A new terrorism and extremism research centre has opened, and backers of the initiative hope it makes New Zealand a safer and more inclusive society.
Ministers today launched He Whenua Taurikura – the National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.
He Whenua Taurikura directors are Prof Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) and Distinguished Prof Emeritus Paul Spoonley.
“This is our message-in-a-bottle moment,” Kidman said.
Ummmm, isn’t Professor Joanne Kidman the worst person to appoint to an extremism taskforce?
This academic research unit will advise the Government on how to clamp down on our free speech and restrict our civil liberties for the implementation of woke doctrine. It is half social engineering and half Identity Politics Stasi.
There is still a push to create a national intelligence and security agency whose lidless eye will stare unblinkingly over the people to ‘save’ us.
Labour have been pushed back on their hate speech madness, but are still trying to find new ways to restrict free speech, meaning this new Extremist Research Academy will have vast influence over very large powers, which brings us to the problematic appointment of Professor Joanne Kidman.
The good professor was the one who called out and started the woke cancellation of Dress Maker Trelise Cooper for a dress called the ‘Trail of Tiers’ which Kidman argued was a play on the ‘Trial of Tears’, the genocidal forced march of 46,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850 by the United States federal government.
Hands up who thinks for one second that Trelise bloody Cooper had any idea whatsoever what the Trail of Tears was or intended to culturally appropriate a genocidal forced march?
Kidman wanted Cooper cancelled for a dress, that’s her threshold for hate and extremism, a dress maker who had no idea of an indigenous atrocity.
That’s the person in charge of an Academy on Extremism? Someone who is triggered by a dress and who used their platform to start a woke Lynch mob?
Now the good Professor Joanne Kidman may scream in rage that I’ve reminded everyone what her brittle thresholds for hate crimes are just as she gets her large dollop of creamy public money to investigate extremism, but I would calmly retort that Professor Joanne Kidman is getting the exact same zero benefit of the doubt that she as a woke crusader gave Trelise Cooper.
If the good Professor Joanne Kidman doesn’t like the taste of her own medicine, perhaps that’s a teachable moment?
Anything coming out of this extremism research centre must be challenged.
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I had exactly the same thoughts. A way to give a veneer of legitimacy to a clampdown on civil liberties and woke politics authoritarianism wrapped in fear-mongering. Professor Spoonley is also terrifying – he has been a man on a hunt for far right extemeism in NZ for decades, like McCarthy searching for communists under every bed bed. Never mind the fact Tarrant was an Australian who dropped his hideous and hateful ideology into NZ or that Labour presided over the gleeful stayed division and exclusion of society.
So what do we do? Frankly I’m sad at how academia has become a critical social justice infested rabbit-warren. It was a bastion of critical thought, now it is firmly ensconced in Labour money and ideology.
Martyn thinks there’ll be a big Pakeha backlash – there won’t be. The nearest thing to a pushback resides with Luxon, who is a woke-washed idiot and virtually all our institutions from the Law Society to Nurses Union are emeshed in this ideology. We’ll
mutter amongst friends, but nothing will happen. Institutional capture is virtually complete.
Farewell New Zealand, hello the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Aotearoa; a semi-democracy built on racial bifurcation and suffocating social engineering.
“So what do we do? ”
I’m not a fan of Jordan Williams more a fan of Matt McCarten and this is not a left right issue. Support free speech by joining their Free Speech Union. http://www.fsu.nz
I second that Joseph.
If you cant afford $50 to join, go on the mailing list and flick off a few emails to people when the FSU raise issues, like to the Royal Society and AUT and Auckland District Council. Keep the pressure on, there is more than one way to contribute.
Fantail Is it a $50.00 joining fee or annual fee ? Thanks.
James I agree with you about Spoonley. Until recently I’d identified four or five permanently disgruntled trouble-makers who can usually be answered individually whereupon they lie low for a whole until something else triggers them, and up they pop again; Kelvin Davis’s bad colonialist diatribe revealed that these sort of basically racist attitudes may in fact be quite widespread within certain social groups. I also don’t see a big Pakeha backlash, but I wouldn’t mind knowing the Nats attitude to anti-free speech laws. I worked as an academic at VU in the 1990’s, and worked hard and trouble free among persons I much respected, staff and students alike, and am appalled about the debasing and downgrading of our universities, which seems to be symptomatic of what’s happened throughout New Zealand.
