Winston Peters has been accused of “pure racism” in Parliament by Labour leader Chris Hipkins, who has called out National ministers for failing to combat or challenge it.

The Greens say Peters is scapegoating migrants, while ACT’s David Seymour — his own Cabinet colleague — says Peters is simply seeking attention.

The condemnation came following Parliament’s Question Time yesterday when the NZ First leader singled out a Green MP for his Rarotongan heritage.

Green MP Teanau Tuiono had used the word “Aotearoa” to refer to New Zealand while asking questions about climate aid in the Pacific.

It prompted Peters to interrupt: “Why is [the minister] answering a question from someone who comes from Rarotonga to a country called New Zealand . . . ”

Speaker Gerry Brownlee cut him off to object to noise from other MPs in the debating chamber.

Hipkins then leapt to his feet: “Members in this House are equal. For a member of the House to stand up and question whether someone is entitled to ask a question because of their country of origin is pure racism, and you should’ve stopped him in the beginning.”

Brownlee said he did not hear Peters’ remark, but would review the transcription later.

Peters then completed his question, asking why somebody from Rarotonga had decided “without any consultation with the New Zealand people” to change the country’s name.

In response, Brownlee said that was “not an acceptable question at all”.

“I want that to be the last time that those sort of questions are directed so personally at members of this House,” Brownlee said.

Tuiono has both Māori and Cook Islands Māori heritage but was born in New Zealand.

Hipkins calls out ‘ugly side’ to politics
In a speech to Parliament shortly later, Hipkins decried an “ugly side to New Zealand politics”, calling out “outright race-baiting” and “direct racism” being expressed in the debating chamber.

“Attacks on our Chinese and Asian communities in New Zealand, attacks on our Indian communities in New Zealand, and just today, attacks on whether those who have Pasifika heritage are entitled to ask questions in this house.

“And what have we heard from the government side on those attacks? Absolutely nothing.”

Hipkins said National ministers needed to “combat and challenge that racism” during this year’s election campaign, saying it was “totally unacceptable” for them to “say nothing and do nothing”.

“They are quite happy to stand by while members of their own government attack our Chinese community, our Indian community, our Pasifika community, migrants to New Zealand who work damn hard and contribute to New Zealand, and it’s an absolute disgrace.”

Hipkins said government ministers should celebrate diversity and not cast aspersions on it.

Speaking to reporters later, Hipkins said Peters’ behaviour “had no place in government and Parliament” — but he still would not say whether Labour would be prepared to work with NZ First after the election.

“I’m going make judgements about those things closer to the election, but I’ll call out bad behaviour when I see it.”

Greens call Peters ‘Temu Trump’
Addressing reporters outside Parliament, Tuiono said Peters was using “culture wars” to distract from the real harm he was causing New Zealanders.

“Just like Trump, he’s not very good with geography,” he said. “He just needs to get an atlas. A bilingual one preferably.”

His Green colleague Ricardo Menéndez March said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had failed to show leadership by allowing Peters — “a Temu Trump” — to spread anti-migrant sentiment.

“It’s migrant scapegoating . . .  it’s emboldens people outside of these four walls who wish to cause harm on our migrant communities,” Menéndez March said.

Speaking afterwards, ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour said he would never make such comments but would leave others to judge them for themselves.

“Do I like those comments? No. Would I make those comments? No. But I think if we all go on a 2019-style witch-hunt, we’re actually just fuelling it,” he said.

“If we all get ourselves in a lather, giving them the attention that they want, then that’s just as bad.”

‘Utter nonsense’ claim
In response, Peters told reporters Hipkins was talking “utter nonsense” and he did not care about Seymour’s views.

“How can somebody from another country who’s come to New Zealand decide to change my country’s name?” Peters said.

When told that Tuiono was actually born in New Zealand, Peters said, regardless, the Green MP claimed to be a “Cook Islander”.

“I would never go to the Cook Islands and start changing their name, would I?”

Peters said he was regularly being “literally mobbed” by New Zealanders on matters like the use of the word Aotearoa.

