A MILD POKE AT WOKE
The Joke Woke Folk…still Token but not Broken
The demise of New Zealand’s Labour Government is undeniably a blow for Aotearoan Wokesters, but they’re not going away.
Wokedom will struggle to (let’s invoke their infantile vernacular) “process” the setback. Kate Hannah, the paranoid delusional director of New Zealand’s Disinformation Project, will falsely attribute the change of government to Nazi Disinformation and other Dark Forces.
This Substack showcases ten Paragons of Woke, each an elite member of New Zealand’s Wokerati. Wokesters are a curious combination of strident, sinister and pathetic, so first let’s quickly precis what “Woke” is all about…
Ostensible and trumpeted concerns for the marginalised and disadvantaged in society. These concerns are often insincere or at least do not translate into concrete efforts to help.
A belief that women, people with dark skin and anyone with any sexual persuasion other than male heterosexuality, regardless of their particular personal characteristics and circumstances, are inherently oppressed. Wokery is therefore an inherently divisive philosophy, which puts labels on people regardless of their circumstances and how they actually conduct themselves. Martin Luther King’s famous hope for people to be judged on the quality of their character (rather than skin colour) is reversed under Wokery.
Everyone has an innate Woke racial/sexual/gender “identity” (akin to a religious soul) that defines one’s position in the societal pecking order and is more important than any other aspect of one’s life (e.g. job).
Woke loves authoritarian State controls on personal actions and freedoms of association, speech and attitudes
Wokesters loath productive business activity and businesspeople in general
In Wokedom, words from people you don’t know that are not even personally directed at you can nonetheless constitute real violence against you
Wokesters embrace cancel culture and gleefully call for people they disagree with to lose their livelihoods for throwaway remarks, often deliberately taken out of context
The Woke are earnest to the point of humorlessness
The Woke don’t like debating subtleties and complexities. Wokedom is a childish world of goodies and baddies
Wokesters love witch-hunting. A white-skinned heterosexual (“cis”) male either admits he’s a Racist Homophobic Transphobe or proves he’s one by denying that “reality”
Wokesters claim to be arch progressives, bravely making the world a better place by calling out social justice transgressions. But Wokery’s illiberalism and intolerance are far from progressive
Wokeism is not working-class. Wokery is a distinctly bourgeois indulgence
Wokemons are ahistorical. The Brave New Woke World is unconnected to the past. All Wokesters need to know is that Racism, Sexism and Transphobia are eternal monsters to be endlessly battled
Wokesters have little appetite for task-orientated work. Woke is performative; it’s all about signaling virtue and generating self-aggrandizing personal narratives.
A TOP TEN OF WOKERATI
With those preliminaries out of the way, here goes…
Ayesha Verrall
Verily I say unto you…Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall is a classic of our times in the land now Wokeily known as Aotearoa.
In 1997 Verrall was a member of the New Zealand Youth Parliament and came into Parliament on the Labour Party list in the 2020 election, shortly after she conveniently found, having been commissioned as a health “expert” by the Ministry of Health, that New Zealand’s national COVID-19 tracing programme was excellent. This was a curious finding indeed given the programme had in fact not been rolled out (it never really was), but it obviously worked for Verrall.
Verrall cries over her dread that COVID-19 may jeopardize her dream that by 2025 no one in New Zealand will smoke tobacco. She’s less concerned about obesity.
She became especially animated about monkeypox, a rare disease that virtually never kills but which almost exclusively affects men who enjoy promiscuous and/or group sex with other men. Accordingly, Verrall concluded that monkeypox “discriminates” against such men and must therefore be eliminated from Aotearoa. She also concluded that the term “monkeypox” is itself discriminatory (against monkeys, or people with the disease or some other group?) and renamed the affliction “mpox”. Can she really be a qualified medical doctor?
Adrian Orr
It takes a certain type of man to personally suck multi-millions of risk-free dollars out of the public coffers for over 15 years and then demand wage restraint from the masses, in tough economic times he himself created. Adrian Orr, Reserve Bank Governor, is exactly that type of man, who is also blessed with an instinctive sense of how to exploit the Wokegeist.
Orr has discovered and incessantly broadcasts his Cook Islands Māori heritage. He has had the Reserve Bank adopt the Māori mystical god (and kauri tree) Tāne Mahuta in the following terms:
Orr spent more than $400,000 of Reserve Bank money on an art installation for the foyer of the Reserve Bank’s lobby, celebrating, you guessed it, Tāne Mahuta.
A drinking enthusiast, Orr loves to imbibe with former Finance Minister Grant Robertson, who in late 2021 gleefully re-appointed his mate Orr for a further five-year term – the maximum available. Not for Orr those boring old-fashioned notions like a Reserve Bank Governor should be politically independent.