News of the centre for ‘research and countering extremism ‘ is a chilling sort of extremism in itself, totally surreal, and potentially dangerous – some poor blighters will find themselves even poorer when they have to consult with lawyers over innocent activities like the name of a frock, or the decoration on a birthday cake, but
this whole misguided venture has too many Orwellian echoes – and it will never stop the lone rangers anyway.
Agree also Snow. I shudder every time I see Spoonley in the news. He is such a woketard and very divisive.
As to the initiative itself, there is definite potential for stasi like tendencies but when I first saw it and in particular the name of it, the’ Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism’ just screamed to me – Jacinda is virtue signalling for the international/US market ahead of her career change.
Violent Extremism in NZ, yeah right – before Jacinda got into government there was almost none. Tarrant has served as a useful idiot for Jacinda’s authoritarianism and self aggrandisement. (Not to make light of the catastrophe and its long term effects).
Increasingly the dual lingo names of government agencies have been becoming whittled down to a single name such as Taumata Arowai but this new initiative has a widely publicised English name with the Maori one hardly featuring in print.
And although this must have been in the works for some time, it gets announced immediately after Ardern’s return from her Christchurch Call and Gun Violence politicking overseas.
Fantail. “ Excellence” is another buzz word which should be abolished (Haha). SOE’s and similar privatised quangos referred to themselves as excellent, or centres of excellence 20 + years ago, and politicians resurrecting it now to try and impress the plebs are totally pathetic.
What exactly is wrong with Spoonley? Serious question.
Is it just that he has a propensity to be all conciliatory and not the ‘change-maker’ you and I would hope for?
/agreed though that the appointments are just the usual shite we should now be accustomed to.
You were in academia apparently in the 90s?. Imagine what it must be like now with muppets like Guildford running things. Spoonley is probably one that thinks it’s still better being inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. In many ways, I admire him but I’m past caring really. Que Sera Sera. We (collectively – i.e. that ‘us’ team of 5 million) will get what we deserve.
Spoonley introduces his thesis with
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
If history has a meaning, it is as a lesson
for the present. To be wrong now, and to
fail to see the reality of a future rise of
fascism, would not be excusable however much
it might have been in the past.
Poulantzas (1979: 358)
[There is a tendency to see]…fascism as a
kind of bacterial disease, now provably
curable but with the regrettable tendency to
flare up again, in minor epidemics, in the
Jess wholesome quarters of the body politic.
Edgar (1981: 20)
………
Blank Slate: Ignores an innate human nature (“we are all b**tards”) – sees the mind as being contaminated.
He and Steve Maharey started at Massey at the time of the Springbok tour and there was a move in Anglo countries to dismantle their ethnic base. There is another side to the argument (Eric Kaufmann, Jon Haidt etc).
it is the instability of the ethnicless society (or seems to be) that is behind what is effectively, narrative control.
I couldn’t agree more. My OU Magazine May 22 remains unopened for featuring Kidman headlined on the cover as “Landmark wahine Maori leadership”. I may well leave it in its plastic bag forever. As an ex-OU student activist I feel very let down, that our first New Zealand University, founded by independent Scots with a worthy historic tradition of extolling the importance of a solid education, has fallen so far from grace as to embrace the trite intolerance of the political correctness which is asphyxiating this little country into an oxygen-deprived nation of stumbling zombies. Kidman, to me, is stereotype of the bullying women trying to laud it over others, by virtue of being non-white.
Ironic that she targeted a very successful fashion icon, but mean girls can be like that, and there’s a word for them. What’s more, using tax payer money to fund an anti-extremist group centred in academia shows a certain disconnect by the government, especially if they have handpicked the appointees themselves, and at Victoria University itself, there are academics too intimidated to speak out on these issues because they are clinging onto their jobs with less security than the message inside Joanne Kidman’s bottle.
