Of course the nation should be named Aotearoa, if only on poetic grounds. It’s a beautiful word – especially in contrast to the soft nasal consonants of New, followed by the discordant Z and then the sustained vowels of ealand, which ends with a thud like a clump of mud dumped between Australia and Antarctica. Hideous.
But if we change the name of the country, doesn’t that change the country itself? Conservatives and their mortal enemies, the intelligentsia, believe it does. Winston Peters explodes with fury at Green MPs and journalists who use the te reo Māori name. Act minister Brooke van Velden has reversed the order of Aotearoa and New Zealand on passports. The Green Party has launched a petition to restore the te reo name of Rongotai to the capital’s newly named Wellington Bays electorate.
This happened alongside a controversy about the government removing kupu Māori from the Ministry of Education’s Ready to Read Phonics Plus series, promoting an outcry from writers and academics. And New Zealand First is introducing a member’s bill that will ban “woke flags” from government buildings.
At a time when they’re struggling to keep the hospitals open, the ferries running and the power on, why are our MPs obsessing over flags, children’s books and passport design?
There are many reasons. The most uncharitable: they don’t know how to fix any of our serious problems so they’re pivoting to the trivial. And they personally are not affected by the economic downturn – our MPs across the left and right are largely sorted, to use the Prime Minister’s term for his own financial good fortune. But politicians as a species have always been attracted by symbolic conflicts.
Consider a substantive problem, such as the secondary school teacher’s strike. There’s a lot of money and the cohesion of the education system at stake. It’s real politics. It’s hard work. It will require negotiation and compromise to solve.
In a fight over public servants having the right to fly the trans-rights and Palestine flags over their offices, there’s nothing at stake except the symbolism – which a clever politician can present as existential. Yet it doesn’t really matter if they win or lose.
Thus the torrent of squabbles over names and language. For the left, the adoption of te reo signifies decolonisation – liberating the nation from the legacy of white supremacy and imperialism. For conservatives, this is the dreaded “Māorification of everything” and must be resisted at all costs. It’s all nonsense, based on the fallacy that words have a magical power over the things they describe.
“New Zealand” was named after Zealand, a Dutch province; Wellington was named after the Duke of Wellington – but neither name signifies the province or the politician any more, just the country and the city. Neither of which are flourishing, no matter what you call them.
Cultural cleavages
The late-20th-century turn towards symbolic conflicts – otherwise known as the culture wars – is often described in the social-science literature as “post-material politics”. It’s supposed to be a marker of affluence: when concerns about jobs, wages, growth and personal safety diminish, politics becomes about self-expression, identity, cultural cleavages and social etiquette (what is “wokeness” other than the etiquette of the educated class?).
But everything we see in the polls tells us voters’ concerns are very material. The economy. Health. Law and order. The price of butter. Gang shootings. Being seen at an emergency department without dying in the reception area. Shouldn’t they take priority over passport redesigns?
The minor parties dominating our discourse aren’t talking to the general public, though. They’re micro-targeting persuadable voters who are more likely to engage with fringe topics.
Modern political parties are media companies. They produce their own content – cosy chats to the camera, fights with journalists, getting thrown out of Parliament – and use it to generate traffic for their YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook feeds, partly to win voters, partly to generate revenue. Much of their income comes from small online donations harvested via email and other digital platforms.
The most lucrative topics are often divisive culture-war issues. Political scientist Henry Farrell developed from this a kind of internet-porn theory of politics. There’s a lot of pornography online and it’s often very strange, focused on acts that are outside the scope of a political column. That’s because it’s not manufactured for the majority of people, it’s targeting a tiny fraction of consumers who are interested in taboo content, and are more likely to convert into paying customers.
Because everyone can see it, this gives us a false impression of what the general public is interested in. This has a distorting, degrading impact on our political discourse. The irrelevant fixations of small online cohorts swamp the national conversation.
Deflect and distract
In the same week as the dispute about the education ministry’s phonics book, the achievement data from the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study came out, indicating 74% of Māori students in Year 8 were more than a year behind in writing, against a baseline of 61% across all demographics.
The symbolic conflict over the inclusion of Māori words in phonics books overwhelmed the material problem of a growing equity gap in the education system – a gap that’s grown worse over the decades in which te reo has become more prevalent in the school system, predicated on the magical thinking that changing words will solve a problem.
The cultivation of Māoritanga across the public sphere is an important nation-building project – hopefully it will one day lead to a more meaningful, harmonious name for the nation itself. But the politicians promoting and opposing it are using it as a distraction from the pressing material problems they don’t seem inclined to solve.
