Michael King closed his magisterial The Penguin History of New Zealand with a description few would contest: “good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant”, a national character that “in the past saved the country from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism seen in other parts of the world”. Today, that description is tested to its limits by official reactions to Israel-Palestine activism.
The conflict is extraordinarily complex, defying straightforward diagnosis. Yet in an era of instant news, we watched genocide unfold and felt compelled to adopt fixed positions along an imagined continuum.
Seeking to appear a reasonable international player at the UN General Assembly in September, the coalition government declined to advocate a Palestinian state. At home, ministers branded activists troublemakers and, that frequent phrase, virtue signallers.
Elsewhere, the pattern is harsher: in the United States and Britain, university courses on Palestine have been cancelled, peace organisations proscribed, protests broken up, and antisemitism defined narrowly to silence opposition to Zionism.
New Zealand has not reached that point but polarisation and personalisation are creeping onto the public square, abetted by politicians at the very top of the establishment.
A government bill to tighten protest restrictions, The Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill, signals an intent to suppress public protest. Such responses erode the foundations of social cohesion, long rooted in tolerance, indeed celebration, of organised citizen dissent.
When a protester vandalised Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ home, it marked the opening salvo in a new kind of battle, where some respond to personalised political rhetoric with personalised tactics. The recent Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll suggested an alarming explanation: growing acceptance of violence as a legitimate political response. Undoubtedly, political rhetoric accelerates the spiral. Politicians framing complex issues in emotive, binary terms amplify division.
When they respond with punitive measures, popular engagement either escalates or recedes as people retreat into atomised lives.
Social cohesion cannot afford such withdrawal. As an immigrant from Singapore, I have seen where this leads: stability, efficiency, even vast wealth, but at the cost of a depoliticised, disengaged citizenry. The troubling conflation of civic peace with authoritarian control sacrifices cohesion for order. New Zealand is not Singapore, but there is no reason polarisation and social control in a mutually-reinforcing loop might not take root here. Once norms of respectful debate erode, strongman politics can seem attractive.
The government has a special responsibility to preserve civility, not hasten its demise. Sadly, it is not living up to that duty. Singaporeans, ruled by one party for 66 years, learnt to their cost that once entrenched, social control is near impossible to reverse. In 2017, a young activist stood silently and unobtrusively outside the Singapore Parliament holding a mirror, urging legislators to reflect on the type of society they had created. With (almost) laughable irony, he was jailed under public order laws. George Orwell foresaw this inversion of meaning, calling it “newspeak”, whose objective is to “diminish the range of thought”.
Our goal should not be to narrow the Israel-Palestine debate but to defend civic instincts of curiosity, humility and respect, resist the personalisation of politics, and repudiate authoritarian reactiveness to problems of such profound moral complexity.
Vincent Wijeysingha is a senior lecturer in social work and social policy at Massey University and a Palestine rights activist.