“I’m not indulging fools here. Let me tell you something: stand back and watch the polls go.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

There’s been skillful work in journalism’s dark arts on display in the UK this past week, as the nasty British right-wing media pack tore down two senior BBC executives. The right-wing culture warriors will be celebrating big time.

They reckon they’ve put a big dent in Britain’s most trusted and most used news media with the scalps of director-general Tim Davie and director of news Deborah Turness.

Best of all, the London Daily Telegraph was able to make it look like an inside job (leaning into a paean of outrage from a former part-time “standards” adviser), hiding its hit job behind the pretence of serious investigative journalism.

For the paper long dubbed the Torygraph, it’s just another day of pulling down the country’s centrist institutions for not being right wing enough in the destructive, highly politicised world of British news media.

Sure, there’s criticisms to be made of the BBC’s news output. There’s plenty of research and commentary that pins the broadcaster for leaning over backwards to amplify right-wing talking points over hot-button issues like immigration and crime. (ABC insiders here in Australia call it the preemptive buckle.)

Most recently, for example, a Cardiff University report last month found that nearly a quarter of BBC News programmes included Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — far more coverage than similar-sized parties like the centrist Liberal Democrats or the Greens received.

It’s why there are mixed views about Davie (who started in the marketing rather than the programme-making side of the business), while the generally respected Turness is being mourned and protested more widely.

BBC’s damage-control plan
The resignations flow from the corporation’s damage-control plan around an earlier — and more genuine — BBC scandal: the 2020 expose that then rising star Martin Bashir had forged documents to nab a mid-1990s Princess Diana interview. You know the one: the royal-rocking “there were three of us in the marriage” one.

The Boris Johnson government grabbed onto the scandal as an opportunity to drive “culture change”, as then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden put it in an interview in Murdoch’s The Times. As part of that change, the BBC board (almost always the villain in BBC turmoil) decided to give the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee a bit of a hand, by adding an external “adviser”.

Enter Michael Prescott, a former News Corp political reporter before moving on to PR and lobbying. Not a big BBC gig (it pays $30,000 a year), but it came with the fancy title of “Editorial Adviser”.

Roll forward four years: new government, new board, new BBC scandal. Prescott’s term ended last July. But he left a land-mine behind: a 19-page jeremiad, critiquing the BBC and its staff over three of the right’s touchstone issues: Trump, Gaza and trans people.

It fingered the BBC’s respected Arab programming for anti-Israel bias and smeared LGBTQIA+ reporters for promoting a pro-trans agenda.

Last week, his letter turned up (surprise!) — all over the Telegraph’s front pages, staying there every day since last Tuesday, amplified by its partner on the right, the Daily Mail, helped along with matching deplora-quotes from conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and demands for answers from the Tory MP who chairs the House of Commons Culture Standing Committee.

The one stumble sustaining the outrage? Back in November 2024, on the BBC’s flagship Panorama immediately before the US presidential election, snippets of Trump’s speech on the day of the January 6 riot had been spliced together, bringing together words which had been spoken 50 minutes apart.

Not for the first time, heads have rolled at the BBC following a puffed-up scandal pushed by the UK’s Tory press. Will the ABC learn the lessons of its British compatriot? https://t.co/nteARbd2M3

— Crikey (@crikey_news) November 11, 2025

Carelessness . . . or bias?
Loose editing? Carelessness? Or (as the cacophony on the right insist) demonstrable anti-Trump bias?

The real problem? The loose editing took the report over one of the right’s red lines: suggesting — however lightly — that Trump was in any way responsible for what happened at the US Capital that day.

Feeding the right’s fury, last Thursday the BBC released its findings that a newsreader’s facial expression when she changed a script on-air from “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” laid the BBC “open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity”.

Even as the British news media has deteriorated into the destructive, mean-spirited beast that it has become, outdated syndication arrangements mean Australia’s legacy media has to pretend to take it seriously. And our own conservative media just can’t resist joining in the mother country’s culture wars.

