In a month’s time, the Right Honourable Winston Peters will be celebrating his 80th birthday. Good for him. On the evidence though, his current war on “wokeness” looks like an old man’s cranky complaint that the ancient virtues of grit and know-how are sadly lacking in the youth of today.

“Woke” is a political weapon being used by conservatives to rally the nation’s voters against a left wing agenda that seeks to reward and promote Māori, feminists, trans people, and the disabled, at the expense of ordinary decent folk who are – allegedly – none of the above.

Needless to say, this threat isn’t real. Newsflash: the people in the key positions of power in this country aren’t trendy leftists. Yes, current hiring practices in the public service do encourage diversity, but – as RNZ’s Ingrid Hipkiss pointed out to Peters – nowhere in the rules does it say that diversity should be at the expense of merit. Nor is there anything but isolated, anecdotal evidence from the aggrieved that diversity must have been the reason why they weren’t hired. In the real world, being “woke” simply means being aware of the existence of privilege, and recognising that diversity is good for society, and good for the economy.

The more serious barriers to social mobility – and to getting a job on merit – have always been the workings of privilege and inherited wealth, and the dynastic networks by which the elites promote their own, and the offspring of their relatives and friends. This “who you know” syndrome has always been a far more powerful factor in being employed (and getting promoted) than anything remotely to do with wokeness.

Besides, Winston Peters and his coalition colleagues can hardly pose as credible champions of merit in the public service. For the past 12 months, they have been throwing public servants out of jobs regardless of merit and ability, without appearing to care a toss about what impact this will have on the public services these people had been providing.

So...to whom is Peters pitching his campaign against diversity programmes? On the left, there’s a tendency to assume he is pandering to racists and bigots - but that’s only one part of the intended audience. The reality is that the baby boomers, their children and grandchildren have leveraged their privilege to become over-educated for a declining number of secure, well paying jobs in the economy.

For 20 years or more, neo-liberalism has been eating its young, including those blessed with merit (and university degrees) coming out their ears. AI is also about to sweep through the white collar “knowledge” professions. Peters and his current mates don’t want to acknowledge that reality, let alone figure out strategies to address it. Their wilful cluelessness on this point is one more reason why thousands of smart and capable people are seeing no future for themselves in New Zealand. If they can afford it, they’re heading offshore.

Peters doesn’t seem to be bothering himself with addressing that worrisome outflow of merit, either. For a man who is due to turn 80 on April 11, maybe the real challenges of his job just seem too, too difficult. Far easier for him to blame the phantom legions of the woke for this country’s employment problems.

Ask not for whom the poll tolls

This week’s polls – which showed that (a) the centre left bloc would win an election held tomorrow, and (b) that the recently loathed Chris Hipkins is now the country’s preferred PM – are being widely described as a “wake-up call” to the government. (Who knew that there’s such a big difference between getting a wake up call and being woke.)

Over the course of this week, those on the centre-right – including some people in the current PM’s office – have been saying there’s no reason to panic at the polling trend. Apparently, they believe that between now and the next election, there’s still plenty of time to convince the majority of people to vote against their own best interests.

But what to do in the meantime? Earlier this week, a chap from the Taxpayers Union interviewed by RNZ cited the Bolger-led government of the early 1990s as a precedent, and as a way forward. He used the Bolger comparison to argue that the Luxon government now needs to carry out sweeping economic reforms of the type engineered by Ruth Richardson, in order to get voters back on side.

Hello? There is so much that’s wrong with that argument it's hard to know where to start. In no particular order: Bolger fired Richardson as Finance Minister because those reforms were proving to be wildly unpopular, put his pal Bill Birch in control, and steered National back towards its traditional centre. Even then, National only squeaked home at the 1993 election.

More recently, when the ACT Party brand was associated with Richardson-style economic extremism, its voter support languished around 1% for most of this century, until David Seymour found a few more popular policies (e.g. the end of life issue) to add to the party’s mix. Let's be clear: free market policies have been ballot box poison for the past four decades, and have never had a voter mandate. Yet there’s an enduring fantasy on the centre-right that when the electorate rejects hard-right economic settings what they really, really want is an even harsher dose of the same toxic medicine. Nothing succeeds like failure, as Bob Dylan once said.

Christopher Luxon – if he was truly following the Bolger precedent – would fire David Seymour, and use Seymour’s school lunches fiasco as his reason for doing so. None of Labour’s fabled mistakes in government came anywhere near inflicting the levels of harm that Seynmour continues to do to the nation’s schoolchildren, while Luxon looks on gormlessly from the sidelines. If instead, Luxon fired Seymour from at least his associate education post, the PM’s popularity would soar, overnight. For once, Luxon would actually look like a leader with a backbone.

Luxon won’t fire Seymour – or the inept Nicola Willis – despite being given cause to do so. The reality is that Luxon has few allies in caucus, and has no equivalent to Bill Birch waiting in the wings. So much so that even talking of a “Luxon faction” in caucus is almost a contradiction in terms. Simeon Brown, Louise Upston, and Matt Doocey got where they are today not on the basis of merit, but at Luxon’s discretion. Look beyond National at a Cabinet that has also found room for the likes of Nicole McKee and Casey Costello.

Hmm. Would Winston Peters be willing to swear on oath that Casey Costello is in Cabinet today solely on the basis of her overwhelming personal merit?

About Kogonada

Talking of merit... the Korean/American film-maker who calls himself Kogonada seems to excel at everything to which he turns his band. He first came to notice with a series of brief, startling video essays on the film-making techniques evident in the work of Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Robert Bresson, the Breaking Bad TV series etc.

He then wrote and directed two superb indie films (Columbus, After Yang) and directed four episodes of the TV family saga Pachinko, which deals with the Korean diaspora in Japan and the US over the course of the 20th century. This year, he has directed (but did not write) a yet-to-be released romantic comedy called A Big Bold Beautiful Journey starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Here’s the wordless, one minute forty five second video essay on Stanley Kubrick that conveys more about Kubrick’s preferred POV than a 2,000 word essay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy4mhiYhVSI

The bonds and obligations of family (and how these shape one’s identity/morality) are front and centre of Kogonada’s own work. In his much-loved debut film Columbus these familial concerns play out against the backdrop of the incredible modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana. This essay on the film contrasts how Kogonada uses architectural space to more humane end purposes than Michelangelo Antonioni did 50 years ago, back when alienation was taken to be modernism’s sole message:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86HAHINYfh4

Finally, the After Yang film casts two Kogonada regulars - Colin Farrell and Haley Lu Richardson – in a slightly futurist setting in which Artificial Intelligence and family dynamics have become entwined. The film makes striking connections between being the “other” as experienced by a sentient AI within a human family, and as experienced by an Asian immigrant within Western culture. Here’s Koganaha himself talking (without spoilers) about himself, and his film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fzzpV9Qxto

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