Smiling Zombies

A quiet revolution is happening in New Zealand right under our own noses and, for the most part, we’re just letting it happen. Karl du Fresne explains.

In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, the late author and journalist Gordon McLauchlan characterised his fellow New Zealanders as ‘smiling zombies’: polite, cheerful and hard-working but smug and compliant. It was cruel but not inaccurate.

[…]Since then, Kiwis have largely reverted to their default setting of complacency and passivity. Which makes it all the easier for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government to push through an agenda of radical transformation quite unlike any the country has experienced.

[…]The most visible change might crudely be described as Maorification, much of it aggressively driven by activists of mixed Maori and European descent who appear to have disowned their problematic white colonial lineage. Self-identifying as Maori not only taps into a fashionable culture of grievance and victimism but enables them to exercise power and influence that would otherwise not be available to them.

[…]The government has done its best to ensure continued media support for this ideological project by creating a $55 million slush fund, supposedly to support ‘public interest journalism’ but available only to news organisations that commit themselves to the promotion of the so-called principles (never satisfactorily defined) of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. What has been framed as an idealistic commitment to the survival of journalism is, in other words, a cynical and opportunistic bid for control over the news media at a time when the industry is floundering. This is a government so shameless, or perhaps so convinced of its own untouchability, that it is brazenly buying the media’s compliance.

The government has effectively bought the media for a song, and the media have all too willingly sold themselves.

Not that bribery is necessary. Turn on Radio New Zealand’s flagship news and current affairs programme and you’ll routinely hear virtue-signalling presenters making announcements in Maori, a language spoken fluently by only 1 per cent of the population. Similarly, the country is routinely referred to by the media and political elite as Aotearoa, despite the name being of dubious authenticity. All this has happened with no public mandate but encouraged by a government that seems determined to promote division between New Zealanders of Maori and European descent.

This is important. Where has the public been given a chance to have a say about changing the name of our country?

In other radical changes, union power is being restored through a return to a discredited national pay agreements system and proposed ‘hate speech’ laws will place new restrictions on freedom of expression.

[…]Meanwhile the government is showering money on pet causes such as cycling, announcing recently that it would commit $785 million to a second Auckland Harbour bridge that will be used only by cyclists and walkers. The plan was rightly ridiculed as humouring a small but vociferous minority of the affluent middle classes.

[…]So far, the smiling zombies — five million of them — have tacitly encouraged all this radical transformation through their silence. This can partly be attributed to the still-potent Ardern Effect, the political fairy dust that a charismatic young prime minister scattered over the country following the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres and again when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

The prime minister has been blessed with incredibly good luck and that she has exploited to the fullest.

But it’s possible to sense a mounting pushback, particularly in those parts of the media — such as commercial radio — that haven’t been ideologically captured. Opposition to Labour’s agenda has been fuelled in recent weeks by concerns over a compulsory school history curriculum that will indoctrinate pupils with neo-Marxist theories of colonisation and white privilege; by the ascendancy of violent criminal gangs that the police seem unwilling or unable to challenge; and by the announcement of generous taxpayer subsidies for electric cars (another handout to the affluent middle class), with corresponding punitive taxes on diesel vehicles that will hit farmers and tradies — two groups that are crucial in propping up an economy severely hit by the downturn in international tourism.

Not only commercial radio but independent websites like The BFD, that don’t rely on advertising and hence are immune to attacks by the woke Left.

[…]Ardern’s famous charisma is faltering and the earnest, imploring expression she wears whenever she faces the media, so effective in Christchurch two years ago, is wearing thin.

It may be a bit unfair to call New Zealanders (Aotearoans?) “smiling zombies”. I personally know people who see what’s happening and can’t stand how Maori culture is being rammed down our throats.

Secondly, and what I see as of greatest concern, is how the media were so willing to sell themselves. It is that willingness that has enabled the above to happen. State control of the media is supposed to be something that only happens in totalitarian communist countries.

Until now.