I’m too young to remember the Citizens For Rowling campaign but Karl du Fresne is not, and the memories are not good despite the following (which, in today’s political climate, has to be put out there as the disclaiming cough):

I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too.
…
I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.

What has pushed Karl into these memories is a surprising connection of that past to the present as he lists off the names of the Great And The Worthy who signed onto Citizens For Rowling: Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves,  businessman Sir Jack Harris… “and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer”:

It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.

I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.

Mmmmmmmm… the juicy, juicy goodness of history, irony and Schadenfreudeliciousness.

As du Fresne – and more than a few of his commentators who voted Labour in 1975 while looking over their shoulders at this shite – make clear:

There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.

I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view.

Heh. The Listener and RNZ, MSM sources I haven’t looked at in two and one decade respectively, despite once attending to them frequently and in detail. And just as in 1975, where the campaign was fucking gold for Muldoon (hence the cartoon rather than one of Rowling) this is likely to have the same effect for Seymour’s bill.

BTW, this comment over there by a Labour supporter of the day, one Paul Peters, cracked me up as an example of both the words and thoughts (which would be demonised nowadays) and the actions of New Zealanders in relation to those words and thoughts:

One little side story from 1975 was the Socialist Unity Party, the pro-Moscow communist party, fielding Les Taylor as a candidate in the Stratford electorate. He had an adapted ute fitted with banners and a loudhailer and took his campaign into the hills at Whangamomona and beyond. Better-dead-than-red country. The farmers out there gave him credit for guts and not everyone was nasty to him. He got 12 votes. I remember several reporters including me discussing him at work. Les was gay at a time it was illegal, a communist, a ”Pom” and possibly worst of all a soccer supporter.

One workmate said: ”Poor bastard hasn’t got much going for him”, in the political climate of the day.

Brilliant.