The take-over is a fait accompli. The civil service walks in a left-wing goose-step. Our universities are left-wing. Our teachers are too, as is our education system. Our corporates toe the line. Our parliamentarians, generally speaking, are, and our legal system sways to the left in a stiff prevailing wind.
This is not to say that all New Zealanders are left-wing. I know teachers and lawyers and business owners who are conservative to the core, but they are silent. Most, it must be said, hold their tongues by reason of economics or out of a survival instinct. Others have been beaten into submission by a national discourse which no longer permits dissenting views.
It’s all too common these days for conservative voices to be smeared and vilified for a crime no greater than deviating slightly from the New Established Orthodoxy.
The left’s Long March through the institutions is nothing new and won’t be a surprise to readers here. What’s more stultifying to our national life is the almost total absence of conservative voices from our media. The US has Fox. The UK retains a semblance of balance in its print media, with The Guardian on the left and The Telegraph on the right. In the tabloids, The Sun endorsed Blair, but had also supported Thatcher.
Australia suffers from a strong left bias in its state-funded media outlets, but is a large enough country to maintain an array of publications and news channels. Australian conservatives are, for the time being, still heard.
New Zealand’s ‘National Forum’ – essential to public life in any healthy democracy – is not only closed, but the lights are off and the cleaner has gone home.
Every major media source is left-wing. The New Zealand Herald (NZME) and Stuff (Fairfax) are in equal measure doctrinarian and hysterical in their Party Line approach. From climate change to free speech, and from race relations to the Lockdown, non-believers are for the most part blacklisted. When the occasional head does appear above the parapet, it’s shouted down and bounced from the debate.
Very few commentators speak for the right, and in the mainstream media almost none do. Mike Hosking has been a virtual one-man-band in holding our Prime Minister – who is the worst since Kirk, if not since records began – to account. Set against Ardern, Lange was an intellectual giant. Clark remains a festering boil on the nation’s collective backside. And yet, such is the collective religiosity for Labour, that to say such things is verboten.
Even worse is the self-interested complicity of individuals supportive of The Take-Over, who move about us holding closet left-wing views. I have heard such people loudly proclaim The New Zealand Herald to be a conservative paper, both in order to bamboozle the gullible and to move the ‘centre’ of debate, through almost imperceptible clicks of the cog, further to the left.
People who work in government-funded media outlets like RNZ appear to genuinely believe in the value of the consensus they have formed by speaking with a singular political voice. They are very smug, as well as being hand-in-glove with the Labour Party policy which seeks to expand them into television.
Stuffed to the gunwales with Marxist aesthetes, RNZ personalities appear to loathe our traditional values; in particular, Christianity. Concert FM presenters still sometimes play classical music – when they are forced to – but refer to classical music’s Christian tradition only in the third person. ‘This is what Christians believe in,’ they sometimes say, when pressured to admit through gritted teeth that it is Easter.
I feel particularly sorry for school pupils who have never so much as heard a conservative voice and are raised to be left-wing activists through a programme of progressive, ‘right on’ schooling. They grow up and vote for left-wing parties accelerating a cycle of left-wing policy in our increasingly left-wing parliament.
And they do so unthinkingly. It’s fine, of course, to assume a socialist position. But one has to begin from a starting point of informed choice. That’s why I’m not sure what is more damaging: our nation’s policy direction, or the lack of debate. Somebody, at some stage, needs to stand up and say No!
It’s for this reason that I support a minority political party. It’s not about backing a winning horse – although I do wish my ‘horse’ would win – or choosing a party based on ‘damage limitation’. It’s about standing for the values one believes in.
I say the same for the conservative media. If we believe in conservatism and wish to provide others with informed choice then it is imperative we support it, subscribe to it, contribute to it, disseminate it and, in short, use it. Or else in future we may yearn for its voice, and seek it out, only to find it isn’t there. To then be left with a diminishing echo, like classical civilisation’s once-great, but now elusive, promise.
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