Matua Kahurangi
Matua Kahurangi, unapologetically provocative, is infamous for his incendiary writings that challenge societal taboos and stir relentless debate.
Over the past few weeks, a new phrase has crept into the talking points of the left: “imported cultural wars”. You’ll hear it everywhere now, especially from Green Party figures like Chlöe Swarbrick, Ricardo Menéndez March, Benjamin “Bussy” Doyle, and Lawrence Xu-Nan. Like clockwork, they’re all parroting the same line, trying to paint conservatives and critics as the ones dragging foreign conflicts and ideologies into New Zealand politics. It’s almost impressive how coordinated it is. But it’s also completely dishonest.
If we actually take a moment to examine where these so-called ‘imported’ issues came from, the answer couldn’t be clearer. The left imported them. For years now, New Zealand’s political and cultural landscape has been flooded with foreign causes and ideologies, and nearly every single one has been championed by the left.
They brought in cancel culture, where people’s livelihoods are destroyed for having the ‘wrong’ opinion. They pushed mass immigration policies without serious conversation about the impacts on housing, wages, or social cohesion. They imported climate change hysteria, demanding radical economic transformations with little regard for cost or practicality. They paraded Black Lives Matter protests through New Zealand streets.
They didn’t stop there. They also brought in Free Palestine activism, much of which in practice has turned into thinly veiled support for Hamas, a recognized terrorist organisation. Somehow, in 2024 and 2025, we’ve reached a point where New Zealand politicians are more concerned with Israeli border policy than with fixing our own crumbling infrastructure and broken healthcare system.
The reality is simple. The left has been globalising our culture wars for years. They brought in identity politics. They brought in race essentialism. They brought in ideological purity tests. And now that the public is waking up and pushing back, they’re desperately trying to pin the blame elsewhere.
It’s not conservatives trying to turn New Zealand into a copy of America’s culture war. It’s not the right who are staging protests about issues halfway across the world, demanding we dismantle our own society to fit the narratives of activist groups overseas. It’s the left. And they’ve been doing it proudly until very recently.
The sudden obsession with “imported cultural wars” is nothing more than damage control. The Green Party, and parts of Labour, know they’ve lost touch with everyday New Zealanders. Ordinary people don’t care about ideological fashion shows imported from woke American universities. They care about putting food on the table, raising their kids in safe communities, and having politicians who put New Zealand first.
Instead, they’ve been served a steady diet of grievance politics, radical environmentalism, and manufactured outrage. And now, facing growing public resentment, the left are scrambling to accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they’ve spent years doing themselves.
In short, the left are cooked. They’ve spent years importing division. Now they’re losing the room. No slogan is going to save them from the consequences.
Before I forget - the “defund the police” madness came from them too.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
