{"id":69796,"date":"2025-04-25T15:50:16","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T03:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/?p=69796"},"modified":"2025-04-28T11:51:12","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T23:51:12","slug":"the-populists-war-on-woke-is-also-a-war-on-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/story\/the-populists-war-on-woke-is-also-a-war-on-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"The populists\u2019 war on \u2018Woke\u2019 is also a war on nature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article\u00a0is a guest post and doesn’t necessarily represent the views of Greenpeace.<\/p>\n\n

New Zealanders recently gave the Luxon-led coalition government a record low rating of 4.2 out of 10 in the latest Ipsos Issues Monitor survey<\/a>. Even falling concern about price inflation failed to boost their flagging rating.<\/p>\n\n

Their average performance rating for the previous six months found a statistically significant fall from 4.7 out of 10 last October to 4.2. That\u2019s not good news for a government that has rolled out an increasingly populist menu of policies since coming into office.<\/p>\n\n

Most notably, those policies are increasingly aligned with the US Trump administration\u2019s \u2018War on Woke\u2019.<\/p>\n\n

Immediately after coming into office on 20 January, President Trump and his team of Fox News presenters and TV wrestling moguls declared a \u2018War on Woke\u2019, with faux warnings about phoney folk devils and bogus moral panic. As part of their \u2018anti-woke\u2019 crusade, they have moved to limit the free speech of those they disagree with on US university campuses in an effort to distract American voters from their menacing Project 2025<\/a> agenda of weakening US democracy, climate action and nature protections.<\/p>\n\n

Despite that, news headlines have still been dominated by Trump\u2019s primary vehicle for implementing Project 2025 \u2013 Elon Musk\u2019s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His minions spent the first 100 days slashing federal government agency budgets and then contracting out more government functions to the private sector, including Musk\u2019s own company SpaceX and those of Trump\u2019s other big financial backers.<\/p>\n\n

As this unfolded, NZ First party leader Winston Peters was quick to put on his double-breasted pinstripe suit and fly to the US<\/a> to bend the knee to Trump\u2019s Oval Office bully boys.<\/p>\n\n

Mr Peters<\/a> has been known to cosy up to far-right figures before. He reportedly first met Nigel Farago<\/a> and his billionaire \u2018Brexit bad boy\u2019 ally Arron Banks<\/a> in England in 2018, and Farago again in 2024<\/a>. Banks reportedly bankrolled Farago\u2019s populist Brexit campaign to the tune of $10 million and was known to visit the Russian embassy in Londongrad for a samovar of tea with high ranking Russian officials<\/a> when he and Farago were campaigning to sway British voters to leave the European Union between 2015 and 2017. Their controversial campaign was accused of using misleading figures and false claims<\/a> and by 2025 a clear majority of British voters said they think Brexit failed to deliver<\/a> – including Farago<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

In June 2020, Mr Peters reportedly provided consular assistance to Banks<\/a> in relation to a transit visa for Australia. Later, Banks reportedly sent a team to Aotearoa to work on the NZ First party\u2019s unsuccessful 2020 election campaign<\/a>, in which Peters\u2019 party was voted out of Parliament.<\/p>\n\n

After returning from Washington DC in March this year, Mr Peters rolled out his Trump tribute-act, declaring with his Godzone MAGA-phone that he was launching his own \u2018War on Woke<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n\n

The Trumpian populist playbook<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

It was a move from the Trumpian populist playbook, something which has been critiqued by US-based Venezuelan academic and journalist Mois\u00e9s Na\u00edm in his 2022 book The Revenge of Power: How autocrats are reinventing politics for the 21st Century.<\/em><\/a> <\/em>In his book he uses \u2018The Three Ps\u2019 to define the formula as, \u201cPopulism, Polarisation, and Post-Truth\u201d.<\/p>\n\n

Naim describes how populists like Trump claim to champion \u2018the people\u2019 but once in power they champion the one percenter billionaires and oligarchs who bankroll them \u2013 in Trump\u2019s case Musk and his fellow \u2018Tech Bro\u2019 rich-list billionaires<\/a>, and fossil fuel magnates including Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer<\/a>, the company suing Greenpeace in the US over the Standing Rock pipeline protests in Dakota. <\/p>\n\n

