But one already knew that:
New Zealand is also different because of the size of the local political culture. In a small country such as this, new ideas have a way of galloping through the institutions of government, higher learning and the news media.
The Antipodean version also had a toothily telegenic face of its own. Coincidentally or not, Jacinda Ardern — a pupil and teacher of the Trudeau style — served as the country’s energetic prime minister from 2017 to 2023, becoming a byword for this style during some of its biggest excesses.
The past may be a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote in the opening line of The Go-Between, but under Ardern the present started to feel a bit like one too.
In particular, Ardern’s government applied this new thinking to New Zealand’s foundational relationship between its predominantly Anglo majority and the descendants of its original East Polynesian inhabitants, the Māori, who probably first arrived here in the 1200s, around 100 years after Britain’s University of Oxford was founded. About one in nine Kiwi adults claim some Māori heritage.
Relations between the two groups have not always been hunky dory. Today, the Māori still lag behind the rest on measures such as health, life expectancy and educational attainment. Successive governments have struggled to fix these disparities.
Ardern’s government opted for an expansive policy agenda aimed at radically reshaping the broader culture. The idea was to ensure that almost every official outlet gave equal or greater billing to Māori language and motifs.
As Ardern put it, the nation would no longer be “the same place it was 10 years ago.” …
Outsiders were often left scratching their heads. The eminent British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, after a fact-finding visit, testily wrote in The Spectator about how figuring out official intentions in New Zealand “requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori.”
Given that only a small percentage of the nation speaks the language in the first place, Dawkins added, the bureaucratic exercise smacked of “self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt.”
An exasperated conservation minister of the time, Kiri Allan, agreed, telling officials to quit sending her mish-mashed briefing papers. A Māori herself and fluent in the language, Allan said the style was “tokenistic.” …
Like Canada, New Zealand spends well below the OECD average on research and development, and governments of every stripe have wrestled with the question of how to make scholarship yield commercial returns for the wider economy.
Under Ardern, however, the government turned to the Marsden Fund — previously focused only on science and medicine — to funnel millions into social-science projects that double-clicked the prevailing woke nostrums.
That included CAD$300,000 to examine whether it is “benevolently sexist” to believe that “men ought to protect and cherish women,” and $700,000 for a university department to investigate the prima facie meaningless question of why so few Asian people appear on New Zealand television.
Marsden also coughed up $250,000 for a study on the “shifting intimacies” of people who use dating apps, with a particular emphasis on “non-binary” users. Another nearly $1 million went to research on the “reimagination of anti-racism theory in the health sector.” …
The journalism fund has subsequently been wound down, along with the Marsden Fund’s ill-starred foray into the social sciences. Under the current centre-right government of the austerity-minded Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, neither is likely to be resuscitated.
Luxon himself has said the previous Labour-led New Zealand administration’s style saw it spending too much time on what he recently told this writer were “solutions looking for problems.”
And what about ordinary New Zealanders, most of whom have no real hostility to Māori culture or nostalgia for a supposedly pre-woke golden age? They, too, appear to have grown weary of symbolic overreach and crypto-religious gatekeepers.
Critics might also note that the underlying justifications for the previous Labour government’s cultural heavy-handedness, whether framed in terms of health or economic well-being, do not appear to have produced much measurable improvement.
And people have wearied of the language, according to David Rozado, a local associate professor of data science at Otago Polytechnic and a leading researcher on trends in terminology.
After analyzing more than six million news and opinion articles having to do with prejudice-denouncing and social justice jargon, he says the numbers for the familiar buzzwords like racism and transphobia are well down on where they were in the last decade.
That mood may outlast any single election result, perhaps even another one if Luxon wins again later this year.
Or perhaps New Zealand is simply following a broader shift and beginning to move away from the conventions of the unconventional, or what the country’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, these days calls “peak madness.”
Funny, that. New Zealand was once quick to pick up the moral fashions blowing through the wider English-speaking world, and Kamloops was easily treated as proof of convictions that were already taking hold here. Now, in 2026, the country may be catching a different breeze as opinion elsewhere starts to taper off.
The recent past already feels like another country.
Shaming a country, reducing to a quivering mass of self-consciousness and weakness, is a long and involved process. It requires decades of brow-beating, historical revisionism, disunity, and plenty of taxes diverted to anything BUT the nation itself.
One problem with that is that when the government that spent so much time and resources needs bodies to fight its wars and consumers to support its businesses, there is no one there.
These self-unaware, timid masses aren't interested in getting their legs blown off in an overseas war that doesn't benefit them, for an army that won't arm them properly, a nation that won't care for their shattered bodies. They certainly won't think twice about buying things made in some slave labour hell-hole for a tremendous lack of domestically-produced products.
The cattle is used to nettles, not fresh hay.
Work around that.
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