In New Zealand this week

Someone sent me a copy of the open letter signed by 2000 academics and assorted hangers-on attacking the seven University of Auckland professors who wrote to The Listener challenging the idea that Matauranga Maori – traditional Maori knowledge – should be treated as worthy of equal status with Western science.

The open letter is an academic gang-up on a grand scale.  It cannot be interpreted as anything other than a determined attempt to deter dissenters.

It’s depressing and disheartening, but it should serve as a call to arms to anyone who values intellectual freedom and free speech. No one should be in any doubt that these fundamental values of a liberal, open democracy are at risk in the institutions where they should be most honoured and celebrated.

A large proportion of the signatories to the open letter appear to be academic also-rans from third-rate establishments. The numbers have been padded out with dozens of ring-ins from overseas. Predictably, many of the local names will be recognised as belonging to people with a history of attaching themselves to whatever fashionable leftist cause happens to be passing.

Disappointingly, the list also includes a few prominent figures who one might have hoped would hold out against invitations to sign, not only in defence of intellectual freedom but also for the reason that the open letter looks like bullying (which it is). Emeritus Professor Paul Spoonley is there, for example, as is Dr Colin Tukuitonga.

I’m not going to get into the debate about the relative merits of Western science and Matauranga Maori, (a) because other people are far better qualified to do that, and more importantly (b) because it’s immaterial. The real issue here is the right to engage in free and open debate on a matter of public interest – namely, how New Zealand children are to be taught about science, which is at the heart of the seven heretics’ concern – without being howled down.

That howling down has one object in mind: to enforce orthodoxy. The sheer weight of numbers shows how all-pervasive that orthodoxy is, and how intolerant of disagreement. I wonder how many signatories felt under pressure to sign because they were concerned about their career prospects.

I also fear for university staff who refuse to toe the approved ideological line and courageously insist on their right to hold and express their own informed opinions. It can’t be easy for them.

Now here’s the thing: all 2000 of those signatories enjoy the benefits of an academic environment that came about through freedom of thought and the right to challenge accepted beliefs. They are now betraying that heritage and denying it to others.

I recently read someone suggesting that the period from the 1960s on, when the conservative establishment was under assault from a wave of free thinking and open debate, was actually a temporary aberration, and we’re now regressing to a society in which censorious bullies are in control and non-conformists feel threatened and intimidated.

Sadly, I think the theory may be right. The people who signed the open letter are the new establishment, and they’re as intolerant of challenges to their authority as the old one was.

■ Morning Report this morning began an item about the dawn raids apology with Elton John’s line, “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”.

Actually, it’s not. Not when you’re Jacinda Ardern and the events you’re apologising for happened so far in the past that they don’t reflect unfavourably on you. Neither is saying sorry difficult when your message is targeted at an audience whose votes you want in 2023.

Yes, from the vantage point of 2021, the dawn raids look bad. This is an example of presentism, when we judge historic events according to contemporary values and expectations. In the circumstances, a formal government apology makes good political theatre.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s true that Polynesian overstayers were cynically made scapegoats for a downturn in the economy which meant they were no longer useful as low-cost factory fodder. But we can see this with more clarity now than we could then. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

It’s also true that early-morning police raids were a tactic associated with totalitarian states and that they would not have been used against middle-class white homes because that would have been considered intolerable.

But is it permissible to raise a couple of teensy-weensy mitigating factors? One is that the police pounced at 6am not out of gratuitous insensitivity or cruelty, but because that’s when they knew they would find people at home. They do the same with criminals; always have done.

Another is that the overstayers were here illegally, even if they’d been originally invited by the government because we needed their labour. And a third is that although Pasifika overstayers were targeted while those from countries such as Britain and the US were not, that may have been because there were far more of them.

I’m not saying the raids were something we should be proud of; merely that to portray them as a gratuitously callous act of racism may be a bit over-simplistic.  