I thought that the police were going to be deciding what constitutes ‘ hate speech ‘, and I reckon that the girls and boys in blue, have a better working knowledge of societal dynamics than persons in narrowly defined jobs appointed by a government that turns hoses onto its dissenters and refuses to speak with them at all. What a mess.
So Kidman/Baxter is the same person?
It wouldn’t be the first stuff up with appointments and it won’t be the last, especially when the motivation is towards the appearance of being “fair and balanced” Fox News style. Look at Simon Power
Another waste of taxpayer money and reason for people to not vote Labeen.
It is bad enough that people have little to look forward to in NZ as more and more inability to get anything done, but now if you create a dress, (after climbing a pretty high mountain to become a top NZ designer) you may be labeled a hate criminal, because some woketard bloated on the taxpayers teat, finds some obscure reference, that only the woke Stasi can understand.
Meanwhile youth had their quality education cancelled from the woke, so are only qualified as a chef or nighttime golf person, as the new woke courses in NZ’s academies of higher learning.
After that sort of thing, best to shut up, do nothing and just get that Raro trip as the highlight of living in NZ (middle class) or $13 for the beneficiaries and working class, to get an uber out of your now unsafe rental because your neighbours are threatening to kill you. Beware of a shoot out as you put up some yellow/red curtains or push a child on a swing, and therefore must be sending a gang message to that poor victimised gang member who just needs more taxpayer help and money to prosper.
Fuck me, between the triggers of gangs (coloured clothing) and triggers of woke (name of dresses), no wonder people are not feeling safe anymore in NZ. Government set up a terrorism taskforce with key members attacking people over dresses? Sorry not what people are worried about when they worry about terrorism. C
How is the 3rd Labeen taskforce going on working out why the public health waiting lists keep increasing?
Or another Labeen taskforce and mass privatisation of state house land to make the state house waiting lists and emergency housing waiting lists go down, that actually keep going up with their woke/neoliberal approaches?
It is now costing 1m a DAY in emergency and transitional housing but many metrics are also not being collected. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300287391/emergency-housing-costs-weigh-on-government-books-costing-hundreds-of-millions-a-year
Weirdly under the old system HNZ actually ran a profit. We now work out that woke and neoliberalism seems to increase the amount of money from taxpayers to billionaires and developers overseas and in NZ ‘developing’ up the land for more poor to live in while increasing the cost of rental properties.
All these apartments and gerrymandering and never-ending infrastructure closures in Auckland have created a glut of apartment style housing in Labeens name, but fewer people want to live in. House prices are falling so they achieved something they said they set out to do, but they then rush to allow another wave of lazy immigration which defeats the purpose of the supposed oversupply strategy of housing to make housing more affordable.
Meanwhile 21% increase in the cost of building from last year. They seem to be increasing the cost of housing instead of filling up the existing housing that is empty.
Forgot to enquire how the wrongful conviction justice taskforce is working out – overturned any injustice yet or just another bunch of government lawyers ‘busy’ and needing ‘more resources’ to get the immense job done?
How about the new supermarket taskforce being appointed after yet another commerce commission enquiry?
The 3 waters taskforce to take over the water. How much spent on consultants and marketing so far?
The DHB taskforce to get rid of the DHB’s?
While all these expensive restructures enrich the government ‘friends & family, lobbyists & networker’ consultants working it all out on paper over years with everything on hold until then, in addition to the amount of money needing to be spent on more marketing and communications to try and put a good spin on it all, it makes everything worse for the service, customers and workers in the organisations.
Thus more people leave, being replaced by statistically much lower skill set to make dumb lives matter more, in NZ. Can’t wait for the next anti vaxx protest or the next TreliseGate or KamahlGate or Speak Up for Woman being banned https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/speak-up-for-women-controversy-billboard-removed-mayor-apologises/CGUGDIAATDU3CCE56TUMCMJOQM/ Elizabeth Rata being cancelled for being th wrong type of Maori and scientists being cancelled for being the wrong type of Scientists.
What a tolerant, free speaking, society the woke stasti make us! Sarc.
Interesting article Martyn, thanks for that.
Also you raised good points in your comments “save NZ” Thank you.
The Extremism Task Force, tasked with enforcing extremism!
Tui. I’m wondering how exactly these appointments as government extremist enforcers were made. I’m not aware of the positions being advertised at all.
