Our Prime Minister’s September 23 UN speech seemed to indicate that our collectivist politicians and corporatists believe our national soul is so completely in their hands that no careless revelation of the mangled sentiment guiding their objectives can impede their self-fulfilling escalating upheaval.
Decades of ideological interference has pushed us from our organically cohesive familial neighbourhoods into the anxious, fragmented theatre of a technologically politicised sociological project in which the traditional religious, moral, cultural, historical, intellectual and emotional character and memory of the Kiwi identity has been repressed so that authoritarian and aberrant behaviours might become confused with virtue.
Many warned that such meddling would lead to an unpleasantly different New Zealand, even the once-unimaginable one which would rush to condone lockdowns that unjustly displaced Kiwis’ deep, abiding and vital attachment to common-sense, lawful freedom, a useful press and the crucial parliamentary conventions supposed to shame politicians from overstepping their limited authority.
Despite having been criticised around the world, that speech’s dark intimation equating free speech with weapons of war that governments and tech companies must fight, hardly troubled the Kiwi mainstream. Perhaps the government’s Public Interest Journalist Fund is a short, sturdy and very effective leash indeed.
Rees Sutcliffe
East Tamaki Heights