 

 

 

Let's hear the Canadians for ourselves and decide then whether it's dangerous

It is often the first instinct of the far left, when confronted with ideas or opinions they don’t approve of, to try to shut them down.

There was a tiny but telling example of this in a letter to the Dominion Post a few days ago from a reader who didn’t like my column outlining the advance of neo-Marxism. He said it was “disappointing” (note the morally superior tone and phony sanctimony) to see such opinions being given oxygen by a “credible New Zealand paper”.

In other words, he didn’t like what I said, so I should have been censored. Well, suck it up, buster. It’s called free speech.

But a far more serious and alarming threat to freedom of expression has emerged today with attempts to bar two so-called “far right” speakers from entering New Zealand next month.

There’s the first problem, right there. Both the New Zealand Herald and Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report used that term “far right” to describe the Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who are planning to follow a tour of Australia with a single engagement in Auckland.

I hadn’t consciously heard of Southern before today and was only vaguely aware of Molyneux, but experience has taught me to be very sceptical when the media refer to anyone as “far right”. It’s a subjective judgment that has no place in a news story, which we rightly expect to be unbiased (in contrast with this blog, which is clearly an expression of opinion).

Decoded, “far right” can mean anyone to the right of the political centre. To be consistent, the Herald should have described the activist Valerie Morse, who wants the Canadians kept out of New Zealand, as “far left”. But of course it didn’t, and thus it gave her an aura of political legitimacy that it denied to the Canadians.

In any case, whether or not Southern and Molyneux are “far right” – however that’s defined – is neither here nor there. We live in a liberal democracy that depends on free speech and the free exchange of ideas and opinions. Let’s hear for ourselves what the Canadians have to say and decide then whether it’s dangerous.

When it comes to free speech, I’m an absolutist. The only exceptions should be blatant incitements to cause harm. The moment we give in to the clamour from left-wing bigots seeking to stifle ideas they disapprove of, or for that matter anyone trying to stifle ideas they disapprove of (although it’s invariably the left that pushes for political censorship and suppression), we’re stuffed. Book-burning won’t be far behind.

It will surprise no one that the push to have Southern and Molyneux barred from New Zealand comes from Auckland Peace Action, whose spokeswoman, the serial protester Morse, claims the Canadians are coming to New Zealand to “empower local racists and to encourage racist violence”.

It’s perhaps more surprising that the New Zealand Federation of Islamic Organisations is backing the call for a ban. This is not what New Zealand Muslims should be doing if they want to persuade us that they reject the totalitarian theology of  many of their co-religionists elsewhere.  

So just what makes the two Canadians so poisonous? According to Radio New Zealand, they have “far-right, alternative” views on feminism, gender, Islam and mass immigration.

As one example of their extreme, “alternative” positions, RNZ cited Southern’s statement that there are “only two genders”. It’s an indication of how totally the so-called progressives  have seized control of the public conversation that Southern could be held up as a pariah for expressing an opinion that’s shared by many New Zealanders – possibly even a majority – and which only a few years ago would have been considered utterly unremarkable.

Judging by an audio clip played by RNZ, Southern has also inflamed leftists and feminists by calling out the exquisite hypocrisy of their position on Islam, a religion they’re so eager to empathise with that they conveniently turn a blind eye to its repression of women.

We're told that Southern was barred from speaking in Britain, as if that’s all the justification the New Zealand government needs to turn her away. In fact she’s only one of several speakers to have been detained or turned back at British airports on the spurious pretext that their presence was “not conducive to the public good” or was “likely to incite tensions”, which really meant that they made the timid authorities feel a bit queasy.

But this shouldn’t be a case of “where Britain goes, we go”, to use Michael Joseph Savage’s famous line. Far from giving New Zealand a lead, all the British bans demonstrate is that the country from which we inherited our democratic traditions has betrayed its honourable record as a defender of free speech. We can’t allow the same thing to happen here.