With his ancient Woke wisdom, brave free-thinking and self-serving political partisanship, Orr has ripped up the traditional Reserve Bank Governor playbook and plunged New Zealand into the economic doldrums.
Grant Robertson
Grant Robertson was Adrian Orr’s partner in financial crime and catastrophe. Actually, he’s not a financial criminal, unlike his accountant father who was jailed in 1991 for stealing from his employer.
Like his Labour Party cohorts, Grant has never had a job outside of Government and cut his political teeth in student politics. Despite having been Minister of Finance, he has no financial credentials or useful life experience.
In 2020 Robertson admirably eschewed a central gay “identity”, but still qualifies as a Wokester. In late 2022, he defended Sport NZ’s Transgender Guidelines, which allow biological males to compete against biological females, including in contact and combat sports. In Wokery, cultural safety is paramount; physical safety…not so much.
Robertson’s special political tactic comes straight from the Critical Social Justice Playbook; to cheerfully assert that black is white. As Minister of Finance, he brazenly asserted that household “balance sheets” are in good shape and that New Zealand’s financial position is eminently sound. That’s his personal belief, his “lived experience”, which is enough in Wokedom. Perhaps he really believes money grows on Orr’s Tāne Mahuta tree.
Paul Hunt
Paul Hunt has proved to be one of the most damaging single animal intrusions New Zealand has suffered. In 1992 he arrived from England and became a senior lecturer at that hot bed of tertiary educational mediocrity, Waikato University. He’s remained a good friend of unreconstructed communist, anti-Semite and former head of the British Labour Party, Andrew Corban.
A slow burner to start with in New Zealand, Hunt’s big break came when he was appointed Human Rights Commissioner in 2019. He distinguished himself early in his tenure by getting desperately confused about the Mongrel Mob, the gang with skinhead origins; the clue is in the British Bulldog mascot.
Having convinced himself that the Mongies are a definitively Māori organisation (rather than the multi-racial criminal organisation that they are), Hunt gratefully accepted an invitation issued by Waikato Mongrel Mob public relations liaison officer Louise Hutchinson to present to the Mob and kicked it off by providing $200 cash (not his own) as koha.
Defending his presentation, Hunt fell back on that old Critical Social Justice chestnut, the primacy of lived experiences (over stark realities), stating “I attended the hui to speak, listen and discuss the experiences raised by the Waikato Mongrel Mob Kingdom, acknowledging that these experiences are part of a wider conversation about the importance of social inclusion and belonging in Aotearoa.” Hunt didn’t touch on the lived experiences of the Mob’s multitudes of Aotearoan victims.
Hunt is one of those human rights zealots who believes that one simply has to assert rights to make lives better: declare a right to a house, and houses will magically sprout from the ground; declare a right not to be poor and poverty will be solved (“Poverty is simply a human rights issue. We need to start viewing poverty as an intolerable injustice.”) And so on. Would Hunt drop some his whopping $400,000 annual salary on a house deposit for some of his underprivileged constituents? Don’t bet on it.
Meng Foon
Meng Foon sprang to minor prominence when he was elected Mayor of Gisborne in 2001, a position he held until 2019 when he became Race Relations Commissioner, shortly after Paul Hunt had become Human Rights Commissioner.
In 2001, just before he became Gisborne Major, Foon allegedly got up to mischief in relation to Meng’s Place, a nasty pokie bar that Foon owned and operated in the deprived Gisborne suburb of Kaiti. The allegation was that Foon asked for a kick back in return for his support for a community group’s application for grants from pokie machine proceeds. The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) took no action on the allegation at the time and fought like a rabid dog in 2020 to avoid releasing information about the allegation in response to an Official Information Act request. By the time the Ombudsman intervened, and DIA was forced to release information, multiple documents had gone missing. The Leftie Legions look after their own. Until they don’t…
With the heat beginning to go on the Human Rights Commission (with includes the Race Relations Commissioner), Commissioner Paul Hunt was all too willing to throw (Buf)Foon under the bus for failing to properly disclose donations he had personally made to Kiri Allan, before she appointed him Race Relations Commissioner.
Siouxsie Wiles
Siouxsie (born Susanna) Wiles describes herself as a microbiologist and “science communicator”, but not as a compulsive attention seeker and self-appointed social media canceller.
A veritable Queen of Wokedom, it goes without saying that Siouxsie is a Member of the NZ Order of Merit and was 2021 New Zealander of the Year, hot on the heels of the stratospherically smug actor, “intimacy coordinator” and proud Pakeha Te Reo Māori speaker Jennifer Ward-Lealand.