Here in Aotearoa, we already know from RNZ reporting that the populist NZ First party has been bankrolled by big coal and big fishing rich-lister Peter Talley<\/a> (full name Peter Ivan Talijancich<\/a>) who is a joint owner of Talley\u2019s<\/a> and billionaire stock market investor Graeme Hart<\/a>, whose Rank Group owns Carter Holt Harvey and retail chain Carters.<\/p>\n\n

Then there\u2019s the stoking of division by populists to create polarisation \u2013 the classic tactic used by Trump and Farago, in which they took Goebbels\u2019 concept of a \u2018kultur kampf\u2019 (culture war) and rebranded it as the \u2018War on Woke\u2019. Whether it\u2019s Trump petulantly renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, or Mr Peters attacking opposition MP Ricardo Men\u00e9ndez March for referring to the country\u2019s name as Aotearoa<\/a> in Parliament, the clear purpose is to divide and polarise. While populists may pay lip service to the concept of national unity their public comments are often aimed at stoking division and polarisation.<\/p>\n\n

According to Naim, the third \u2018P\u2019 stands for Post-truth fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories aimed at confusing people, disrupting the truth, and drawing in the confused and less well-informed.<\/p>\n\n

Naim has now written a new book, \u2018Charlatans – How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses<\/a>\u2019. Due out later this year, it promises to highlight how 21st century populists adopt a \u2018circus showman\u2019 persona (think 19th century US politician and circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum who famously promoted hoaxes) and seek to emulate reality TV hosts (think The Apprentice).<\/p>\n\n

Bulldozing the RMA in the War on Nature<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Soon after Mr Peters\u2019 speech, the Luxon-led coalition announced its new Trumpian offering in the form of their \u2018anti-woke\u2019 replacement to the Resource Management Act (RMA). Their two new bills are set to bulldoze environmental protections and replace them with an anti-environmental free-for-all for big oil, big mining and big developers.<\/p>\n\n

Interviewed on the RMA by RNZ, Mr Luxon said \u201cWe cannot have Tom, Dick, and Harry weaponise the planning system to block progress from the opposite end of the country.\u201d<\/a> This will have been music to the ears of the coalition\u2019s rich-list backers and fast-trackers because the RMA replacement promises to be lucrative for them.<\/p>\n\n

The RMA rollback echoes the Trump administration\u2019s latest policy bulldozing US environmental protections, which allows the federal Forest Service to carry out logging on 58% of US national forests<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

The RMA replacement comes after the government\u2019s fast-track legislation<\/a> passed in December, which deleted public consultation and environmental protections, and replaced them with a long list of environmentally destructive pet projects strapped to the back of a Space-X booster rocket.<\/p>\n\n

They also have a track record of undermining and weakening climate action. In February, Mr Peters<\/a> and his coalition co-lead David Seymour both floated the idea of following Trump in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change<\/a>. Then in March, the coalition confirmed its intention to overturn the \u2018woke\u2019 2018 ban on offshore oil and gas exploration<\/a> \u2013 emulating Trump, who overturned the existing US offshore oil and gas drilling ban passed by the previous US administration within a day of coming into office in January.<\/p>\n\n

Also deplorable has been the coalition\u2019s announcement that it would cut public science sector funding, including scrapping Callaghan Innovation and merging the seven Crown Research Institutes<\/a> into three entities with a stronger focus on commercialisation and profit, and fewer staff. This is similar to Musk\u2019s DOGE minions in the US slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and government funding of scientific research in various federal research institutes and universities.<\/p>\n\n

DOGE minions have also cut the federal US National Parks Service, while here in Aotearoa the coalition has cut Department of Conservation funding<\/a> and the number of conservation science roles<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

While Musk wielded a chainsaw<\/a> in glee over the DOGE cuts, this week\u2019s news that Tesla\u2019s profits fell by 71 percent<\/a> over the first three months of this year will have wiped the sneer off his face.<\/p>\n\n

Here at home, the coalition\u2019s \u2018War on Woke\u2019 has also included shameful moves to weaken the role of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the public sector and the appalling decision to rule out incorporating a Treaty principles clause in the two new RMA replacement bills<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

The cold irony for the coalition is that their implementation of increasingly Trumpian populist \u2018War on Woke\u2019 policies has coincided with their record low performance rating. Perhaps there\u2019s a message in that for them?<\/p>\n\n