We need to talk of the elephant straddling NZ

We need to talk about how we’re going to talk about the situation we find ourselves in.

We probably won’t, and a few months down the line we’ll regret it, those of us who don’t get a kick out of trash-talking each other talkback-styles.

So we really should do it now. Just saying.

The situation is the easy bit. We know, as of a few days ago, when this year’s general election will be. It’s on September 19. Good to have certainty this far out, I guess.

Now we have to get there, and that’s the concerning bit; whether we can be civil, and honest, along the way. My instinct is to say don’t be bloody ridiculous but I’m trying to sound hopeful here.

I’m also aware people doing what I’m doing right now have a role to play in setting the tone, but I’m not a bellower, so I doubt the shouting classes will be paying attention. I’ll say it anyway. New Zealand isn’t just one giant talkback radio audience, or online comments section.

September 19 is significant. Here at home, it’s Women’s Suffrage Day, an entirely appropriate day for us to go to the polls.

For the purposes of this discussion, though, it falls, just as aptly, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Which I’m sure will inspire plenty of jokes – I know of at least one person working on a piratical polling day get-up – but I hope won’t be mirrored in Kiwis’ interpersonal relations in the buildup. A take-no-prisoners attitude isn’t the best option in the circumstances.

But long before we get to the election we will mark, in just six weeks, the first anniversary of our country’s worst mass shooting, a terrorist atrocity that blindsided us as a nation and tore Canterbury’s small and close-knit Muslim community asunder.

It also brought back to the surface an ongoing, and not always civil, national debate about hate speech.

It’s a debate that often seems to be more about the rights of speakers than of those who fall victim. There’s no doubt in my mind it’s in hate speech that the hatred that inspires atrocities like the one last March is incubated and festers into something much more dangerous. But I’m not 100 per cent sure how much beefing up our laws will capture that, given it takes place primarily in the murky outer reaches of the internet.

The hate speech debate is an instructive one, though, because it always brings to the fore those who seem to want the right to be as nasty as possible about others without consequences. Anything less is turning us into some kind of totalitarian state, goes the line.

Yeah, nah. There’s robust, constructive debate, and there’s being hateful for the sake of being hateful, and although the line is fuzzy, I’d like to think we’re an intelligent enough society to find it most of the time.

As an aside, while I’m not a fan of his politics, I think ACT leader David Seymour is on the constructive debate side of the line. So he won’t mind me putting this out there. Is he really Arnold Rimmer, the hologram from Red Dwarf, or just a remarkable likeness?

Realistically, there wouldn’t even be a debate if hate speech hadn’t led to atrocities, but as we contemplate a drawn-out election buildup, it struck me we devote a lot of time to the concept but virtually none to turning it on its head and focusing on its opposite – love speech.

Does such a concept even exist? It must, every single one of us speaks love at some point, to anything from a pet, to strangers in need, to friends, to extended family, to our children, to the loves of our lives.

Iwoke up yesterday to news of a study of coverage of the mosque shootings, which found New Zealand media mostly centred the victims while Australian media covered the shooter. Not that surprising, given our relative positions, but

Wouldn’t it be great this [election] year if the narrative is ‘‘we, we, we’’, emphasising our collective needs as a nation, rather than ‘‘me, me, me’’.

gratifying nonetheless.

Giving victims in a range of circumstances a greater voice in the media was something I’d been challenged about for some time. I’d written about it a month to the day before the shootings.

It struck me that in a political context, we had a pretty amazing example in that situation of how we could and should talk about the elephant straddling our islands these next eight months.

Our prime minister set a tone in the aftermath of the shootings that we’d do well to keep in mind. I know a lot of Kiwis don’t get her, I read dozens of letters to that effect. I know her Government has disappointed on several fronts – but her empathetic response was rightly all about the victims.

‘‘He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist,’’ she told Parliament shortly after the massacres. ‘‘But he will, when I speak, be nameless.’’ That was about the victims, and she took it further by imploring others to ‘‘speak the names of those who were lost, rather than the name of the man who took them’’. I know that moved me deeply; it still does.

Wouldn’t it be great this year if the narrative is ‘‘we, we, we’’, emphasising our collective needs as a nation, rather than ‘‘me, me, me’’. If, in discussions of policy, we centred those set to be mainly affected by them, positively or negatively, and used that to inform our discussion, and our votes. It doesn’t happen much around the world these days. We could, and we should, be different.