They’ve marketed themselves as RNZ in recent years because long names confuse people nowadays, punchy marketing soundbites are needed, and Radio Aotearoa is likely not to go over well with their largely older audience.

Having ignored them for the last five years I found myself checking their website each day to find out the Great Chinese Lung Pox Case count, so have had the ‘opportunity” to scan through their other stories. As was entirely predictable they, like all the rest of the NZ MSM, are fully onboard with government policies, actions and measures, although sometimes it comes in the form of attacking the critics, presumably when Labour has produced results or done something so useless or awful that RNZ can’t bring itself to directly defend them.

It’s a version of the play that old hard-line Lefties pulled in the 1980’s re the USSR: they couldn’t defend that crap any more, so they just attacked those attacked the Soviet system; anti-anti-Communists as it were.

So I was pleased and surprised to see this article in the RNZ a few days ago, Prior’s warning:

The writer Bill Pearson’s essay, Fretful Sleepers, written in the wake of the 1951 waterside dispute, famously depicted his fellow citizens as what some might now call “sheeple”.

He warned there “is no one more docile in the face of authority than the New Zealander”, a condition he said arose from “a docile sleepy electorate, veneration of war heroes, willingness to persecute those who don’t conform, gullibility in the face of headlines and radio pep talks”.

Heh. That must have got up the nose of more than a few members RNZ’s Leftie luvvies, who have feasted for years on the martyrdom of 1951 and the terrible things it said about their Right-wing fellow citizens.

But the article mentions another person, one Arthur Prior, “the greatest New Zealand philosopher of the 20th century” (sadly we can’t claim Karl Popper, even though he wrote his famous essay The Open Society and Its Enemies, while teaching here)

In Prior’s speech to the Civil Liberties Council in 1955, titled The Threat to Civil Liberties in New Zealand, Today and Tomorrow, Prior identified three “rather deep-seated national habits and weaknesses … in our national temperament”. These were:

  1. Careless Legislation
    “what might be called our habit of lazy and careless legislation” – laws that enter the statue books not because of any conspiracy but because “of a lack of concern and watchfulness”
    …
    He called this “oppression on paper with liberty in fact” – that is, daily life continues unaffected until a government threatens to enact the dormant legislation.
  2. Political tribalism
    “unscrupulous party spirit” – what today we might call political tribalism – whereby “we cannot admit that sometimes our own bunch are wrong and the other bunch is right”.
  3. Blanket of silence
    “a certain excessive readiness to take offence which we New Zealanders exhibit”.
    …
    “For some reason, it is only too easy for a person or organisation to go to the powers that be and say, ‘Look here, it hurts us to hear somebody saying so-and-so’, and the powers that be will reply, ‘Goodness me, I’m sorry to hear that – we’ll just stop them saying it then’.”

As the RNZ writer points out that last sounds an awful lot like “cancel culture”, and in case you’ve forgotten:

… its application sometimes requires the government to protect you from being censored by other citizens. For example, the government has a duty to protect you from being attacked by a hostile mob that doesn’t like your ideas or having your public speech disrupted by a heckler’s veto.