Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Every time Jacinda Ardern makes the news, New Zealand goes a little bit mad.
For many, the former prime minister is the evil face of totalitarianism – the terrible woman who destroyed families and divided the nation. One podium of truth to rule them all. They hate that the ‘pretty communist’ not only walked away from the country she’d wrecked, but that she went on to receive honours and recompense from the global elite.
So when she was appointed as Professor of Practice at the University of Sydney this month, Voices for Freedom founder Alia Bee spoke for many when she wrote in an open letter that:
Appointing Jacinda Ardern to teach social cohesion is rather like appointing Jeffrey Dahmer to teach a course on wellbeing, or Jimmy Savile to run the local daycare centre.
You can bet that’s not the way Ardern sees herself. Indeed she followed the news of her appointment with a speech criticising global leaders for actively worsening societal division rather than healing it – grand sentiments delivered without a scintilla of irony.
It’s also not the way many other New Zealanders see her. To the chagrin of people like Alia Bee, Jacinda Ardern routinely ranks in surveys as the most popular politician in New Zealand.
As a former cult member of Jacindamania, I’m fascinated by the spell she cast on her homeland (and me). I don’t detest her as many do. I don’t even dislike her, even though I think she was a disastrous leader. But I do want to understand how she won us all over, if only because I suspect some ingredients of her magic potion will be emulated by others.
There’s a reason seasoned political operatives like Iain Lees-Galloway at Opportunity chose the photogenic Qiulae Wong as their leader over goober features deputy leader Daniel Eb. And why Arena Williams is being groomed to lead Labour and the very high chance that Erica Stanford will be the next leader of National. The camera loves these women and you’d have to be exceptionally obtuse not to acknowledge that, in love and life, looks matter.
So there’s that. The great optics. But that’s not all. There’s also Jacinda Ardern’s exceptional communication skills coupled with the message she routinely espoused. She didn’t come to politics to be a wrecking ball. Her intentions were always good. In fact, they were pure. They still are.
She saw herself as a quasi religious figure, someone wielding “a different sort of power”, the kind of power promoting ideas that were nicer, gentler and more morally virtuous than the usual political slop. Qiulae Wong mines the same utopian vein when she smiles winningly and talks about doing politics differently, even if, in the next breath she outlines who she refuses to do politics with.
Jacinda Ardern especially wanted to protect, equalise, secure the nation. Covid presented someone like her with the perfect opportunity to centralise at scale. To combat the viral peril, she needed a centre that decided. A ministry, an agency, a regulation, an app. The single source of truth.
She centralised for the common good. Naturally. It helped that this is a principle that’s been lauded since the end of World War II. She took decisions away from anyone with a different view – the doctor, the pharmacist, the business person, the family, and handed it to people who saw everything from above.
But her purpose remained pure. Everything Jacinda Ardern did, she did for the common good – and something more, something even more saintly and unarguable. Those hard calls? The two classes of citizens? The people who couldn’t farewell their dying loved ones? She did all this for the very very very best of reasons – To Protect The Most Vulnerable in Society.
This is the playbook of politics in New Zealand right now. You can do anything you like, no matter how repressive and sinister, as long as you camouflage it as Compassion For the Most Vulnerable.
Case in point – Ardern’s, Wong’s and presumably Williams’ attitude (she’s Labour, after all) to men cosplaying as women. Their sympathy for these men and their willingness to endorse laws giving them the power to enter women’s spaces, take women’s awards and erase women’s sex-based rights tells us they would rather have a progressive, authoritarian society, than a liberal one. They would rather indulge the fetishes of a tiny delusional elite than back the needs of half the population. They would rather treat lies as truths when those in power insist it is virtuous to do so. They would rather shut down all debate on this issue than encourage free speech.
They don’t want a reason-based society or a reality-based society, because a powerful lobby for the ‘most vulnerable’ says it’s kinder to back absurdities and unfairness.
The ‘trans women are women’ mantra is a proxy for these questions. That’s why it’s a far more important issue than many people realise.
If the left bloc wins the election this weekend, expect all these tendencies to go into overdrive.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog.
