FRIDAY 25 JUNE will be remembered as the day the Sixth Labour Government declared war on New Zealanders’ freedoms. In the finest traditions of “Newspeak”, this attack was presented as a programme of “Social Cohesion”. Just as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the Ministry of Love was where you were sent to be tortured, and the Ministry of Truth was where the Ingsoc (English Socialist) regime manufactured its lies, the Labour Government’s “Social Cohesion Programme” will tear New Zealand apart.
Too strong an accusation? Is it not rather a case of the government implementing one of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry Into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks? That is certainly the justification for its plans to outlaw “Hate Speech” and “Discrimination”, but it would be most unwise to take either the Royal Commission’s or the government’s protestations at face value. Their understanding of social cohesion has much more to do with fostering a uniformity of thought throughout New Zealand society, than it does with preserving the material conditions necessary for a diverse collection of human communities to live and work together peacefully and productively.
To have any reasonable expectation of producing social cohesion, it is first necessary to ensure that as many people as possible have jobs to go to, houses to live in, easily accessible educational and health services for themselves and their children, generous support in old age, and the ability to participate meaningfully in the political and cultural life of their country. Provide these things and social cohesion will emerge naturally.
A population which feels secure in its material existence has little incentive to exploit or harass its weakest and most vulnerable communities. Indeed, historical research indicates a strong correlation between periods of broadly-based prosperity (such as the early 1960s) and strong public support for programmes intended to uplift the poor and the marginalised. A programme which announces its intention to produce social cohesion by outlawing social dissension, is destined not only to fail, but to generate the very antithesis of its stated objective.
And yet this is precisely the sort of programme which the Royal Commission and the Labour government propose to unleash upon New Zealanders. In every sense of the word it is an idealistic quest. The moment one discards the notion that social cohesion is an outgrowth of material abundance, more-or-less equally shared, and insists on attributing it instead to the conscious moral choices of individuals, then any failure to achieve social cohesion will end up being sheeted home to the anti-social choices of immoral individuals. A materialistic reading of social cohesion will remedy failure by fine-tuning the distribution of basic goods and services. An idealistic reading can only remedy failure by punishing those who wilfully refuse to cohere with their fellow citizens.
Tragically, this is the path the Labour government and its hand-picked Royal Commissioners have opted to take. Since the mosque shootings are held to constitute irrefutable proof of hateful and divisive ideas, the government has decided that the first duty of the state is to protect society by disciplining and punishing all those who give expression to “bad” ideas.
Behind this approach to securing social cohesion lies an unstated but very dangerous premise: that the number of people espousing these “bad” ideas is significant enough to warrant major changes to our human rights legislation. After all, if the number of people harbouring the sorts of ideas that result in mosque massacres turns out to be vanishingly small, then the argument for limiting the freedoms of everybody else simply falls apart. The problem, of course, is that if society is full of people holding “bad” ideas, and social cohesion can only be achieved by extirpating these “bad” ideas, and replacing them with “good” ones. Then the cohesive society which emerges can hardly avoid being totalitarian in its ideological ambitions and repressive in the means it employs to achieve them.
Sadly, this is no mere philosophical speculation. New Zealand’s Muslim community is adamant that Islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and racist attitudes are everywhere in New Zealand society. So much so that their appeals for action to the Police and other relevant ministries, made prior to the mosque shootings, were more-or-less ignored. The Green Party went even further: advancing the actions of the “Lone Wolf” terrorist, Brenton Tarrant, as evidence that the whole of New Zealand society was infested with “colonialist” and “white supremacist” ideas.
Clearly, the government’s social cohesion programme has a lot of work to do. Which is why, presumably, it is arming itself with the heavy legal weaponry needed to silence all those expressing the wrong ideas and, by so doing, make New Zealand safe for all those good little bunnies who parrot the right ones.
Naturally, these “good” ideas encompass a great deal more than securing the safety and peace-of-mind of New Zealand’s Muslim community. There are “bad” ideas which threaten te Tiriti o Waitangi; “bad” ideas which discomfort the Trans community; “bad” ideas which outrage the sensitivities of religious groups all over New Zealand. Which is why the Government (in the person of Justice Minister Kris Faafoi) is giving all the fierce bad rabbits out there fair warning that pretty soon their insulting, “othering” and other objectionable forms of “Hate Speech” are going to get them locked away for up to three years.
Excellent! Or, as they say in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Doubleplusgood!”
Or, maybe not. As a general rule, New Zealanders do not take kindly to being told what they can think, and say, and do. Which means the chances of a jury of twelve good Kiwis and true sending someone to prison for criticising Islam; or insisting that the pre-European Maori were slave-owning cannibals; or declaring that men are men and women are women; are very close to zero. Not that any citizen should ever be arrested, charged, hauled through the courts, impoverished – and then acquitted – for the “crime” of expressing their thoughts. Which is why the chances of the National, Act and NZ First parties putting an end to this ill-considered and dangerous Social Cohesion programme, by putting Labour and the Greens to flight in 2023, are a great deal better than even.
Big Brother will just have to wait.