An Australian Financial Review opinion piece by the masthead’s European correspondent Andrew Tillett took the opportunity to rap the knuckles of the ABC, the BBC and “their alleged cabals of leftist journalists and content producers”, while Jacquelin Magnay at The Australian called for a clean-out at the BBC due to its pivot “from providing factual news to becoming an activist for the trans lobby and promoting pro-Gaza voices”.

Trump, of course, was not to be left out of the pile-on, with his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling the BBC “100 percent fake news” — and giving the UK Telegraph another front page to keep the story alive for another day. Overnight, Trump got back into the headlines as he announced his trademark US$1 billion demand on media that displeases him.

It’s not the first time Britain’s Tory media have brought down a BBC boss for being insufficiently right wing. Back in 1987, Thatcher appointed ex-Daily Mail boss Marmaduke Hussey as BBC chair. Within three months, he shocked the niceties of British institutional life when he fired director-general Alastair Milne over the BBC’s reporting on the conservative government.

Here we are almost 40 years later: another puffed-up scandal. Another BBC head falling to the outrage of the British Tory press.

Christopher Warren is an Australian journalist and Crikey’s media correspondent. He was federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) until April 2015, and is a past president of the International Federation of Journalists. This article was first published by Crikey and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

After many years of heated debate over whether January 26 is an appropriate date to celebrate Australia Day — with some councils and other groups shifting away from it — the tide appears to be turning among some groups.

Some local councils, such as Geelong in Victoria, are reversing recent policy and embracing January 26 as a day to celebrate with nationalistic zeal.

They are likely emboldened by what they perceive as an ideological shift occurring more generally in Australia and around the world.

But what of young people? Are young Australians really becoming more conservative and nationalistic, as some are claiming? For example, the Institute for Public Affairs states that “despite relentless indoctrination taking place at schools and universities”, their recent survey showed a 10 percent increase in the proportion of 18-24 year olds who wanted to celebrate Australia Day.

However, the best evidence suggests that claims of a shift towards conservatism among young people are unsupported.

The statement “we should not celebrate Australia Day on January 26” was featured in the Deakin Contemporary History Survey in 2021, 2023, and 2024.

Respondents were asked to indicate their agreement level. The Deakin survey is a repeated cross-sectional study conducted using the Life in Australia panel, managed by the Social Research Centre. This is a nationally representative online probability panel with more than 2000 respondents for each Deakin survey.

Robust social survey
With its large number of participants, weighting and probability selection, the Life in Australia panel is arguably Australia’s most reliable and robust social survey.

The Deakin Contemporary History Survey consists of several questions about the role of history in contemporary society, hence our interest in whether or how Australians might want to celebrate a national day.

Since 1938, when Aboriginal leaders first declared January 26 a “Day of Mourning”, attitudes to this day have reflected how people in Australia see the nation’s history, particularly about the historical and contemporary dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In 2023, we found support for Australia Day on January 26 declined slightly from 2021, and wondered if a more significant change in community sentiment was afoot.

With the addition of the 2024 data, we find that public opinion is solidifying — less a volatile “culture war” and more a set of established positions. Here is what we found:

This figure shows that agreement (combining “strongly agree” and “agree”) with not celebrating Australia Day on January 26 slightly increased in 2023, but returned to the earlier level a year later.

Likewise, disagreement with the statement (again, combining “strongly disagree” and “disagree”) slightly dipped in 2023, but in 2024 returned to levels observed in 2021. “Don’t know” and “refused” responses have consistently remained below 3 percent across all three years. Almost every Australian has a position on when we should celebrate Australia Day, if at all.

Statistical factors
The 2023 dip might reflect a slight shift in public opinion or be due to statistical factors, such as sampling variability. Either way, public sentiment on this issue seems established.

As Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta writer Nayuka Gorrie and Amangu Yamatji woman associate professor Crystal McKinnon have written, the decline in support for Australia Day is the result of decades of activism by Indigenous people.

Though conservative voices have become louder since the failure of the Voice Referendum in 2023, more than 40 percent of the population now believes Australia Day should not be celebrated on January 26.

