Neoliberalism as Content Marketing
Whale strandings and whale rescues are a feature of life on the Aotearoa coastline. The baby orca Toa coming ashore amongst the sharp earthquake-terraced rocks north of Porirua was a story grounded in leadership by Ngāti Toa Rangatira and the local community as well as scientists and vets coming together to make hard decisions, as some news reports of the situation conveyed.
Screencaps of Magic Talk and TVNZ clickbait
Trying to trap the lost baby whale in a net of austerity clichés through headlines and press releases came across as a vote loser rather than a vote winner. It might have gotten people to click and share but turning the poor creature into a main character in the culture war seemed relentlessly negative, cruel and pointless.
Pearl-clutching over miniscule government spending on this insulted people who support whale rescues. It was dismissive to the community around Karehana Bay. It was a fundamentally irrelevant and dishonest argument, given that a lot of this happened on the same day the line items of the recent America’s Cup failure revealed a $156m loss.
Was it running interference? Was it a dog-whistle attempting to problematise values of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga embodied in real community action? Or just lazy content marketing, pumping out press releases to advertise an always-on dial-a-comment capability for news editors?
We have no public knowledge of what’s really motivating this clowning but the broader history of certain symbols and why they’re still in use today is very clear.
As a political identifier and identity, the genealogy of the English word ‘taxpayer’ here is the result of a cursed ‘Mickey to Tiki’-like mutation, from the original appeals to ‘Tax-Payers’ in Reconstruction era American states—which mobilised white supremacist class interests to purge elected governments of black and working class representatives—then stepping through a century of conservative arguments; the rise of neoliberalism; an $89 pair of underpants in 1996; to our destination in 21st century New Zealand where strategic communications funding is used by the vestigial hacks of Rogernomics to drag American-style culture wars into public debate and stir up anti-Māori sentiment.
Most of the time, people are unaware of all this when they sling that word around. It’s treated as self-evident and self-explanatory in the context of headlines and news stories. But organisations with taxpayer in the title are directly descended from white supremacist colonial history. It is an association to avoid unless you’re willing to risk staking your political claims on a continuation of that legacy.
Trying to make sense of all of this led me to reading about Tuku Morgan’s underpants again. It’s so obvious in hindsight that it was less about holding the spending to account, more about generating a jumping-off point for years of generalised hateful rhetoric towards Māori which sowed the seeds for Brash’s Orewa speech and the Iwi/Kiwi billboards. They know they can’t get away with this directly anymore, which is how we end up with innuendo and mockery of kaitiakitanga becoming news stories about the baby whale being a burden to the taxpayer.
Cartoon by James Hubbard which ran in The Dominion, 11 February 2002
Since the #DemandTheDebate hashtag launched, people outside the target audience have noticed signs of peeling away from reality and tacit encouragement of conspiracism and outrage from National Party leadership. Nothing illustrates this better than Collins’ speech to an elderly audience at the Kerikeri Bowling Club one week after the farming protests. After flirting with a phrase about bottling the Minister of Police and declaring herself ‘a biological woman,’ she asked the crowd how many of them were on Facebook and encouraged those who weren’t to ignore news media and sign up immediately. This was reported on by David Fisher and posted under the NZ Herald’s paywall. Several days later, the article was pinballing through various Facebook posts and group threads as copypasta.
Not many observers expect this unsteady state of affairs to last much longer but you never know with such situations. We could be in for quite a bad time if Collins continues to drag the opposition into her brand of Pakeha populism while plausibly deniable conspiracist associations continue to run rampant in rural communities with funded media production.
The real challenge to activists for ‘favourable business conditions’ like the Taxpayers Union and their associates has little to do with getting owned by the left (or successfully getting paid to waste the left’s time). Their wicked problem is that neoliberalism has failed on a massive scale and they have no new ideas to offer in a time of urgency and rapid change. Time is running out. Their current push is a last, desparate grasp for relevancy on behalf of the class interests who exclusively benefitted from these past few decades of rampant social inequality and environmental degradation.
It’s entirely understandable how frustrated many people are when news media continues to book these professional ratfuckers for speaking slots and insert their comments into political reporting, justified by the glowing aura of ‘balance’. Unfortunately, expressing that frustration by dunking on deliberate social media provocations is part of their culture war playbook, memorably expressed in Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics where he details the significance of ‘explaining is losing’. Despite the language they hide behind, appeals to right wing social dominance are not grounded in logic and rationality but in posturing. The goal is to always be leading the argument and never visibly in a position of defence, no matter how bad-faith or dogmatically incorrect.
That they still continue to hammer away from this complex of discredited, outdated and racist 20th century ideas is not because any of it makes sense or is intellectually defensible, but because there’s funding and support available to do it. It serves a purpose. We should continue to ask what that purpose is and who is paying for it, rather than engaging with any of the cynical value-free content marketing as presented.
Mark Rickerby is a writer, designer and programmer in Ōtautahi–Christchurch.