Ben Thomas: Will the battle against 'woke' be enough to get Winston Peters back in parliament?

Wednesday, 29 March 2023

'Why are we putting up with this bulldust?' Winston Peters asked supporters during his address in Howick.

Ben Thomas is a public relations consultant and political commentator who has worked for the National Party. He is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: In a world where a “cis white male” like Stuart Nash can be sacked as a minister for nothing more than repeated consequential breaches of his Cabinet responsibilities, will the so-called culture wars be a factor in this year’s election?

That’s the hope of Winston Peters, who was dumped from Parliament by the electorate in 2020, three years after he launched the global profile of Jacinda Ardern by entering coalition with Labour, and launched his bid to return last Friday.

It’s a bold tactic: excoriating Māori names for government departments (Peters himself founded Te Puni Kōkiri in the 1990s) and pledging a war on “wokeness”, telling his audience to “take back your country” from the government and presumably whoever installed them in power six years ago.

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Winston Peters walks to the stage to give his state of the nation speech.

It’s not entirely new territory for the New Zealand First leader. He first appeared to wage a war on wokeness in 2019, on a diplomatic trip to Turkey, when he was pictured apparently dozing during a key meeting. He later claimed he had been deep in concentration, listening. And he has been listening again, although it is not clear whether it’s been to his former voters, the anti-vaccine-mandate protesters outside Parliament last year whom he welcomed, or simply to Fox News as he lounges at home in retirement.

At least a couple of these would explain his interest in starting so-called “culture wars”, a longstanding feature of American politics which have prioritised culture and social issues: think the battles which have put Roe v Wade at the centre of debate while other countries’ laws have moved on along with their populations.

By invoking “wokeness”, Peters is talking about the supercharged version of the culture wars, which can be thought of as a mutation of the strain around the time of Donald Trump and the Maga movement.

Wokeness is more of a tone than a set of policies or ideology; a belief in the importance of clear-cut subjective individual psychology and morality over substantive progress, and an obsession with categorisation of identities.

Its greatest sin, even to those obsessed with its destruction, seems to be that it is annoying. Even the word is annoying.

But the tunnel vision focus on group identification became mirrored on the American right: a kind of inverted vision where group identity was “being against wokeness”. The identification of “sides” ended up being more important than any specific policy issue.

From the unedifying spectacle of America’s Evangelical Christian right falling in behind Donald Trump, to the de facto school book banning policies of presidential hopeful Rick DeSantis in Florida, what is important is inflicting emotional pain on “snowflakes” or woke people.

Will this American invention be enough to bring Peters back into Parliament? It seems unlikely. This is both because of the temperament and style of our political parties and the political realities of the electorate.

Our parties are different. National’s education policy is to refocus on reading and writing and maths for an hour a day, not to ban books like American Republicans. Labour, until recently, had a place for Stuart Nash.

The more salient feature of what could best be described as culture-war-culture is that it is intended to be a war, between two sides. In the US, the number of swing voters has plummeted. Instead of reaching into the centre, the two major parties have been increasingly encouraged to double down ever further to their base supporters.

In New Zealand, swing voters are plentiful. A third of Labour’s record 2020 vote share has already come adrift. National’s vote percentage, after staying anchored in the 40s for more than a decade, collapsed to 25% in 2020 as Labour surged to record support – around a third of which it has since shed. New Zealand voters move around, and not simply in incremental shuffles along the imagined political spectrum.

ACT has said around a third of its new support has come from Labour voters.

Polls confirm what is blindingly obvious in a time of rising inflation: the majority of voters are concerned about cost of living issues (along with law and order, housing, and how to deal with climate change). Most voters want to own a house, not phantasmal political opponents.

What little room remains for the so-called “culture wars” is occupied by the Greens and ACT, which have been engaged in mutually beneficial baiting over these rhetorical cultural issues for the past five years, since Peters was otherwise engaged propping up the Labour government he now claims to despise.

In his absence, ACT has also snared the support in the regions Peters would normally hope to rely on through strong advocacy for farming and the rural sector, rather than Fox News-style antics. In 2023, Peters is too late to the battle.