In addition, the claim of a significant swing towards Australia Day among younger Australians is unsupported.

In 2024, as in earlier iterations of our survey, we found younger Australians (18–34) were more likely to agree that Australia Day should not be celebrated on January 26. More than half of respondents in that age group (53 percent) supported that change, compared to 39 percent of 35–54-year-olds, 33 percent of 55–74-year-olds, and 29 percent of those aged 75 and older.

Conversely, disagreement increases with age. We found 69 percent of those aged 75 and older disagreed, followed by 66 percent of 55–74-year-olds, 59 percent of 35–54-year-olds, and 43 percent of 18–34-year-olds. These trends suggest a steady shift, indicating that an overall majority may favour change within the next two decades.

What might become of Australia Day? We asked those who thought we should not celebrate Australia Day on January 26 what alternative they preferred the most.

Among those who do not want to celebrate Australia Day on January 26, 36 percent prefer replacing it with a new national day on a different date, while 32 percent favour keeping the name but moving it to a different date.

A further 13 percent support keeping January 26 but renaming it to reflect diverse history, and 8 percent advocate abolishing any national day entirely. Another 10 percent didn’t want these options, and less than 1 peecent were unsure.

A lack of clarity
If the big picture suggests a lack of clarity — with nearly 58 percent of the population wanting to keep Australia Day as it is, but 53 percent of younger Australians supporting change — then the task of finding possible alternatives to the status quo seems even more clouded.

Gorrie and McKinnon point to the bigger issues at stake for Indigenous people: treaties, land back, deaths in custody, climate justice, reparations and the state removal of Aboriginal children.

Yet, as our research continues to show, there are few without opinions on this question, and we should not expect it to recede as an issue that animates Australians.

Dr David Lowe is chair in contemporary history, Deakin University; Dr Andrew Singleton is professor of sociology and social research, Deakin University; and Joanna Cruickshank is associate professor in history, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Sex

Whoever would have predicted that the definition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ could ever become a matter of contention? My professional life has been in political economy, which includes social science and humanities: philosophy, economics, history, statistics, demography, and geography. Demography in particular, requires a biological definition.

The objective science of sex is simple, and genetic. Males have a Y-sex-chromosome as well as an X-sex-chromosome; females instead have two X-sex-chromosomes. To get around the fact that some people want to play-down this observation, commentators and politicians often refer to sex as ‘biological sex’ or ‘sex assigned at birth’. Some organisations refer to ‘gender’ when they mean ‘sex’. Statistics New Zealand doesn’t have any of these problems; for example, the first set of data in the New Zealand cohort life tables: March 2023 update is simply labelled ‘Estimated births, deaths, net migration by sex‘.

Confusion exists because there is a different concept, ‘gender’, which also uses male-female categorisation. When it is necessary to avoid confusion, a person’s sex may be characterised as their ‘genetic sex’ (or ‘reproductive sex’) rather than their biological sex; this is because ‘gender’ may also have a biological basis, and some people whose gender differs from their sex may gave gained this gender variation at conception, in the womb before birth, or even in the birth process itself.

Gender

Gender differs from sex in that it is subjective. A sense of divergent identity from within may arise from any mix of biological or cultural influences. On the biological side, possible influences include aspects of the species genome other than the Y-chromosome, environmental influences within the mother’s uterus, and the birth process itself (eg caesarean birth versus natural birth). Endocrinological and neurological variation can occur before, during, or after birth. One important driver of this gender variability is most likely the microbiome: the changing bacteria and other microbes which inhabit especially the gut, the brain, and the birth canal.

Unlike sex, a binary concept, gender is a spectral concept. And gender is not fixed for all time, it’s fluid. The microbiome is mutable; cultural memes amplify, deamplify and reamplify over time.

