It will be a more close-run thing than most people imagine, but Labour is likely to retain control of parliament after the election and secure a second term.
It’s difficult to say they will ‘win’ given the vagaries of the nonsense MMP system, and what happened last time at the behest of ‘queen maker’ Winston.
The ‘circumstance’, as we should properly call it, will be brought about this time by lying, and the Big Lie is this: that Jacinda Ardern is a ‘Middle New Zealander’ – essentially cautious and conservative – and that she only wants for the country what everyone else does.
My thanks go to Chris Trotter for pointing out Ardern’s (feigned) ‘conservatism’ in Monday’s Insight. And also the fact that the left’s foot soldiers are peddling this lie in national publications like The Spinoff.
Reading The Spinoff is, fortunately, above my pay grade. The ploy used by the socialist propagandists in the print media and on television is, however, familiar and decades old: by their assertions and omissions, and in gradual and almost imperceptible increments, they shift the ‘centre’ of the debate further and further to the left.
Most people imagine that the milieu in which they receive the news and hear the national dialogue is ‘neutral’ and ‘balanced’, but this is far from the truth.
Even moderately conservative notions around, say, family and sexuality, or working for a living, are portrayed as being so outrageous that we must deny their expression. Those who slip up will be press-ganged into an apology, proving that the new regime of ‘political correctness’ is the most intolerant we have faced since the Reformation.
On the other hand, spurious theories from our universities around gender, and our ability to shape the climate through new-age devotionals such as electric cars, are upheld as unquestionable truths in respect of which ‘the science is settled’.
The first way, therefore, the left promulgates The Lie is by owning the narrative and manipulating the media without anyone really noticing. David Farrar’s media survey, published on Insight, notes that a net 14 per cent of respondents believe The New Zealand Herald to be ‘right-leaning’, and finds the consensus around TV3’s Newshub to be that it’s ‘balanced’.
By any objective measure, this cannot be true. What it does demonstrate is that right-leaning people want to believe that their news sources reflect their views. Whereas left-leaning people don’t see left-wing bias, and the views that they like to hear expressed never go far enough.
The gradual closing down of free expression and the ‘repurposing’ New Zealand’s media as a left-wing tool (The BFD being the notable exception) has fooled the electorate into believing it receives balanced opinion when in fact it does not.
Hysterical and extremist left-wing columnists in The Herald and on RNZ are presented as ‘normal’. Reasonable and moderate views from the right are not only absent, but derided as unimaginable, the crazed modern-day reinvention of Oscar Wilde’s Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. This is, in fact, gaslighting.
Our histories and traditions have been altogether disestablished. Where they are discussed, they are rewritten to suit the narrative. As such, New Zealand’s past has become a foreign country to us, which is easier to mock than it is to understand.
Without it, we are left marooned and facing an uncertain future. It is this future which the left has now hijacked.
For more on the subject, read How Far to the Left we Have Travelled and We’ve Been Stitched up.
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