Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Two vastly different conferences in Auckland last weekend revealed shared concerns about changes impacting the nation. Both used the same phrase to describe these changes. They called them “the long march of the left through the institutions.”
The original long march is, of course, the foundational myth of the Chinese Communist Party and refers to their march over difficult terrain while under attack by the Nationalist government in the 1930s. The phrase has come to symbolise endurance, sacrifice and ideological commitment.
For Family First (FF), the socially conservative Christian group, that long march meant the erosion of the traditional family as evidenced by the rise in divorce numbers, abortions and children spending long hours in daycare.
For the Free Speech Union (FSU) that meant the inability to express dissenting views in the workplace and elsewhere and attempts to bring in restrictive speech legislation.
At the intersection of both groups sat Janet Dickson, the real estate agent who lost her licence to practice last week because she refused to do a Māori course as part of her registration. The avowed Christian was actually at the Family First conference, but her case was raised in a speech by lawyer Stephen Franks at the Free Speech Union conference.
Both groups also referenced influential texts dating back to the 1950s that helped explain these changes. For FF leader Bob McCoskrie, the seminal text was The Naked Communist by W Cleon Skousen, published in 1958. For the guest speaker at the FSU, British writer and comedian Andrew Doyle, it was The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport, published in 1954. Both parties agreed the societal rot that plagues us now began in the 1960s.
From my viewpoint, the FF conference was probably the most intriguing, partially because of the novelty of attending a socially conservative Christian gathering as a former progressive atheist.
This was FF’s 20th year, an achievement by any measure, but more so since they have been routinely under attack by the media and politicians from the left. In 2013 they lost their charitable status. Despite this setback, they have thrived with an active online presence featuring podcasts, YouTube videos and social media.
In any case, the 830 people who had travelled from all around New Zealand to attend the two-day conference in Auckland were obviously unbothered by the condemnation of the intelligentsia. Full confession – for most of FF’s 20 years of existence I have also despised them.
What changed? Gender ideology. It was bad enough to find this horrible, misogynistic pile of garbage beliefs in the public domain but to discover that it was actually embraced by the progressive left – staggering.
Also staggering, the discovery that the only groups joining sane women’s groups condemning the garbage were often from the conservative right. That meant that for the first time I had to actually listen to what people like Bob McCoskrie had to say and, hot damn, if he wasn’t smart, articulate and genial. Mind officially blown – even if I didn’t agree with everything he said.
It also occurred to me then that my claim of having been a progressive atheist was false. I had, in fact, been an unwitting member of a secular church. The progressive left is as much a religion as conservative Christianity but far less tolerant. The left demands unquestioning allegiance to a set of beliefs, regards the right as grasping sinners, and views those who leave their church as apostates. Apostates are not extinguished but they are definitely exiled and dismissed as bigots. I speak from experience.
Essentially, in the church of the left, the state is God, an unqualified good whose expansion is always desirable. The left’s manipulation of the language is also telling. Those who question the leftist narrative of climate change are called deniers. What could be more biblical?
In his FSU speech, Stephen Franks talked about the infiltration of activists into the professions turning them into monastic orders while they cast themselves as the priesthood sniffing out heresy, ensuring only the elite or privileged rule.
So, in fact, my presence at FF was not as remarkable as I had first thought. I had simply left the church of the left for a dekko at another religious outfit. Also present at FF was the woman who designed my Sisterhood of the Disagreeable Bigots t-shirt, Siobhan from The Secret T Society. She has returned to Christ after 20 years away and says her faith gives her immense peace. Throughout the weekend she kept nudging me, sure that I would turn during these two days. I said I’d tell her at the end.
Bob McCoskrie kicked the conference off with a speech responding to the march through the institutions, much of it drawn from insights from The Naked Communist. I knew not to be surprised by his opposition to abortion and, although I don’t agree, I don’t begrudge anyone their beliefs in such matters – as long as they don’t impose those beliefs on me. Same with homosexuality. McCoskrie and his ilk are entitled to their views, as long as they don’t impinge upon the rights of gay people.