Back to Val Morse. The Herald quotes her as saying: “They [Southern and Molyneux] come to recruit people to their fascist ideology. It is imperative that this type of racism is given no room to be promoted and encouraged in Aotearoa. If they come here, we will confront them on the streets. If they come, we will blockade entry to their speaking venue.”

Well, there you have it. Even if the government allows the Canadians in – and I’ll be the first to take to the streets if they’re barred – the bigots of the left will do their best to ensure no one can hear them. I ask you: who are the real fascists here?

Shouting people down is something the far left has a lot of practice at. They do it all the time in the US, Britain and even Australia. You can hear it on one of the audio clips played on today’s Morning Report, in which shrieking protesters try to prevent Southern being heard.

In the US, ironically, the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which was the birthplace of the radical student free-speech movement in the 1960s, is now synonymous with the practice of no-platforming – the very antithesis of free speech. Just as ironically, some of the speakers recently turned back at British airports had been engaged to deliver addresses at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where traditionally all comers have been allowed.

Let’s assume for a moment, as a purely hypothetical exercise, that Morse’s shrill hyperbole is even remotely accurate, and that Southern and Molyneux would come here with the aim of inflaming local racists. I could only say good luck with that, because New Zealand is by world standards a remarkably tolerant and moderate society, and stolidly resistant to inflammation by extremists of any stripe.

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s a robust democracy that is perfectly capable of being exposed to rancid opinions without being swayed. I always come back to that wonderful line from Milton’s Areopagitica: “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Here, in a way, is the essence of the issue. It all comes down to trust and control. Leftist fanatics like Morse don’t trust people to make their own sensible judgments, so they want to control what we hear and read. If we value free speech and representative democracy, we can't let them.

Footnote: I was saddened to hear Massey University professor Paul Spoonley say on Morning Report that he wasn’t opposed to the Canadians being denied entry. I respect Spoonley and have never doubted him when he described himself as a supporter of free speech. On Morning Report today, however, he added the dreaded “but …”. Spoonley said he didn’t see free speech being advanced by views that he described as “hateful and extreme”.

I have two problems with that. The first is the assumption that the opinions expressed by Southern and Molyneux are hateful and extreme. That depends entirely on the ideological prism you happen to be looking through. But more importantly, I believe that the moment we start putting qualifications around freedom of speech, we’re in trouble. Big time.

A quiet demographic revolution

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 1.)

Here’s a statistic that might radically change your perception of the country you live in: in the 2006 census, nearly 40 percent of the people living in Auckland were born overseas.

As Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley pointed out recently on the TV programme Q+A, that makes Auckland one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.

Spoonley observed that New Zealanders tend to equate large immigrant populations with megacities like London and Los Angeles. Many of us – and I include myself here – still mistakenly regard Australia as a more multicultural society than ours, because for decades it was.

The New Zealand I grew up in was essentially monocultural; in parts of New Zealand, even Maori were virtually invisible. There were Chinese market gardeners and greengrocers, Greek and Yugoslav fish and chip shop owners, Dutch builders (the Dutch being considered by New Zealand governments in the 1950s and 60s as the next best option after the British) and Italian fishing communities, while in urban areas such as Porirua and South Auckland from the 1960s onward there were concentrations of Pacific Islanders, essentially imported to provide a cheap workforce for labour-intensive industries such as car assembly plants. But overall, our immigration policy targeted people of British origin.

Australia pursued a much more adventurous policy, recruiting large numbers of immigrants from southern Europe and the near Middle East. As a result, Australia in the 1960s and 70s was an infinitely more vibrant and cosmopolitan society.

But how things have changed. Population statistics confirm what should be apparent to anyone walking down Auckland’s Queen Street: New Zealand has undergone a quiet revolution. In a remarkably short time, we have been transformed from one of the western world’s most homogeneous societies into one of the most ethnically diverse. Spoonley describes Auckland as one of the world’s major destination cities, comparing it with Toronto and Vancouver.