It seems to me that a good way for demographers to document gender is through a scale from one to nine. One through to three could be characterised as ‘female gender’, four-to-six as ‘non-binary gender’, and seven-to-nine as ‘male gender’. So a somewhat ‘macho’ male might be described as ‘male sex, male (9) gender. And some ‘trans’ women might be best described as ‘male sex, female (3) gender. For short, for data-coding purposes, these two example people could be listed as ‘m9’ and ‘m3’. F1 through to f3 would translate to ‘cis-female’ in the jargon now used by many as gender identifiers. The mere use of this new jargon is of itself a cultural self-identifier.

It is important to note that the prefixes ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ do indicate that the gender-diverse community does in fact make the distinction between sex and gender, and therefore does not fully deny the reality of genetic sex; the issue is deemphasis, not denial. The issue that impassions that community seems to be to render the concept of sex as unimportant, even unnecessary. But, in the sciences of biology, demography and epidemiology, sex can never be redundant.

Demography

The ‘bread and butter’ of demography is reproduction, migration and death. In this context, ‘age’ and ‘location’ are the most important statistical characteristics of people.

‘Sex’ is in the next tranche of important demographic variables, because genetic sex is an important determinant of the reproduction of populations. Sex should be an easy identifier, because sex is an objective attribute; a person’s genetic sex is a matter of observation, just as whether a person has died is a matter of observation.

Another second-tranche demographic variable is ‘ethnicity’, although to be objective it needs to be ‘ancestry’, and ancestry is often not fully-known. (Many people not know who both of their biological parents are, let-alone their great grand-parents; some people do not know that they do not know this information.) In early United States censuses, the description of a person as ‘black’ or ‘white’ was regarded as central to their demographic identity as whether they were male or female. There certainly is an argument, nowadays with most people having multiple ethnicities of different proportions, that ethnicity should be treated as a subjective ‘third-tranche’ demographic variable. Likewise, religion. (The counterargument is that people who are substantially of a single ethnicity, or who were born into particular religions, do have life outcomes – maybe health outcomes or culturally-determined food choices – which reflect in part the ethnic genetics or religious faiths of their parents.) The important thing is that persons’ designated ancestries or religions should never become the basis for differences in their democratic rights. Demographic attributes should be kept separate from democratic attributes (with the exception of the designation of a young person as a ‘minor’).

Gender, a subjective attribute, distinct from sex, may nevertheless be important in a number of social studies. From a demographic viewpoint, gender may be classed as a third-tranche variable. It may be an interesting scientific question to compare and contrast the life experiences of genetic females (ie people without a Y-chromosome) who are gender-female, gender male, or gender non-binary. Likewise, the gender-diverse life-outcomes of genetic males.

Demography is a very important, though underappreciated, social science; a sibling discipline to epidemiology, and also to human geography. Optimal public health outcomes depend on good-quality demographic research. (Demography provides the all-important denominators needed to make sense of public health data.) Further, like all social-science disciplines, demography is intrinsically historical. Demography is closely intertwined with the disciplines of economic history and economics.

Identity Documentation

Sex or gender are widely used in identity documents; too widely, perhaps. For important demographic purposes, sex is necessary in birth certificates, death certificates, and documents used for travelling between countries (especially passports, now the basis for statistics of international migration). Demographers need to know the age and sex distributions of countries’ populations to be able to make population projections. (I congratulate Statistics New Zealand for well-crafted questions on sex and gender in the recent 2023 New Zealand census.)

Additionally, some kind of reliable documentation should be available for persons using spaces which are reserved for specific demographic subgroups. (We should note that women should not be too precious about ‘their spaces’. Those of us old enough remember the racially segregated toilets that used to exist in South Africa and parts of the USA; many white women and white men did not like their spaces to be transgressed by black women and men. Nevertheless, there is no argument at present for the removal of remaining reserved spaces.)

Does a person need to declare their sex or gender if, say, buying a flight ticket, or enrolling at an educational establishment? (How do the recipients of this information use it? Do they use it?) Sex may be useful on a document used to determine entry into restricted spaces. It may be worthwhile to have a bespoke identity document – a voluntary document – that helps people who need to inform others of their sex, gender or age.