That’s just it Applewood, they are being made corruptly. And its happening all over. At senior level, being Maori, woke and connected is what matters. White and Asian people of 50 or so will not even be allowed an interview though in many cases, jobs are not advertised simply gifted.
@Fantail is it also being ‘connected’ to Iwi around Auckland and Waikato? I have friends in Hawkes Bay and Northland and am told their Iwi leadership is not plugged into the woke industrial complex.
Tui. Things have always been done this way, viz personal connections, appointments being given as rewards etc. Way back, the only really racist person I knew, boasted about being put on some prisoners’ welfare committee because her husband was Jim McClay’s electorate secretary. She complained about blacks allowed in restaurants in Sth Africa. I thought her unsuitable. Trying to ascertain how these current appointments were made just provides employment for the script writers.
This is a much bigger game when, as others have noted, it looks very much like social engineering, and worse than anything Bill English tried.
It has the potential to impact at a national level, and has the potential to be sinister, and it’s not clear quite what the aim is, apart from not wanting people to use offensive language or shit stir, which are already covered by existing legislation.
Politicians virtue signalling is wearing thin as a ploy to garner votes from the gullible public, we’re heartily sick of it. We’re not always as thick as them.
The best scenario here is that this VUW extremist lot are another bevy of useless clowns, but appointing people who possibly have their own agendas or prejudices, is not confidence inspiring. The whole condescending exercise does look like time-wasting poppycock dreamed up on the deck chairs of Deck Chair University and an unnecessary waste of hard-working tax payers’ money.
It’s a lack of originality by the NZ government. US homeland security recently set up the Disinformation Governance Board (Ministry of Truth) led by self proclaimed “disinformation fellow” Nina Jankowicz herself famous for propagating disinformation such as dismissing the Hunter Biden Laptop story as a fairy tale and product of the Trump campaign. She was also a fan of the Steel dossier and opponent of so called ‘free speech absolutism’.
My guess is the NZ government was feeling FOMO and wanted their own Orwellian institution led by an eminently unsuitable partisan actor. May it last as long as the US MoT.
How did the political left in the anglosphere let Free Speech become a right wing issue?
The Whenua Taurikura is a concept which has been closely associated with the political program of the NZSIS in the months and years since the Christchurch massacre. There is nothing wrong with the idea of a peaceful and prosperous land, but how we get to that end is the key question. The SIS think that it can be achieved by reining in the “extremists” and “radicals” so that colonial capitalism can freely operate in a benign environment.
I happen to think that is a misguided and even dangerous notion. Professors Kidman and Spoonley may naively assume that all they will be doing is help create an Aotearoa free from hatred and violence. Unfortunately that is not the case. As members of a state run institution with links to the SIS they will be diverting attention from the systemic causes of inequality, violence and hatred and focusing on the popular responses, misguided as they may sometimes be, to the ravages of colonial capitalism.
What is absolutely wrong about all this, is that we already have a whole heap of organisations GCSB, SIS, police etc. etc. (I know they were listed on the blog sometime) with an enormous enormous amount of money. i have been reading the series on Stuff by Eugene Bingham about the non-action non-interest by all the current mob who should have and could have been if not wise to the event on the ball over the possibilities had they actually listened to the moslem women who wrote who met and where a committee was set up that NO government department actually went to after the first meeting. This is a disgrace, some of those who dropped the ball should have had the push instead I expect they got a performance amount that year………………
NZ sheeple – Bloated, Bleated and Rooted.
In Urban Dictionary/s vulgar, common meanings:
rooted
1. To be Utterly Exhausted, depleted of energy
2. When an object is damaged or appears to be functioning incorrectly
3. To engage in sexual activity
4. Extremely Intoxicated
5. To take Root and begin to grow
***
1. To be Utterly Exhausted , depleted of energy:
“Hey Johnno – maaaaate, just got home from work.. I’m Rooted”
Chooka: “Hey Davo – wonna go fishing?”
