and public alike, in Justice.
The gloss is gone, and now people realise just what is in charge. They no longer see a princess covered in fairy dust; they now see a poorly dressed mangler of the English language with a propensity for making huge statements of intent and delivering less than nothing.
Bashing the woke will become a sport. One we can all enjoy.
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