National, despite having recovered from the depths of its 2020 catastrophe, is failing to open up a gap against the most useless, incompetent NZ government in my life. Perhaps this will change over the course of 2023 but given the increasingly tough choices facing New Zealand voters it seems to me that fear will allow Labour to keep 30-35% of the vote despite all their failures.

Perhaps this is what has driven DPF over at Kiwiblog to produce a series of posts on crime in New Zealand – both the rate of it and the specific instances of brutality, the poor state of education and healthcare, economics and the minimum wage and, most of all, Iwi “co-governance” seeping into legislation far beyond Treaty of Waitangi settlements – things like the Maori Health Authority, Three Waters, and the RMA reforms.

Today brings us, Lange on the Treaty, in which he and other various worthies in the political firmament – Brash, Peters, Sir Apirana Ngata – are quoted in their rejection of Maori sovereignty arising from the ToW. The post itself merely arises from one written by Brash – New Zealand is reaching a crisis point.

All of these are no doubt what DPF believes and good on him. But the reality is that it may lead his Kiwiblog commentariat, or even National and ACT voters to believe that this revolution is going to be slowed or stopped or perhaps even reversed by a National/ACT government.

That is not going to happen and another political commentator and blogger, Chris Trotter, while often more florid and hysterical in his thoughts and writings than DPF, actually has a much better handle on what is happening in his post A Real Revolution:

“I think the general public is not aware that we are going through huge revolutionary changes in the country and, in fact, we have taken that such a long way, there is no going back.” – Dame Claudia Orange

That is the authentic, arrogant voice of a winner who knows what has happened throughout New Zealand politics, bureaucracy, the legal system, school, academia and increasingly our business world. Add to her voice that of people like Mahuta, Rawiri Waititi, the Harawira’s, Kiri Allan, Willie Jackson, Joanne Mihingarangi Forbes and countless other lessor known activists.

It’s notable that one of his Far Left commentators appropriately quotes the communist Antonio Gramsci, who saw how better to destroy Western societies than Marx’s primitive class warfare:

One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality.

Gramsci’s successors are much closer to achieving their objective than the direct heirs of Marx ever were, through their focus on a cultural revolution. However, Gramsci likely never foresaw allies such as National’s Chris Finlayson:

“I simply say to people, one, there’s a new regime, get with it folks; two, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

While he says there’s room for robust debate about the co-governance model between the Crown and iwi and hapū, Finlayson’s advice for dealing with the “sour right” behind the racist, resentful rhetoric: “We’ve just got to leave those losers behind and move on. They don’t like tangata whenua. They dream of a world that never was and never could be,” he says.

And there are plenty more where he came from:

My prediction, there will be a substantial empowering of iwi in education, heath, housing supply and social policy in the next few years. National will go along with most of this once they are back in government, just as they have done so since 1990.

In that sense Don Brash was a bit of an aberration, one that National is not keen on repeating.

Lange, Brash, Ngata and others are the voices of the dead and – as Finlayson describes – the losers of this debate, The only thing that can stop it now will be its own excesses; the revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children – but Gramsci never cared about that anymore than other communists.

But how many years or decades will that take, and what destruction will it leave in its wake? Judging from this quote from another of Trotter’s commentators the destruction is already gathering pace:

We run business servicing the Wellington PTB, every time we contract for work we are required to extend Te Tiriti type requirements even further.

So far to win business, we have had to partner with a Māori organisation (so ‘cut them in’ on everything) and have run cultural sensitivity training for all senior staff. Recently for a big contract, they asked the Māori partner if she spoke Te Reo (she does) and what she was going to do to ensure all the staff were reflecting treaty issues in their work so had to give a commitment on wider cultural training and monitoring of Tiriti aims.

All this in 2+ years. On top of this, every govt institution has Te Tiriti and cultural norms embedded in every policy and procedure. Meng and Paul have got their hands down into many, many organisations and State Services is in it up to their necks as well.

After 3 years of pushing out experienced people on the basis of age, race, gender or wokeness level (dinosaurism) and selecting on identity, many departments are in a shambles. The horse has bolted and was last seen North of Kaihohe.

We have been calling it a quiet coup for a while. And the problem is where to from here? It will be almost impossible to remove without an Act of Parliament overruling all references to race, gender etc and preferential treatment and I doubt anyone has the guts to do this.