Davo: ” No Mate, Just mowed the lawn I’m Rooted”
2. when an object is damaged or appears to be functioning incorrectly:
“The Car won’t start – I think the battery is rooted”
“All i get is blue screens – this computer’s Rooted”
3. To engage in sexual activity:
“Did you here that Stevo Rooted Jessica after the christmas party”
“Yep – that was after I Rooted Eunice”
4. Extremely Intoxicated:
“Man I had 12 pints at the royal, then Stan fired up a joint, I was Rooted”
“After downing half a bottle of wild turkey, I was rooted”
“Dude that Rooted Me”
5. 5. To take Root and begin to grow:
“Cool – those cuttings have rooted”
by Arthur Stagg October 24, 2005
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rooted
A good cafe’ name if it hasn’t already been taken – ‘Bad Taste Hangout’ –
The Place where you aren’t afraid if everyone knows your name.
Santamaria: I like your skirt.
Kidman: Your dress is hate.
Karl du Fresne: ‘Special mention should be made of Victoria University professor Joanna Kidman’s impeccably thoughtful, mature contribution to the debate. In a sneering tweet reproduced (with implied approval) by RNZ, Kidman referred to the Listener letter signatories and asked, “Where do these shuffling zombies come from? Is it something in the water?” It was accompanied by a video clip from a zombie movie.
‘Now there’s intellectual engagement for you. If you ever wondered why the once honourable title of professor no longer commands the respect it once did, there’s your answer, right there. It probably comes as no surprise to learn that Kidman (Ngati Maniapoto, Ngati Raukawa) is a sociologist – an academic discipline steeped in strict scientific rigour.’
http://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2021/07/another-dismal-setback-for-intellectual.html
Sociologists do good work when they can keep their heady ideas under control. Anyone van wish to believe in fairies, but they need to do it in their own time and not as part of their paid work.
When criticising remember that science found time and money and eager beavers to develop the atom bomb and others took it o and used it. Terry Pratchett was a very intelligent man and parodied certain things in his books. He wrote about a university with books that had to be chained shut so that their potent spells could not get out and upset present reality.
John Trezise – Indeed. If you look at the hard and disciplined grind involved in becoming a Professor of Pediatrics, or Classics, or Mathematics, or Physics, or Philology, and contrast them with Sociology in its current New Zealand context, then one can only feel a profound mistrust about the semi-literate glibness of current so-called academia.
Apart from this idiotic virtue-signalling exercise being socially unnecessary, the sort of persons perhaps best suited to participate in it, would probably be totally uninterested in doing so, they function at a level most parliamentarians would struggle to reach or to even relate to.
John T Others have also commented about Joanna’s crude mode of parlance ( great word – let’s abolish it – burn the Scottish hymnal ) but alley-speak may be a requirement for persons in her position now, I might try and find out; it rather looks like a lashing out at accepted conventions and proprietaries, who knows.
Maybe you could find out what our execrable prime minister was doing at Blackrock?
If anyone’s interested, Trail of Tears is also the name of a song by the symphonic metal band Nightwish (with lyrics about Native Americans and stuff). It seems more plausible that the dress designer likes the band and saw a chance for a play on words. Of course a publicity-seeking crusading woke extremist would go straight for the implausible explanation: the dress purposely refers to genocide, and she got the publicity she wanted thanks to the tabloid media.
Ah, you Godless Endeavour, thank you for leading into the realms of the metaphysical on a Sunday – a gloomy sort of Sunday.
Cooper, frock-maker rather than the barrel-maker of her forebears, is creative, she is an artist. To be able to make dosh as well as being able to create is great stuff – most don’t. Ask any poet. I think that Landfall used to pay a dollar a line for poetry – might have been less.
Robert Frost : “ Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I suspect that they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by… poets get theirs cavalierly and as it happens…let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the fields”.
Frost’s complete passage here is well worth reading in full, but I didn’t want to imply that Kidman is a scholar, and my typing finger is sore and my left eye.
A song … It seems that Cooper may have picked up, on something, somewhere, in any what way, when naming her frock, but Kidman’s clobbering her for this turned Cooper’s pretty ethereal Trail of Tiers into her own personal Trail of Tears.
Beware the Kidman.
And what makes this all the more interesting is that both Kidman and Spoonley were on the selection panel for the appointments…appointing themselves to a 150-200k job!
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