The gender-diverse community wishes to play down excessive gendering in our administrative lives, and, for the most part, prefers to have access to unisex toilets rather than have to use sex-exclusive facilities. (Ask any parent with a young child of the ‘opposite’ sex about gauntlets they have had to run re public toilets. Unisex toilets, much more common today than last century, represent commonsense progress.) If, when buying an airline ticket, does the airline really want to know a person’s sex or gender? Yes, maybe; knowledge of their passengers’ sexes (but not genders) could help an airline to estimate the take-off weight of an aircraft.

Finally, in this section on documentation, we probably should not be using birth documents as general identity documents. While a passport should refer to birth documentation (which should designate ‘sex’), I see no reason why other identification documents – eg documents used by banks – need such information. Thankfully, we do not require a person’s ‘race’ on a drivers’ licence or an airline ticket.

Cultural Wars I

In noting that ‘gender’ is very much a subjective attribute of people (and not only people), that is not saying  there are no biological aspects to gender. Nevertheless, to use modern parlance, the confrontations about sex and gender which we are seeing at present are taking place very much in the human ‘cultural space’.

I was intrigued to read Bryce Edwards’ The ugly stoking of a culture war in election year(Evening Report and others, 27 march 2023). It’s a good non-partisan piece of writing. I was intrigued to see that an academic source to whom Edwards referred was a lawyer called Thomas Cranmer.

Much of my time this year has been spent in reading about the historical origins of modernity. It turns out that the culture wars of the sixteenth century in Europe – otherwise known as the protestant Reformation and the catholic Counterreformation – represent central events that created the global modernity which (for worse and for better) we now take for granted today.

The first true battles of that culture war took place in Tudor England, in particular in the years 1547 and 1558, during the short reigns of the young King Edward VI and then his older sister Queen Mary. (In the kinds of dramas about the Tudor period seen on television and in the movies, this critical and difficult period is rarely touched on. Instead we see various reruns of the 1530s’ story about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and, in the later Tudor period, about the contested lives of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.)

A central figure of the mid-sixteenth century cultural war in England was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. In New Zealand, his role in that cultural war is commemorated through the name of Cranmer Square in Christchurch, alongside that of another protestant martyr, Hugh Latimer, who is commemorated in the same city through Latimer Square. This cultural conflict, ostensibly a war of religion but really about much more, lasted a very long time. (Port Chalmers in Otago is named after Thomas Chalmers, a central figure in the Scottish religious schism in the 1840s.) In my historical judgement, this particularly nasty war only ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland. If we start with Martin Luther in 1517 and end in 1998, we may call this the 481-years-war.

(And a piece of historical trivia that does foreshadow the events in England from the 1530s to the 1550s. So many of the prominent people in England in those days had the given name ‘Thomas’. This is because it became fashionable from the 1470s and 1480s to undertake pilgrimages to the then magnificent shrine of Thomas Becket, archbishop and martyr, who was killed in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II. See the reference to this in Chris Trotter assesses what happened on Saturday at Auckland’s Albert Park and what it means, interest.co.nz, 27 March 2023. Becket won fame for standing up to his king, speaking for the separation of church and state as institutions of authority. Indeed, a number of the later Thomases also met their ends through displeasing their monarchs. It’s too late to visit the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury; King Henry VIII looted it to destruction in 1538.)

It is also important to note that the culture war referred to here peaked in Europe in the period from the 1560s to the 1640s; the military component being the ‘Eighty Years War’ between the Spanish Empire and the ‘rebels’ of the Dutch United Provinces (the forerunner of the modern Netherlands), with the last part of the Eighty Years War also being the descent into near-perpetual violence in central Europe known as the Thirty Years War.

While the Reformation is correctly attributed, more than anyone else, to Marty Luther from 1517, the most important figure in the ensuing culture war was Jean Calvin (cis-male), in Geneva, whose principal publication was in 1539 (the second edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion). Calvin’s disciples became evangelists for his more direct and more strident protestant variant of Christianity, becoming a direct and immediate threat to the established (Catholic) Church as well as to the Lutheran reforms. Much of the British ‘intelligentsia’ quickly became attracted to Calvin’s message. But they had to bide their time as King Henry’s administration of the Church in England became very conservative in his last years.

