Pundit Problems
Why New Zealand media should take racism more seriously
Three weeks ago, I sat outside the Māngere East library with the Community Coalition against Auckland Council’s budget cuts and we tallied our losses. The Council had passed Mayor Wayne Brown’s budget the day before and gutted library funding, arts funding, refugee services, rape prevention education services, youth sports leagues, parks funding, community events, and defunded the city’s ten affordable early childcare centers, among many other things. One person told us South Auckland’s free public pools would start charging entry fees, which would make it harder for homeless people to shower there and deprive teens of a safe place to hang out in the summer. I remembered a news story about a South Auckland community leader crying because the budget cut a program that taught children to swim. The cuts will impact poor people and minorities far more than rich ones who can afford private alternatives. They’re devastatingly racist, classist, and will diminish working-class life in Auckland for years to come.
Auckland Council’s budget cuts are racist because Wayne Brown’s a racist. He calls Asians “Chinamen,” refers to Indian and Asian communities as “simple” and “transactional,” and his political idols are Clint Eastwood and Ronald Reagan. He speaks like an Antipodean Caesar who claims he alone can “fix things”, pronounces Whangārei as “Wongaray,” and seats his councilors by race. I reported on politics in America and I know his kind: self-deluding, “self-made” men whose wives took care of their kids and houses while other people created the surplus value they pocketed. The mayoralty gave him the power to inflict his bigotry on Auckland. But he couldn’t have done it without help.
Wayne Brown’s campaign team featured two prominent right-wing NZ media operatives: Matthew Hooton and Ben Thomas. Hooton writes regular columns for The NZ Herald and other papers and Thomas is prominent across New Zealand print, TV, and audio outlets. Based on his prior work, Hooton seems incapable of shame. When Thomas was asked to comment on Brown on the Gone by Lunchtime podcast, he and Spinoff editor Toby Manhire laughed about Thomas being one of “the geniuses that got [Brown] elected.” Their professional success is testament to Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s observation that the fastest way to succeed in media is to kill one’s conscience and develop “an instinct for forward motion with a notable lack of introspection.” I’m not surprised New Zealand has amoral profiteers who treat politics as a system to be gamed and monetized. I suspect they grow like barnacles on every ship of state. What surprised me was neither Hooton nor Thomas seemed to face professional consequences for helping install a racist as mayor of Auckland.
Seeing liberal reporters’ indifference to their colleagues’ facilitation of racism made me wonder: what does New Zealand media think racism actually is? To me, it’s obvious defunding minority neighborhoods is more consequentially racist than being a waiter who says slurs. But people I talked to and read didn’t seem to agree. Self-described progressive Councillor Richard Hills, who voted to pass Brown’s budget, tweeted a few months ago that he’d “gotten to know Matthew Hooton over the past few months,” and that “he was very nice to [Hills]” and “had a great sense of humor.” Reporters I’ve talked to about Thomas usually respond with variations on “We disagree politically but he’s really nice.” I have to take my jaw off the floor after hearing this. “Do you really think interpersonal warmth matters compared to gutting Auckland’s public sphere?” I ask them. “Are you delusional or indifferent?” I silently wonder. People who I thought were smart suddenly seem stupid and I’m left trying to explain consequentialist ethics to audiences who don’t want to hear it.
This denial isn’t unique to the media industry. Per Upton Sinclair, you can’t make someone understand something their salary depends on them not understanding. Reporters who want to know that stoking fear of minority crime causes police brutality already do, and I gave up trying to convince the ones who don’t a long time ago. But as New Zealand election season approaches, I think its political media’s denial of the role racism plays in contemporary politics could sleepwalk its trusting readers to atrocity.
As a reporter in America, I covered police shootings, police brutality, electoral politics, and a synagogue massacre. In the process I came to agree with Kwame Ture that racism’s about power rather than attitude and Umberto Eco that every society contains would-be fascists who’d eliminate anyone in their way with force. As such, I believe we have a responsibility to keep them out of government however we can.
But as I dug into NZ liberal pundits’ work, I noticed a more business-friendly idea of racism emerge: the idea that it’s something only “bad” people do rather than a system we all participate in. It’s a convenient fiction that lets them externalize racism into skinheads with swastikas and lets them ignore that “racist” isn’t a fixed identity but defined by things you do. Crucially, it also lets them deny “nice” people can facilitate consequential evil just as easily as socially frictious ones.
