As one would probably expect, living as we do in New Zealand’s hyper-sensitive, left-wing heliosphere, negative media commentary around Judith Collins’s election to the leadership of the National Party began almost immediately. The efforts to discredit her have been varied, with some media channels seeking to downplay or disregard the event, and others pursuing false narratives around National as a party in disarray.
Social justice lawyer, left-wing activist and Spinoff commentator Catriona MacLennan was so quick off the blocks with her Radio New Zealand article on Collins that she must have had it filed, like an obituary, ready to be pulled from the bottom drawer should the dreaded day of Collins’s ascendancy ever arise.
MacLennan’s argument against Judith Collins is an argument against adversarial politics. It’s a common pressure tactic of the left. New Zealand’s national dialogue, the argument goes, has been built around ‘consensus’, and we should not challenge the consensus through negativity or by saying things which hurt people’s feelings. Collins, MacLennan complains, is combative, used the word “fight” repeatedly in her initial press conference, and ‘actually said that National’s aim was to “crush” the government’.
This, apparently, is a shameful thing to say. When in reality it is the correct and only proper thing one could say when the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition.
“What the country needs at present is a constructive approach, not aggression and negativity,” MacLennan asserts. She then wrests the spotlight away from Collins, focusing it back on King Corona where, in a mythical, netherworld place she calls Aotearoa, a grand coalition of united peoples has done “so well” that through socially-distanced hugging and by kindness the Biblical plague has melted away.
What she fails to disclose is that the “consensus” which forms New Zealand’s national dialogue today is entirely the métier of leftists, whose Marxist multicultural and diversity project has been fitted and then tightened like a straitjacket over the past sixty years — without anyone really noticing.
In seeking for us “to lead the way internationally” and showing how “politics can be done” constructively (with the obligatory sideways references to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, “who are in politics solely for self-advancement” and “have brought their respective nations to their knees”) what MacLennan is really advocating for is a single-party state.
“Opposition for the sake of opposition should stop,” she says, employing the same argument which brought us MMP. What the nation really needs, according to MacLennan, is a left-wing echo chamber where a multitude of “minority” voices, in unison, agrees. Those who can’t or won’t countenance this will, like Johnson and Trump, will be smeared.
This woke, proto-fascist nonsense is, of course, the preserve of media outlets which are controlled and sponsored by the leftist state. Looking beyond COVID-19, MacLennan’s vision for Collins is that she embrace Miss Ardern’s mantra of posidividdy, stop digging dirt on incompetents like Clare Curran and Phil Twyford, and support the left in its mythologising of “colonisation” and climate change.
I for one am grateful for MacLennan’s efforts to bring the colonial era and global warming back into view. Many of us had been led to believe (falsely as it turns out) that the COVID ‘crisis’ had cured us of them. This is in much the same way that the election of a Labour government in October 2017 ‘cured’ us of poverty and ‘homelessness’.
MacLennan has authored a range of extraordinary articles, including one from May 2020 for the ironically-named Democracy Project on the website of Te Herenga Waka, which used to be known as Victoria University of Wellington when the dastardly colonists were running it: democracyproject.nz/2020/05/10/cat-maclennan-we-are-beneficiaries. Do these people have no shame?
Here she celebrates the fact that “approximately 2.8 million of … New Zealand’s 4.9 million residents are now beneficiaries”. This figure is, of course, made up of the 1.7 million workers who are wage subsidy recipients, 781,000 people receiving New Zealand Superannuation, 175,000 Kiwis (and growing) on jobseeker support, and 160,000 people on sickness, solo-parent and other benefits.
Rather than embracing the situation as good Communists should, MacLennan complains that ‘this country has been characterised by some of the worst attitudes in the developed world towards beneficiaries’. The solution will come, she helpfully explains, when we all embrace our inner-beneficiary. There’s even a hashtag for it: #WeAreBeneficiaries.
If we truly do all become beneficiaries under the state’s purview or – for those who deign to work – the state’s employment, then I fear a more appropriate hashtag for us might be #WeAreVenezuela. Unsurprisingly, Te Herenga Waka’s website prominently affirms “its support for the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement, and its commitment to addressing systemic racism, injustice, and violence”. So let’s dismantle the whole of Western society while we are at it, including free markets, the police, and all those “unpleasant” instruments of state which currently restrain us from anarchy.
The student activists of the 1960s are now not only running our universities but all the other institutions too. And it’s not difficult to see the areas where the New Consensus must be enforced, like the abomination of abortion up to full term — which is, in fact, a vile blood sacrifice designed to blight our land — and the dismantling of “discriminatory” international borders, so that anyone who “self-selects” may inflict their culture and lifestyle upon us at the taxpayer’s expense.
MacLennan’s final advice to Collins is to embrace Big Government (small government is so “out of tune with the times”) and to throw her full support behind Miss Ardern. “Constructive politics” – and she manages to say this with the straight face that only a leftist or a psychopath could pull off – “means accepting defeat if you do not win by engaging in a fair fight”.
Journalists like MacLennan are really smiling assassins, wolves in sheep’s clothing, pied pipers masquerading as reasonable people. Their cloak of ‘kindness’ conceals a heart of totalitarian blackness and the desire to rule with an iron fist.
Judith Collins is no conservative (as witnessed by her voting pattern on social issues), but this is hardly surprising in a party which is a historical coalition of both classical liberals and conservatives: a point I made in an earlier article.
When National gets dragged to the left by Labour and allows the leftists to control the narrative, the consensus forms and adversarial politics disappears. This is hugely damaging to democracy, and to freedom and liberty.
Collins is a strong and engaging leader, which is what the party needs if it is to re-establish itself on the right bank of the river which divides — and must continue to divide — politics.
She will never succeed at out-Jacindering Jacinda, by which I mean playing Jacinda at her own game, as well as bringing about the slow death of the nation through nausea. She must leave the fake emotion to Labour’s Ardern, and communicate an alternative message by the most adversarial means possible.
To agree to a consensus is to lose, and there is a great deal (our future, no less) presently at stake. Thanks for the ‘free’ advice, Catriona, but I don’t want it. And I pity the poor taxpayers who are funding it. The election will be won by the team with the strongest arguments. As Todd Muller found out, playing to the gallery with platitudes will leave the loser stuck in the left’s quicksand.
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