Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
A grey damp Sunday in Auckland was matched perfectly by the grey damp cinemascape of a movie a group of us decided to watch. The movie was based on a novel, one of the three must-reads many now swear are prescient and apt for the times we find ourselves in.
The other two are Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Animal Farm by George Orwell. But this was the film 1984, also originally an Orwell creation, featuring John Hurt looking scrawny and vulnerable and Richard Burton, always handsome, if a tad world-weary, in his last film role.
Apparently the world Orwell describes really isn’t about the future but about the bleak years after World War II when he feared that fascism, communism and conformity might turn the world into a totalitarian prison camp.
Let me tell you, she’s a grim two-hour watch, with barely a leavening moment, and certainly no happy ending. And not altogether apt for our times. In Orwell’s 1984, there were few luxuries and the city looked like a junkyard, but we are drowning in abundance and even Auckland isn’t all that bad.
For me, the bits that resonated most were the nonsense words and phrases redefining reality ‘because the Party said so’, such as two and two make five and doubleplus good. In Orwell’s world, the definition of key words were inverted to mean the opposite. Freedom equaled slavery, war was peace and ignorance was strength. Also suffocatingly oppressive was the knowledge that Big Brother was always watching its citizens.
We live in a similarly nonsense ‘women-can-have-a-penis’ world, inundated by technology that monitors our movements and listens more than it should.
Just in case I was in any doubt that the battle is still live, one of the coven of disagreeable bigots handed me a booklet she had recently bought online. Said it might interest me. This was kind of her since I would have baulked at giving ActionStation $30 for The Far-Right Playbook. But it did interest me. Now that I’ve read it, I thought it might interest you.
ActionStation is the crowdfunded community campaigning organisation that launched its first public campaigns in July 2014. In theory anyone can use their platform if their values align. Past campaigns have included free dental for all, homeless debt forgiveness (partially successful) and lobbying for an inquiry into the Family Court system, also partially successful. Currently they are genuflecting to all things Māori.
Their publication, The Far-Right Playbook, is a collection of essays featuring a collection of writers with an agenda. You’re bound to hear from them again so look out for Tina Ngata, Byron Clark, Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown, Matt Macdonald, India Logan-Riley, Valerie Morse, Neil Vallelly, Simon Barber and Māni Dunlop.
Some, like former RNZ reporter and presenter Māni Dunlop, will be known to readers. The name Byron Clark might also ring a bell. Clark is the author of the 2023 book Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists. He and his publisher, HarperCollins, recently had to issue a public apology to Conservative Party Leader Helen Houghton for including her in a chapter entitled “Women and the Alt Right.”
Clark is the only writer who gets two chapters in The Far-Right Playbook. The ActionStation team might be regretting this, given the massive blow to his credibility following that apology. Or not. I mean, Helen Houghton is your classic far right operative – white, straight and Big C Conservative. Who cares, right? Clark’s misstep is hardly likely to dent his rep among the progressive left. All good.
The intro describes the inspiration for this publication. It is their view that:
... we are witnessing a dangerous rise of division and hate, particularly along the lines of racism, xenophobia, misogyny and transphobia ...
And, boom, there it is - the T word which is the tell-tale giveaway that we are deep in delulu land, lost to the woke left cult with its attendant package of acceptable views. Transphobia? There’s no such thing. But the fight for women’s sex-based rights is real, albeit redefined by trans activists as this bogus phobia.
Which begs the question – what is their definition of the other evils? Likely the exact opposite of the commonly understood meanings. One thing the progressive left is in no doubt about is the need to control the narrative, even if it means altering the meaning of words. Orwellian indeed.
The first chapter by Tina Ngata deals with the “brutal realities of invasion, colonial land theft and white supremacy” upon which our nation was formed. Not education, law and order, science, medicine, technology – all of which, you could argue, were superior to the culture settlers encountered on arrival in this new land. Nope. Wrong wrong wrong.
Colonial governance through laws, courts, councils, schools, police and property systems, has always functioned to make oppression and indigenous oppression look normal.
What Ngata gets right is that the ‘far right’ (ordinary New Zealanders) know they cannot exist in a decolonised future, even if she does call this ‘justness.’ She thinks the far right (anyone who disagrees with her) knows that controlling the narrative is vital to control the future. In her view nothing will be achieved until “all colonial harm, against all communities, is ended”.
She’s right too that Te Tiriti is framed by critics as ‘unfair advantage’, Māori political authority and co-governance sounds to them like ‘separatism’ while anti-racism is rebranded as ‘reverse racism.’
Obviously, accusations of separatism, unfair advantage and racism are intended to give readers a jolt of moral tension and white guilt. That’s the whole point of deploying these evils. All of this, meaning all criticism of the decolonising agenda, is a bad thing and the people promoting it are obviously bad people. White guilt has become, after all, the central pillar of progressive-left politics in New Zealand in 2026.
It will not surprise you to learn that there is more in this vein. Scapegoating immigrants, feminism, the LGBTQIA+ community, especially trans people, is far right, as are the terrible TERFS who “see themselves as feminists but adhere to a biological essentialist conception of feminism”. We call it reality but have it your way. We just don’t want men in our spaces.
Transphobia does a lot of heavy lifting in this worldview. Not only did the big T prompt genocidal levels of rhetoric during the visit of Posie Parker in 2023 (where women were assaulted), but it helped New Zealand First return to power, after they lobbied to protect children from unnecessary puberty blockers. Basically transphobia is a weapon against democracy.
This fake phobia and the far-right agenda are aided and abetted by other demonic forces such as the Free Speech Union, Brian Tamaki, Stephen Rainbow, Reality Check Radio, James Lindsay, ACT, Voices for Freedom and Jim Grenon.
What this country needs, says The Far Right Playbook, is tikanga Māori, a Māori legal system and constitutional transformation centred on He Whakaputanga, Matike Mai and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. If not, we will continue to experience the types of democracy “that bend towards its 18th century exclusionary and private property-obsessed bones”. You mean, the type of democracy that moulded this country and has been wildly successful wherever it has taken hold? Got it.
Enough of the polemic. You get the picture. Reading The Far-Right Playbook was almost as dispiriting as watching 1984 the movie, though, to be fair, it did give me more laughs. Like when a writer redefined the canary in the coal mine as ‘the piwakawaka to Māui and Hine-nui-te-pō’ and suggested we ‘hā ki roto, hā ki waho’ (breathe in, breathe out) as we embark on this journey together.
This booklet is meant to be a corrective to a critique of the far left. The authors know that, one way or another, this country is in a battle for meaning. We’re all trying to control the information-scape. This is their attempt to manage the message.
But for me the most compelling question raised by The Far-Right Playbook is this – who is this booklet for? Who the hell is willing to both pay for and swallow this Original Sin trope, the Original Sin of being born white and forever having to apologise – or at the very least submit to dismantling our ‘privilege’ and handing power (aka moolah) to anyone with a fraction of Māori ancestry?
It seems to me that the compliant reader must either be indulging in an intoxicating bout of moral narcissism or be suffering from phenomenally low self-esteem. Perhaps it offers these folk a kind of intellectual mortification of the flesh. In that case, one can only hope that The Far-Right Playbook gives guilt-riddled white readers the thrill of punishment they so desperately crave.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