In his column blaming the Labour government for the political unpopularity of resource sharing with Māori, broadcaster Jack Tame wrote that “while much of the opposition to co-governance [sharing control of water with Māori] centres on reasonable arguments over representation and democracy, there is undoubtedly an ugly anti-Māori streak.” But I’d argue the inverse was true. Any look at an anti-co-governance Facebook group or discussion with its believers quickly revealed racism was the alpha and omega of the animus against it. Conservatives plucked the strings of the unconscious, worked white people into a frenzy, and made them scared Māori were coming for water they felt was rightfully theirs. In the same way that if you scratch a flat earther, you get an antisemite, if you scratch anti-co-governance advocates, you get racists. Tame’s cursory acknowledgment of racism as an ethical aside was an inversion of how the story should’ve been told. It read like an attempt to reassure himself that New Zealanders weren’t capable of successful racist political organization and that if the government had tried hard enough, they could’ve appealed to a fictional shared rationality and won everyone over.
Other liberal commentators share Tame’s aversion to acknowledging mainstream New Zealanders’ capacity for bigotry. A few months ago, liberal Radio New Zealand commentator and corporate lobbyist Neale Jones tweeted that he “doesn’t think Christopher Luxon [the conservative party leader] is racist or anti-Māori in his heart” after Luxon implied he wanted to politically disempower Māori by taking away their parliamentary seats. By this point, Luxon had also doubled down on his promises to put children who commit crimes in internment camps where many get beaten and allegedly raped. Jones’s rhetorical contortions reveal his craven progressivism’s more concerned with appearing generous than doing good. But he dangerously downplays the danger Luxon poses to Māori political power and minority children in the process.
Writer Toby Manhire also avoided directly acknowledging racism’s role in politics in his otherwise detailed profile of racist ACT party leader David Seymour. In the profile, Manhire writes that to Seymour’s “haters” he “stoops to dog whistling” and identifies Seymour’s “rhetoric on race.” But he studiously avoids calling Seymour, a man who tweeted out an access code specifically for Māori to access vaccination services and urged all his followers to use it, who uses every pretext he can find to call for martial law in minority towns, and who recently called indigenous gang members “subhuman,” a racist. He misses the most interesting aspect of Seymour’s political ascension as a result. In the same way Jacqueline Rose argued Marilyn Monroe “carried the can” for 1950s and ‘60s Americans’ unconscious desires, celebrity politicians are only as interesting as the desires they embody and make material on their supporters’ behalf. I suspect if Manhire had interviewed the firearm owners, farmers, and small business owners he identified as ACT’s support base about race, he would’ve heard much more guttural rhetoric than Seymour’s high-minded disquisitions on “the light of liberty.” The kind of people who join a party that fearmongers about “[New Zealand] becoming like South Africa” aren’t likely to be magnanimous towards minorities. But naming racism would’ve required that Manhire take a position on the idea New Zealand’s fastest-growing political party could be driven by indignant white grievance. His unwillingness to do so makes for a much less interesting profile than he otherwise might’ve written.
These pundits’ denial of voters’ capacity for bigotry matters because the internet’s opened the door to once-unthinkable political organization. In the six years since Labour took power, social media’s further eclipsed TV news and newspapers as the arbiter of consensus reality. This clears paths for fringe ideologies to enter the center. People on web forums instigate mass shootings in Christchurch, Reddit threads morph into parliamentary protests where people wave Trump flags at Jacinda Ardern, and unmoderated Facebook groups incubate feverish “anti-white apartheid” conspiracy theories that poison old voters’ minds. Even if Luxon and Seymour aren’t white supremacist doctrinaires, they’ll be responding to much more radicalized constituents than in eras when everyone watched the same TV news. Pundits who pretend otherwise dangerously mislead their audiences.
In response to this, New Zealand media needs to start taking racism more seriously. Stop letting racist politicians speak without contextualizing their claims, stop letting pundit-lobbyists prevaricate about whether men who threaten to throw children in camps are “racist in their heart,” and stop dabbling in the soothing self-delusion New Zealand’s immune to the political turmoil roiling the rest of the world. Wealth inequality’s widening, more climate disasters are incoming, and the same problems that plague European and American democracies can happen here too. As I watched conservatives promise to designate gang members a societal waste product and dispose of them in prisons last week, I remembered what I thought seeing my first Texas migrant detention facility in 2020: concentration camps are always closer than you think.
Kieran McLean is a dual American-NZ citizen who used to work as a reporter in the States. He currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.