Lindsay Perigo
solopassion.com
In my recent article on the proposed downgrading of Concert FM, I concluded:
“If compulsorily-acquired money is going to prop up radio stations, Concert FM should be at the top of the list.”
Having attended Monday’s concert/protest at Parliament Grounds, I no longer think that.
To coincide with the protest, Louis Houlbrooke published the following press release on behalf of the Taxpayers’ Union:
RNZ Concert supporters who are protesting for the station to be “better funded” have to be joking, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union.
Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, “It’s hard to take today’s protest seriously. The protest generation once strove for world peace. Now they’re campaigning to throw even more taxpayer funding at a niche music station, just because they can’t figure out how to work Spotify.”
“Every dollar spent on RNZ Concert is a dollar that can’t be invested in PHARMAC, frontline policing, or tax relief for struggling New Zealanders.”
“RNZ Concert is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. Its listeners should be bloody grateful funding for the station wasn’t cut entirely. The station already has 18 staff, so let’s not feed the beast any further.”
Reading that before attending the protest, I thought to myself, “Now Louis, that’s unfair—they’re not demanding more money, just the maintenance of the status quo. And they are ‘bloody grateful’ for it.”
How wrong I was! Many at this concert behaved just like the entitled, petulant ingrates of Houlbrooke’s portrayal. When the vapid Topp Twins (why were they even there, let alone the MCs for such an event?!) exhorted them to chant “Fuck Mike Hosking!” the protesters did so with a relish reminiscent of Profa (aka Antifa) Blackshirts. What did Mike Hosking have to do with anything? Evidently he gives St. Jacinda a hard time in his weekly interview with her. What does that have to do with anything, let alone saving Concert FM? Nothing, but that didn’t matter. This gathering was more about the Labour/Green “woke” agenda than saving Concert FM, with every speaker more concerned to demonstrate his or her fluency in Te Reo than to preserve a purveyor of the bright lights of Western Civilisation.
And therein lies the rub. More than I realised before this event, Concert FM is currently in thrall to Wokery. Wokers don’t want a platform for Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; they want to expunge these geniuses as Dead White Males, exemplars of a toxic, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah patriarchy. Wokers are not interested in restoring the speech standards of the presenters of old, either; those standards were a tool of the patriarchy’s oppression also. Wokers want to pollute the airwaves with mindless sing-song fry-quacking that better suits their worship of ugliness. Wokers don’t want excellence; they want militant mediocrity. Having seen them up close I’m no longer willing to support their campaign. If their Woke version of Concert FM were indeed left to die, that would be poetic justice.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson, virtuously fluent in Te Reo but refreshingly polished in English as well, told the crowd he was committed to maintaining adequate funding for a commercial-free public broadcaster that provided quality music and genuinely non-partisan news and current affairs. This latter is now even more of a joke than the former. Radio New Zealand is a hotbed of Wokery, a shill for the Labour and Green parties. If Mr. Robertson could wave a wand and restore the genuine impartiality that used to be the conscientiously-upheld norm, I’d applaud. But he can’t. Even if he wanted to, and tried to, Wokers would “cancel” him. Wokers are what they like to call everyone else: Fascists.
Let’s indeed not feed the beast any further … or any longer.
