Appealing to our latent racism (pn719)

Latent racism:biding its time under the bed

Bryce Edwards’ NZ Politics  Daily page sponsored by the Democracy Now project at Victoria University serves a useful purpose in providing daily links to major news items published by the   mainstream media, and every now and again Democracy Now publishes an article by one of its own.

Such is Graham Adams’ article “Ardern in the gun over He Puapua” which comments on Judith Collins’ “separatism” speech delivered to a National Party meeting over the weekend. It opens with this sentence: "A covert 20-year plan to establish Māori sovereignty..." 

Wow! Another conspiracy theorist!

I won’t for the moment comment on Collins’ retake of Brash’s (in)famous Orewa speech which saw the party’s popularity among Pākehā soar after what many Māori  saw as an attack on their Treaty stance —or anything further onwhat Adams’ wrote about her speech— but I do  think Bryce and his team need to be more careful/forthright/transparent about who writes under their banner. 

Both Collins’s speech and Adams’ article appeal to the latent racism that for the moment lies relatively undisturbed (“there but not there”) for many New Zealanders.