The evangelicals got their chance when the nine-year-old King Edward ascended the throne. They ‘came out’ and basically ran the country. The rhetorical wars commenced and much of the language was inflammatory and belligerent. The Pope who had hitherto been the leader of the Church was now routinely lambasted as the Anti-Christ, the Devil if you will, and Catholics were rhetorically condemned as ‘papists’. (The result was the creation of a climate of rumour whereby the Devil could be anywhere and in any disguise.)

Much of the conservative Establishment bit their tongues and bid their time. Many clerics had been able to go along with King Henry’s sacrilege of the Church’s property (and many of its clergy) so long as the overall doctrine remained substantially unchanged. Others of the Henrician establishment – mainly the ones who would have been seen as ‘progressive’ but who did not naturally take to belligerence – merged into the world of the radicals after 1547. Thomas Cranmer was prominent among this decreasingly ‘moderate’ group. He wrote the new Church prayerbook to fit the new prevailing culture.

Everything changed again when Edward died, aged 15, in 1553. With no male contenders for the throne, the Edwardine radicals tried to install a cousin – Jane Grey – as Queen. But the peasants – the ordinary folk – would have none of that; and for the most part the people were unconcerned about the escalating culture war. They knew very well that the next in line for the throne was Edward’s older half-sister Mary; they wanted their country’s leaders to abide by the rules (of succession), even when those rules were inconvenient. Basically, 1553 was a case of coup and counter-coup. Jane Grey’s key supporters were dispatched by her opponents, and soon enough she was executed too.

Mary was what we might call a ‘cultural conservative’ and she surrounded herself with those former establishment conservatives who had been biding their time. With the ensuing reinstatement of the ‘Heresy Laws’, things heated up, literally. I will say no more, other than to note that Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) became the most renowned victim of this Marian prelude to the Counterreformation. There were many other evangelicals, artisans as well as intellectuals, who chose to die; rather than rejoin the catholic Church, rather than breaking with what they understood as their direct relationship with God. Passions prevailed over pragmatism.

Queen Mary and the ensuing Archbishop of Canterbury (Reginal Pole) both died on 17 November 1558, victims of a pandemic that had all the hallmarks of a coronavirus much like the Covid19 virus. The culture war in England subsequently defused, under the new Elizabethan administration. That defusal in England was facilitated by the self-exile of culture radicals and counter-radicals to Europe, especially to the lands we now call Belgium. And it was there in the 1560s that the religious massacres in Europe really got underway.

Culture Wars 2

I tell the above story as a cautionary warning about how matters can escalate in a culture war when the participants are intentionally inflammatory, belligerent, provocative, and intolerant of people who see certain issues differently. And for too many of the people who could be debating the issues to be intimidated into silence instead. Inflammatory speech, which overlaps with the contemporary concept of ‘hate-speech’, is a form of violence that can have profound consequences. (In the Nazi context, an important consequence was the Holocaust.) Inflammatory speech includes comments – especially comments about groups of people – that are true, but which are said for the purposes of initiating or exacerbating a cultural conflict.

The principal issue in today’s culture war, as I see it, is the determination of a small group of people to eradicate the demographic concept of sex – of genetic sex, of XY sex – as an identity marker.

The most poignant moment that I saw in the television coverage of the events in Auckland on Saturday (refer to Bryce Edwards and Chris Trotter above) was of an older (though not elderly) woman – probably dismissed by the cultural radicals as a TERF – with a placard which simply read:

• XX = female
• XY = male

Completely and incontestably true. The foundation facts of reproductive biology. And not in any way inflammatory.

Yet this placard-holder was crowded out, disrespectfully, by others a generation-and-a-half younger than her. Few people with access to the news media that most people see or hear have spoken-up to support her message. “Bad things happen when good people remain silent.”