Not only has immigration increased, but immigrants have become far more visible because many of them are from China, India, Korea and the Philippines.

And although this is most obvious in our biggest city, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s purely an Auckland thing. Overall, 23 percent of the New Zealand population in 2006 (our most recent census, since the one scheduled for 2010 was cancelled after the Christchurch earthquake) was born overseas.

To someone of my generation, this is a change of staggering proportions.

As revolutions go, it could hardly have been quieter. I don’t recall the government making a dramatic policy announcement to the effect that New Zealand would be opening its doors to the world. There was no great debate, no public meetings. It happened incrementally and largely without fuss.

A few questioning voices were heard. Veteran Auckland journalist Pat Booth wrote a controversial series of articles in 1993 warning of an “Asian invasion” and Winston Peters’ New Zealand First Party tried, without much success, to make political capital out of the inflow of “non-traditional” immigrants in 1996.

More recently another journalist, Deborah Coddington, provoked outrage with a magazine article about Asian crime in New Zealand (which is undeniably an issue, although many of Coddington’s critics would have had us believe otherwise).

By and large, however, New Zealanders have absorbed the newcomers without conflict or tension, confirming our reputation as generally tolerant, easy-going people.

Spoonley thinks we’re now more accepting of immigrants than Australia is, and made the point on Q+A that New Zealand had been spared the type of unpleasantness that Sydney experienced with the Cronulla riots in 2005, when an incident involving macho young Lebanese men triggered an ugly backlash from mobs of Australian-born yobbos. Neither side emerged with any credit.

That confrontation showed how immigration can backfire, particularly when clannish immigrant groups fail to integrate with the host society and even exhibit overt hostility toward it. It was a reminder that immigration has to be managed carefully – a lesson also driven home by the European experience with large-scale Muslim immigration, which has had catastrophic consequences.

But the New Zealand immigration experience, thus far at least, has been painless. Most New Zealanders seem to welcome the colour and diversity provided by immigrant communities.

It’s not just a matter of relishing the choice of Indian, Chinese, Thai or Turkish cuisine where once we were condemned to dine out on steak and eggs or roast meat with three veg, or sushi as opposed to a meat pie. There’s strong evidence that Asian immigration is good for us academically as well; many of the top performers in our schools are the children of migrants.

That could eventually translate into an improved economic performance. And as our population ages (by the mid-2020s, over-65s will outnumber under-15s), we may have reason to be very grateful for the economic contribution made by clever, hard-working Asians.

They’re even making an impact in sport. Just look at the remarkable Lydia Ko, at 15 the top-ranked amateur woman golfer in the world, and Danny Lee, the youngest-ever winner of the US Amateur Championship, and now playing on the PGA Tour.

The European experience tells us that immigration causes problems when large, economically deprived immigrant communities become ghetto-ised and alienated. That risk multiplies when the immigrant community has dogmatic religious views that are at odds with the host society.

But it doesn’t have to happen that way. America, one of the world’s most polyglot societies, has been remarkably successful in absorbing large numbers of immigrants and making them feel they have a common stake in the country’s destiny. Canada seems to be managing too. There’s no reason New Zealand can’t do the same.

If there’s one segment of the New Zealand population for whom immigration presents a special challenge, it’s Maori. A leaked Labour Department report last year revealed that Maori are more likely than any other immigrant group to be against immigration.

Many Maori feel threatened by immigration because they’re concerned that newcomers don’t understand the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, have no affinity with Maori culture and may not feel committed to the Treaty of Waitangi. They’re probably also worried that as immigrant numbers increase, Maori political influence will diminish.

As Spoonley points out, there’s the matter of economic competition too.  “The new immigrants are typically skilled, so are they taking [jobs] from Maori? I think that’s where the concern comes from,” he said on Q+A. To which many New Zealanders might reply that it would be no bad thing if economic competition incentivised more Maori to fulfil their economic potential.