Siouxsie naturally co-signed a letter objecting to a letter published in the Listener from seven proper academics (the “Listener Seven”) arguing that Matauranga Māori (Māori indigenous knowledge) is incompatible with science and shouldn’t be included in the school science curriculum. The New Zealand Media Council found to be false Siouxsie’s claim, published by Stuff, that the Listener Seven had intimidated junior staff with lawyers’ letters.
A classic cry bully, Siouxsie (together with Shaun Hendy – see below) complained to the Employment Relations Authority that Auckland University was not protecting her from people being mean to her about aspects of her incessant public pontificating on COVID.
Siouxsie loves to play with Lego, despite being an outspoken critic of what she describes as gender bias in Lego minifigurines. Siouxsie has yet to admit that she’s culturally appropriated her adopted first name, deriving as it does from the Sioux confederacy of Native American tribes.
Shaun Hendy
Joined at the hip with Siouxsie Wiles, Shaun Hendy was a co-signatory to the Listener Seven objection letter as well, as indicated, of co-cry bullying to Auckland University about people being mean to him over COVID.
He was vastly more successful than Siouxsie in monetizing COVID, with his firm paid multiple millions by the Government (in an uncontested process) to make predictions about COVID infections and deaths. When his predictions proved to be frightfully over-the-top scaremongering, Shaun claimed that they were better regarded as “scenarios”.
Clearly a big fan of “open letters”, he has co-signed a letter objecting to a proposal for a new Central Otago (Tarra) airport, despite the incontrovertible scientific evidence that climate change is a global phenomenon and that another New Zealand airport won’t make one iota of difference.
Like Siouxsie and Robertson, Shaun is not starving.
Andrew Coster
Andrew Coster is New Zealand’s first overtly Woke Police Commissioner. He’s never been a cop and spends more time on his hair than any of his predecessors.
Coster’s novel approach to policing is to deny there’s much crime at all.
Coster was heavily politically aligned to the Labour Government and typically told that Government exactly what it wanted to hear.
So, when faced with convincing first-hand accounts of lawlessness in the Hawke’s Bay in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, including an incident of guns being pointed at road workers, Coster – ever eager to please his political puppet-masters - initially reported to Prime Minister Hipkins that post-Gabrielle Hawke’s Bay crime was below average and that the gun-pointing incident simply hadn’t occurred. With Hipkins unable to sustain that preposterous and untenable “nothing-to-see-here” narrative, Coster publicly apologised for his deliberately false report.
Rod Carr
Rod Carr chairs New Zealand’s Climate Change Commission.
Unfortunately for him, he is legally blind. And unfortunately for all New Zealanders, Carr is figuratively blind on multiple climate change fronts. His main climate change blind spots are:
He sincerely believes that New Zealand can materially reduce global human-induced climate change by reducing its own emissions of greenhouse gases, despite the fact that New Zealand’s emissions are 0.09% of global emissions i.e. less than 1/1000th
He believes that, if New Zealand reduces its omissions, other major emitters will follow New Zealand’s example. Fact is…fat chance of that
He believes that if New Zealand farmers do not “clean up their practices”, other countries will not buy New Zealand’s agricultural products. Ditto
He advocates for massive reductions in farm animal numbers and animal farming, and says such actions will increase New Zealand’s prosperity
Carr’s crazy religious zeal extends to his looks. He sports a beard like a Muslim Iman…and now has the ego and critical faculties to match. He of course sports a greenstone/pounamu pendant. He nonetheless publicly expressed excitement that his air travel on Climate Change Commission business has given him gold status for NZ New Zealand frequent flying. His Climate Change salary is not public.
Jacinda Ardern
New Zealand is struggling to “process” ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The Queen of Kindness, who turned out not to be overly kind. A person who stopped pronouncing the letter “T” (DiversiDY, SustainabiliDY, CommiDDee) and who spawned a legion of acolytes with the same affectation of speech. A person who displays delusions of world grandeur, only to retreat from the mainstream media into a life of social media coverage of herself and her daughter, Neve Te Aroha. Someone prone to preposterous promises: that she would personally solve child poverty and New Zealand’s social housing crisis, that Aotearoa will compensate anyone who loses their coastal property to erosion, that a “Road to Zero” approach to road deaths is literally achievable.
A darling of the Left whose instincts turned out to be little about old-fashion socialism and big-time about authoritarianism. Whose idea of a day’s work was simply creating more script for her political theatre.
In the end, a bewildered and bewildering cipher of a woman who rendered the form of Labour Party she spawned unelectable, and was de-throned by her own Party. Was she Woke….or what?!
May look vaguely familiar Glenn!
Great article, John!