But I have to say I was more than a little rattled to see the name of a woman I used to work for and befriended many years ago listed as one of the miscreants of the women’s movement of the ’70s, leading to ruptures in the social fabric today. There she was in large letters – Ros Noonan. Official Bad Woman listed alongside other Official Bad Women such as Helen Clark, Silvia Cartwright and Margaret Wilson. The truth is I’m less impressed by Ros Noonan these days, since she believes TWAW [trans women are women], but I also know her to be a decent person who has achieved a lot for women.
McCoskrie believes this cabal of women have promoted the erosion of the family, fostering divorce and turbo-charging infinity childcare. He cherry picked from statements made by the Socialist Action League at the time (see below) in which the family is viewed as the central institution maintaining the oppression of women as a sex in society.
We can dismiss this as hyperbolic now, destructive even, but McCoskrie should remember that these views came out of a world in which New Zealand women were horribly disadvantaged.
New Zealand in the early ’70s was no picnic for women. I remember. I was there. The culture was heavily male-dominated. Six o’clock closing and the blokey “six o’clock swill” only ended in 1967. Boozy male behaviour didn’t change overnight. My Dutch family were shocked by the Kiwi men who preferred the pub to home, not to mention the peculiar social separation of the sexes. Women in the kitchen preparing the food. Men in the lounge, drinking and holding forth.
The only sports that mattered then were male, and, really, only if it was rugby. Equal pay was not legislated until the Equal Pay Act 1972, and its rollout took several years to fully implement. Banks regularly refused mortgages, credit cards, or business loans to women without a male guarantor (such as a husband or father), severely limiting their financial independence.
Before the introduction of “no-fault” divorce laws in the late 1970s and 1980s, obtaining a divorce was difficult and costly. Women had to prove strict “fault” (such as adultery or desertion), trapping many in abusive marriages.
New Zealand does have a high rate of single-parent families and children do suffer in this environment but whose fault is that? Feminism fought to give women rights they had never had and badly needed. Could we have a little condemnation of the men who benefited from and bolstered this unhealthy dynamic please Bob?
Just when he’d begun to lose me, an old clip of the former director of the Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah, popped up, with her warbling on about the threat posted by the Trad Wife (plenty of hands fessing up to be Trad Wives at FF on that one). This clip was part of a TVNZ doco called Web of Chaos (broadcast 1 November 2022).
What is known internationally as the kind of ‘tradwife’ set of viewpoints, which is white, Christian, a lot of pseudo-Celtic, pseudo-Nordic ideologies behind it. They use Pinterest and Instagram to draw in other women who are interested in interior design, children’s clothing, knitting, healthy food for children. And it does draw people in towards a set of white nationalist ideas. I mean, it’s relatively easy to see, if you see a very beautiful, fair-skinned, blonde or red-haired child with beautiful braiding in her hair and some flowers, just step back a little bit.
The framing of wholesome domestic interests as a potential entry point or ‘Trojan horse’ that can lead some people toward white nationalist or far-right ideologies is clearly bonkers. If McCoskrie’s narrative about feminism leant too far in one direction, this and the whole notion of the spectre of the “faaaaar right” has tipped way too far in the other.
Sadly for FF, their values and perspective are not currently in the ascendant, politically anyway, but I believe that may change. After all, change is the only constant and the progressive revolution may have gone as far as it can go. Having got to the point where they believe men can be women and borders are for busting, the progressives have largely lost the room. It could be time to pull back a bit, to re-establish boundaries and revalue tradition.
McCoskrie ended his talk by urging listeners not just to be conservative but to be a conservative. To be actively conservative.
Being a conservative is probably the most wildly perverse, radical choice you can make right now, given that the left have taken over virtually every institution.
That’s got to have an appeal for the iconoclasts among us.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
