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Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Living in New Zealand is a lot like living on a mountain top watching the weather roll in miles away, knowing it’s coming for you, too. We are so far away from the bulk of humanity but in this globally connected world, we are no longer immune to its effects.
What is irksome is that seeing in advance does not appear to give us the kind of foreknowledge that forestalls disaster. The transactivist movement being a case in point. Far from it.
Though we were late to the party, we embraced its worst aspects with gusto, becoming one of the most enthusiastic prescribers of puberty blockers per capita in the world. Meanwhile as the rest of the world slowly undoes the damage by restricting this medication for minors at the very least, our attempt to do the same has ushered in a legal objection. Surveys have repeatedly shown New Zealanders do not support gender ideology but the judiciary is another matter. Hence we are currently stuck in legal limbo.
What else does the world reveal that might reach our shores this coming year?
You barely need to look up from eating your holiday leftovers to know that the answer to that is obviously immigration. Especially with this being election year.
In the Anglosphere, mass migration has been the burning issue for longer than the elites like to admit. In the United Kingdom neither the Tories nor Labour have grappled successfully with the phenomenon, leading to accusations of the Uniparty and declining support for both.
Until the arrival of Trump, the same could be said of the Democrats and Republicans. Trump has been the circuit breaker. The United States border is now more rigorously enforced and the deportation of illegal migrants is underway.
What of New Zealand? We do not have illegal immigration at anything like the same rate in the US and UK, but our legal immigration has been on steroids for years now.
New Zealand’s free trade agreement with India promises to swap the right to export our goods for increased migration under the guise of foreign students. This is on top of the government offering New Zealand citizens or residents the right to bring in parents for two blocks of five years and our already high level of migration from India. Not for nothing has Singh become the most common registered surname for newborns for the seventh year in a row.
Like the UK, we have also witnessed a large outflow of skilled New Zealanders in recent years. Politicians are fond of saying that we will only take in the people we need, not those that need us, but what people in cities like Auckland observe is the swelling ranks of Uber drivers, petrol station workers, restaurant staff and liquor store owners. The 2023 census showed that 43 per cent of people living in Auckland were born outside the country. That compares with 41 per cent in London. What it means to be a New Zealander is changing rapidly.
Already crimes not unknown in India have appeared in New Zealand –electoral fraud, fake truck licences and a surge in sexual violence convictions featuring Indian-born men.
Overseas the shine has come off the mass immigration feverdream. What citizens know now is that mass immigration allowed for the downgrading of borders, the upgrading of hyper-globalisation and the concentration of power in the unelected bureaucracy, rather than the citizens. Mass migration did not lead to the promised economic nirvana: instead nations witnessed a decline in living standards and social fragmentation. Multiculturalism ushered in a low-trust society and an increase in crimes against women.
In New Zealand mass immigration does not appear to have led to the alienation of a large majority of voters. But it’s clear that the core assumptions that dominated elite thinking in the Anglosphere that led to this pinch point are present in this country.
They will undoubtedly be exploited by NZ First leader Winston Peters in the run-up to the election, even though his record on immigration is far from consistent. He may try to position himself as the bold outlier, but those of us with longer memories than a goldfish remember he’s talked big on immigration before and delivered little.
On the plus side, he must be congratulated for consistently speaking out against gender ideology. If not for New Zealand First, we would not have had the advances we have had, such as the government ordering Sport NZ to scrap trans-inclusion guidelines. Sporting organisations are now free to decide their own policies on transgender participation, a view supported by most New Zealanders.
One of the most unsettling things about resisting this loony movement is finding allies in surprising places and learning that those who were once the heroes in the movie of your life are now the supervillains and vice versa.
It’s why I pay attention to the supervillains identified by the regime, that is, the people demonised or overlooked by MSM. Media won’t touch these folk or organisations for fear of contamination by association and because they think their views are dangerous and should not be aired in polite company. But they are part of the populace, after all. These awful personas non grata. The terrible unmentionables.
All the people who know what a woman is are part of this cohort, of course. That includes every gender-critical group such as Resist Gender Education, Speak Up For Women, Save Our Sports Australasia and the Women’s Rights Party, but also people like Bob McCoskrie of Family First, Christine Rankin, Julian Batchelor, Muriel Newman, the TaxPayers’ Union and Hobson’s Pledge. Sex realists all, but some have other heterodox opinions, many I don’t share, but that’s not the point..
Chief among those is Brian Tamaki, leader of his own Destiny Church. He is despised for his flashiness (suspected of fleecing his parishioners), his crazy statements (linking homosexuality to natural disasters but Te Pāti Māori MP Oriini Kaipara said the fires in Tongariro National Park were a reminder land should be returned to iwi and she hasn’t been ridiculed) and sometimes his OTT protests, such as ripping up flags, angry hakas and barging into a library where drag queens were reading to children.
He was also the subject of a two-part television documentary by regime luvvy John Campbell. I watched as much as I could stand of Under His Command, part two, but in the end had to abandon the exercise. The pompous proselytising from the pulpit was tooth-grindingly awful. Not Brian Tamaki’s. John Campbell’s. Also Tamaki’s sins seemed minor in the scheme of things. ‘Now do John Tamihere,’ I said to the television screen knowing no one will. Tamaki is an easy mark. The litigious Tamihere is not.
What interests me about Tamaki at the moment is that he is outspoken in his condemnation of mass Indian migration into New Zealand. He frequently posts on X about what he sees as an invasion and accuses all political parties of complicity. In this respect he sounds like many critics in Europe and the United States.
Tamaki plans a march across the Auckland harbour bridge on January 31 to “Keep New Zealand, New Zealand”. In his words “If we don’t stand together in five years NZ will be India!” An exaggeration but, given our small population, not impossible over a longer-time frame.
Personally I don’t think any group should be allowed to march in protest across the bridge, but in 2024 the hīkoi opposing the Treaty Principles Bill was allowed and last year a vehicle convoy of recreational fishers protesting aspects of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Protection Act travelled over the Auckland Harbour Bridge as part of their rally. Neither had official permission but authorities permitted the protests to go ahead anyway.
Tamaki has applied for permission to have his Keep NZ, NZ march. His X posts report that he had been dealing with an iwi liaison superintendent. His group had even lodged a traffic management plan. Things were going well until control of the decision was taken over by another district commander, a Muslim Pakistani woman. She is the district commander for Waitematā while the district commander for Auckland is an Indian man. Permission for Tamaki’s march was denied.
Tamaki points out that New Zealanders do not need permission to protest. Naturally he sees his failure to be given permission as discrimination and a rejection of Kiwi patriots’ rights. His posts indicate he still intends to go ahead. Since the Silent Auditor is temporarily out of action, I thought I might go along to talk to the people on the march and report back.
You can be certain no one else will. But that is a journalist’s job, after all. To talk to the deplorables.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