And to those who unknowingly or knowingly aggravate the problems which they claim to be addressing, remember the first law of holes: ‘Stop digging’. Like other wars, culture wars drag on because few protagonists of these conflicts have a vision for what success actually looks like. If you must instigate or perpetuate a culture war, then please at least lay out your vision of your utopia. In particular, how should your cultural enemies live and behave? Should your cultural enemies live?

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Some said the US Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on abortion was none of our business, because we don’t have the same legal or political set-up, let alone its religious cleavages and cultural conflicts.

Opinion leaders in our media didn’t agree — and provoked a significant political response.

Days after his election to the National Party leadership in December last year, Christopher Luxon sat down for an interview where he outlined some hardline views on abortion.

Pressed by Newshub’s Jenna Lynch on whether he felt the practice was tantamount to murder, he said “that’s what a pro-life position is”.

Those comments have become newsworthy again this week, as the US Supreme Court handed down a decision to overturn the right to abortion enshrined in the decision Roe v Wade.

Local media, pro-choice advocates and politicians all expressed concern that the National leader would act on his beliefs, and work to ban a practice he considers all-but murderous, if he was able to form a government.

Their worry only escalated after National’s MP for Tāmaki, Simon O’Connor, posted a Facebook status following the Supreme Court’s decision saying “Today is a good day”.

Noted Luxon’s pro-life views
The New Zealand Herald ran an initial story focusing on how every party in Parliament had condemned the court’s ruling bar National. It also noted Luxon’s pro-life views.

Even after Luxon moved to clarify that there would be no changes to abortion law under any government he leads, Labour’s Grant Robertson said people have a “right to be sceptical” about his statements given the views he expressed to Lynch.

Newshub’s Amelia Wade pressed Luxon further on his stance, asking Luxon for his opinion of women who get abortions. He didn’t answer the question directly in Newshub’s report.

“As I’ve said I have a pro-life stance. I think it’s a very difficult and a very agonising decision,” he said.

These stories — and a corresponding outcry on social media — provoked right-wing figures who see it as an attempt to stir up a US-style culture war.

Political commentator Ben Thomas played down the concern over Luxon’s anti-abortion views in an interview on Newstalk ZB.

“We’ve seen pro-life prime ministers like Bill English, Jim Bolger, deputy prime ministers like Jim Anderton just not go anywhere near [abortion] when they’ve been in government,” he pointed out.

Plea to stop US culture war
On Twitter, he pleaded for people to stop trying to stir up US culture wars in New Zealand.

That was echoed by National’s Nicola Willis, who had been criticised for failing to speak up against the Roe v Wade ruling despite her socially liberal credentials.

“I actually think that these attempts by Labour to import US-style culture wars into New Zealand is irresponsible. It is creating needless anxiety,” she told the Herald.

The concern over abortion becoming a political wedge issue is understandable.

Its transformation into a fundamental political dividing line is part of the reason the US now has some of the most hardline abortion laws in the developed world.

But it’s worth noting there’s an element of political convenience in politicians’ statements as well.

National would benefit if people stopped talking about its leader’s publicly-stated position that abortion is tantamount to murder and go back to discussing the cost of living crisis.

It’s hard to get the politics out of politics.

Still deep divisions
Pro-choice advocates have also taken issue with the idea their anxiety is “needless”.

The decision to take abortion out of the Crimes Act in 2020 only passed by a comparatively narrow margin, 68-51.

Two-thirds of National’s caucus voted against it back then, with the aforementioned Simon O’Connor ending his speech with a Latin phrase which translates to “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”.

National MPs also proposed several amendments to that bill which would have restricted abortion access considerably.

Former National MP Amy Adams recently told the media that deep divisions remain in National on the issue.

As for the US culture wars, they appear to have gained a foothold already. Some people might have noticed them camped out on Parliament’s lawns for the better part of a month.

The question for pro-choice supporters is whether to sit back and hope these movements don’t gain momentum, or to apply as much political pressure as possible to protect their own position.

In this case they prompted a strong commitment from an anti-abortion politician to not act on his views if in power. Arguably they succeeded by speaking out strongly and decisively.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz