Behind a cloak of acceptability
FScott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American life. But New Zealand life? Here, a career can run to four acts, or maybe even five.
Don Brash has been an economist, a Reserve Bank governor and a leader of two political parties, one of which came close to winning an election from the momentum generated by expressing highly controversial views about Ma¯ ori at a Rotary club north of Auckland. His second stint as a party leader, for ACT in 2011, was much less successful. The fourth – or is it fifth? – act has been a late-in-life reinvention as a freespeech advocate.
Brash fronted for the Free Speech Coalition that was formed to back alt-Right activists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux before their visit to New Zealand, although he claimed not to have researched their views.
Yet it turned out their views on racial superiority were surprisingly similar to his own. Brash is on record as saying that ‘‘while Jews made up only around 0.2 per cent of the world’s population, and only 2 per cent of the American population, they had won 22 per cent of all Nobel prizes’’. Therefore, ‘‘it is impossible to ignore the possibility that, at the very least, Jewish culture is superior to many other cultures’’.
Brash made that comment during a debate on free speech at Auckland University, which benefited from Massey University’s counterproductive decision to cancel a Brash appearance, turning him into a free-speech martyr. Combined with his mild-mannered and respectable appearance and background, it has given some remarkably backward and even offensive views the appearance of acceptability.
Of course, Brash has the right to air these and other views. But we also have to be clear about the implications of the pseudoscientific views on race he presents. His comments about Ma¯ ori in general and the use of te reo in particular are echoes of discredited 19th- and early 20thcentury beliefs that an ‘‘inferior’’ culture would die out when confronted by a ‘‘superior’’ one.
After years in the political wilderness, Brash has been normalised again. The strangest manifestation might be a nomination as New Zealander of the Year.
There is every chance that this is a prank. But the notion that Brash could be in line for an award that honours a New Zealander who ‘‘makes us proud of our country and what can be achieved’’ and who has contributed to ‘‘the wellbeing of the nation’’ is ludicrous.
The winner wears a ka¯ kahu or cloak known as Pouhine, designed by Ma¯ ori weaver Veranoa Hetet. It would be bizarre to see that beautifully crafted, historically meaningful object draped around the shoulders of a political figure who has been so hostile to the culture that produced it.
Hetet has responded with horror on social media at the thought that Brash might wear her creation, saying she would ‘‘question the whole NZer of the Year kaupapa’’. We might need to help Brash with the unfamiliar Ma¯ ori word in that sentence.