Could waging a ‘war on woke’ produce a pyrrhic victory?

The Christopher Luxonled government has outlined either a roadmap to take the country decades back, or one zooming it into a Te Tirititamed future – depending on who you talk to, of course. Kevin Norquay writes.

To some, the National, NZ First, ACT coalition’s so-called “war on woke” is a much needed re-balancing of an overly sensitive or politically correct culture, which has been stifling free speech and economic progress.

To others, it’s viewed as a new way of marginalising, a move away from social and racial equity, a minimising of Māori concerns, and quieting the gender debate.

Coalition agreements indicate the government is intent on rewinding not just the work of the Labour-Greens combo, but in overwriting some National and New Zealand First policies that preceded it.

As Stuff political editor Luke Malpass put it: “Those who voted for change are going to get it good and hard.”

While ACT didn’t get the Treaty of Waitangi referendum it desired, the Treaty principles will be reviewed, while NZ First wants to strip te reo names from government departments.

Public service spending will be reined in, the emphasis on Māori language taking a backseat, and in education there will be a focus on the “basics” with cellphones set to be banned from classrooms. Three Waters, the Labour plan to handle water infrastructure with its Māori co-governance structure, has been sunk.

The first documented use of “woke” was arguably in 1938, when African-American blues singer Lead Belly ended a song about people of colour travelling through Alabama with the safety warning “stay woke … keep your eyes open”. It has since come to signify a state of being socially conscious and aware – but often used as a pejorative.

But an “anti-woke” mood for change has gone global, with New Zealand catching up. “Knowing the politicians and the things they always stood for, particularly the two minor parties, I am not surprised,” says Liz Mellish ( Te Ātiawa, Taranaki, Ngāti Ruanui), deputy chair of the Federation of Māori Authorities.

“In some ways, the National Party has been duped, that's the end result of negotiating a coalition with people you don’t know very well, I suspect.”

She’d rather not make too much fuss. “Agreeing that they are dividing the country and causing trouble, feeds into the screaming rhetoric. We’ve got to go opposite, we have to work with the government, whoever they are. We are always activists, because we’re always fighting for the rights of our people. So that won’t change.”

Nor is she concerned for the future. Māori have come too far to be turned back.

“Change, to me, has always been about equity. Māori have always come from the bottom of the heap. But the very joy of what’s happened in my lifetime is watching that shift.”

She believes the government can’t change all that is centred on a Māori economy now worth an estimated $70b annually. “I was at Apec as a representative of Aotearoa/New Zealand, there wasn’t a prime minister there. Who was? Māori.”

Professor in Politics at Massey University, Richard Shaw, is concerned the government is buying into a battle that will distract National from its economic ambitions. “When people on the political right talk about the war on woke, what they’re really talking about is a war on social justice. There’s nothing constitutionally improper about negotiating political agreements which specify courses of action which are broadly consistent with the things that you flagged in advance of the election. There is some stuff on those coalition agreements which was not flagged. It is pretty clear National went to NZ First, who said, ‘we're going to go hard on Treaty of Waitangi issues,’ generally speaking.”

As well as race relations, there was a rewind on educational ideology. An NZ First initiative, teaching children how to navigate pornography online, how to deal with aggressive online behaviour, life in a digital world, and the use of consent: gone.

“It has been reframed somehow as educational ideology that needs to be stripped out of primary schools. That kind of thing is more than a little disingenuous,” Shaw says.

“What is significant about this particular moment is that it is at variance with the general direction of travel under both Labour-led and National-led governments over the past 30 or 40 years.

“We can't avoid that kind of part of our historical legacy. By instructing public sector CEOs that they have got to rebrand in English ... it’s just going to put a lid on the conversation, it is going to bubble up again, in a less constructive way.”

Whether reversing past social policies will ultimately be good divides opinion, even outside the political sphere.

Historian Matthew Cunningham – co-author of Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa – says the policies are a wish list, not a reality … yet.

“The question remains as to whether the coalition will genuinely follow through on these issues, or if they will be diluted or deprioritised over the next three years,” he says. “Winston Peters and New Zealand First have always acted as a populist pressure valve under MMP, but he is also an experienced politician who takes the dignity of the role very seriously. He isn’t a Donald Trump, or even a Pauline Hanson.”

The Government can expect push back from hapū and iwi, who are “much better resourced than they were 15 years ago – in part, ironically, because of the large number of Treaty settlements negotiated by the last National-led government.”

Franks Ogilvie commercial lawyer Stephen Franks (a former ACT MP, and National candidate) says it is about time there was push back, and hails the efforts of Peters to confront Treaty issues.

He tells the Sunday Star-Times he’s just come off a phone call in which a Japanese company said it was halting further New Zealand investment as the rules and regulations made it “too hard”. Risk aversion as part of a cultural and social environment had filtered into society, Franks believes.

“Everything, the level of initiative of New Zealand workers, is suddenly being micro-controlled. There is a general attitude that somehow you can make life costless, and riskless if you just have enough rules,” he says. “When I look through the coalition agreements, I see a number of things that haven’t really attracted much attention – but the review of health and safety legislation, that could be huge.”

Franks argues Te Tiriti has come to be seen as gospel rather than guidance, and interpreted by the judiciary in ways that subvert the rule of law. He expects the Government moves to meet furious opposition.

“They’ll be used by people who don't actually have any value to offer society except for their claims to victimhood, and their claims of special privilege,” Franks says. “They will fight like hell, but if you’re going to have equality of citizenship, it’s a fight we have to have sooner or later. I don’t have any doubt that it has been getting worse, so I'm just delighted that we’ve got Winston and Shane Jones saying, ‘it's time to face it’.”

Three Waters and its Māori co-governance aspects played into pre-election rhetoric. Cunningham, who has worked in water infrastructure, says issues such as that have often been used to fire up voters.

“Economic crises tend to go hand-inhand with social and cultural crises. They feed off each other in a vicious loop, providing raw fuel for populist leaders to draw on. ‘I lost my job because of immigrants’, or ‘the country is falling apart because of ‘x’ minority group’,” he says. “Māori have long-held and complex involvement in freshwater management, acknowledged by successive governments on many occasions.”

Dr Carwyn Jones (Ngāi Te Apatu, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa), head lecturer at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, says the move to erase te reo was “very harmful” and a cultural slap to younger New Zealand.

“It’s a call back to the times when we Māori were stopped speaking te reo in schools and we're really just trying to recover from that language trauma.”

While Māori had been “pretty consistent” in their views about what Te Tiriti stood for, governments had wavered. Often those waverings tended toward the interpretation least favourable to Māori.

An unequal society was not necessarily better for the “haves”. “More unjust societies really erode social cohesion, which make people less safe. What Treaty principles have allowed is a move towards a more equitable society.”

The legitimacy of any government is grounded in the Treaty, he says. To not follow that, lessens its power.

“The government self-honouring and giving effect to and implementing the Treaty would be strengthening its own legitimacy. If it isn’t achieving any of those goals, it makes it less likely we're going to have social cohesion.”

Trying to erase the past is no solution, with the flaws in that approach encapsulated in the words of US author William Faulkner, who was raised in the slave states.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

“They will fight like hell, but if you’re going to have equality of citizenship, it’s a fight we have to have sooner or later. I don’t have any doubt that it has been getting worse, so I’m just delighted that we’ve got Winston and Shane Jones saying, ‘it’s time to face it’.” Stephen Franks