Over the past week, New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister
Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing nationalist NZ
First Party, has fuelled a vile slander campaign accusing
Green Party MP Benjamin Doyle, without a shred of evidence,
of being a sex criminal and a danger to children.
The
unhinged and hysterical claims, which have been repeated by
sections of the corporate media, point to the rapid lurch to
the right by the political establishment. Like the Trump
administration in the US, the National Party-led coalition
government, in which NZ First plays a major role, is
whipping up racism and backwardness in order to divert
attention from soaring social inequality, brutal austerity
measures and the integration of New Zealand into US-led war
preparations against China.
Towards the end of March,
Doyle came under attack by various far-right hacks,
including anti-transgender activist Ani O’Brien—who was
a digital director for former National Party leader Judith
Collins—and Chantelle Baker, a Christian “influencer”
who played a major role in anti-vaccination protests in
2022.
These and other individuals shared innocuous
photos from Doyle’s private Instagram account—including
one of the MP kissing their own child—and made lurid and
defamatory statements. In a typical post, Baker asked:
“Are the @nzpolice investigating the very concerning
images this man has been posting involving incredibly young
children?” She added, in a swipe at the gender diverse
community, that “of course, [Doyle] identifies as non
binary.”
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Peters amplified these baseless
innuendos in a social media post on March 29 which demanded
that the Green Party answer “serious questions” about
Doyle’s Instagram account, including the meaning of the
account’s name, “BibleBeltBussy” (“bussy” is a
lewd slang term “used to denote the male anus,”
according to Wikipedia). Peters also asked why Doyle had
deleted several dozen photos from the account, implying this
was somehow suspicious.
Based on the
so-called “evidence,” the worst that an objective
observer could conclude is that Doyle made a foolish choice
in naming the Instagram account.
The deputy prime
minister frothed: “This is the guy who wants to provide
puberty blockers on demand and surgery for children. Doyle
has been placed in Parliament to sabotage ethical beliefs
our society stands for.”
In an interview with Peters
on the far-right Platform podcast on March 31, host Sean
Plunket declared that Doyle had made “sexually
provocative” social media posts and asked Peters whether
he believed that Doyle was “a promoter of paedophilia.”
Peters replied that “this requires a serious inquiry”
and called for a police investigation.
Plunket also
repeated extreme right-wing conspiracies attacking the
Burnett Foundation, formerly the AIDS Foundation, where
Doyle worked before entering parliament. He said the
state-funded sexual health organisation was involved in
“very questionable sex education in
schools.”
Peters replied: “You’re right about
the AIDS Foundation,” saying it was “pushing a certain
type of behaviour which only invites more
AIDS.”
Peters is repeating the same deranged lies
that he spread during the 1980s when, as a member of the
National Party, he opposed the legalisation of
homosexuality. He told parliament on October 9, 1985, that
the Homosexual Law Reform Bill would contribute to the
spread of AIDS and that its supporters had a “hidden
agenda” of promoting paedophilia.
Doyle has become
the target of a far-right hate campaign after delivering a
speech at a protest outside parliament on March 23
supporting access to gender-affirming medication for
transgender youth. On the same day, Peters gave a speech in
Christchurch in which he demonised transgender people,
denounced sex and gender education in schools and declared a
“war on woke.”
It is no accident that the campaign
against Doyle erupted shortly after Peters’ visit to
Washington and talks with the Trump administration last
month. Anti-LGBT demagogy was a major feature of Trump’s
election campaign and his anti-democratic executive orders
since becoming president, including a ban on transgender
athletes and an order to cease all funding for
gender-affirming care.
NZ First and the government are
using the Trump playbook to shift politics in New Zealand
further and further to the right.
The conspiracy
theories that LGBT people are “grooming” children are
emboldening fascistic groups. In February, the
fundamentalist Destiny Church stormed a drag event at
Auckland’s Te Atatū library, forcing about 30 adults and
children to lock themselves in a room, fearing for their
safety. Destiny’s leader Brian Tamaki has circulated the
“allegations” against Doyle and called for police and
child welfare agencies to investigate the MP.
Green
Party co-leader Marama Davidson said on March 31 that Peters
was “actively fanning flames of hatred” towards the LGBT
community, and that the Greens had received an “immense
number of death threats and abuse” directed against Doyle
and the MP’s family. Doyle has taken leave from
parliament.
The main opposition Labour Party leader
Chris Hipkins similarly criticised Peters, saying his
comments showed “an ugly side of New Zealand
politics.”
Davidson made a futile appeal to National
Party Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to “take
responsibility for the behaviour of his coalition
colleague.” When questioned by reporters, Luxon expressed
support for Peters, saying the language used on Doyle’s
account was “really inappropriate.”
The claims by
NZ First and its supporters to be protecting children are
ludicrous and hypocritical in the extreme.
The NZ
government has aligned itself with the fascist Trump
administration, which is tearing up democratic rights and
carrying out mass deportations of entire families. It also
backs the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, in which tens of
thousands of children have been murdered. Peters has
slandered opponents of the genocide as “racists” and
“fascists.”
The Platform’s Plunket and the rest
of the right-wing pundits attacking Doyle are all supporters
of the Israeli state and defenders of
genocide.
In New Zealand, as a result of
the brutal austerity policies inflicted by successive Labour
and National Party-led governments, at least one in five
children lives in poverty. The current government has
slashed the nutritional content of school lunches for
hundreds of thousands of children, under conditions where
half a million people (10 percent of the population) are
relying on food parcels from
charities.
As for the issue of child
abuse, a royal commission of inquiry last year found that
thousands of children had been beaten, tortured and sexually
abused for decades in state-run schools, detention
facilities and psychiatric institutions. Successive
governments, including ones in which Peters held leading
positions, covered up these crimes and shielded the state
from accountability.
NZ First is a deeply unpopular
party: it received just over 6 percent of the votes in the
2023 election. Peters founded the party in 1993 on an
anti-immigrant platform, and it has a long record of
promoting racism and xenophobia, particularly against people
from China, India and the Middle East.
Along with the
libertarian ACT Party, NZ First is seeking to scapegoat
indigenous Māori people for the social crisis by falsely
implying that they have received “privileges” due to
identity politics, which has in fact benefited only a
narrow, affluent layer.
The toxic and divisive
politics of NZ First and the government must be opposed. But
it must be stressed that NZ First is only able to play such
a prominent role in the country’s politics because it has
been legitimised by National, the Labour Party and the
Greens itself, as well as sections of the trade union
bureaucracy.
In 2017, the Greens joined a Labour-led
coalition government that included NZ First. Then prime
minister Jacinda Ardern made Peters the deputy prime
minister and the foreign minister—the same positions he
holds today in the National-led coalition.
On November
8, 2017, the Greens’ then co-leader James Shaw told
parliament that the Greens and NZ First “do not agree on
everything, but we do agree—as has not been
documented—on far more than we disagree, and we do look
forward to working with them over the course of the coming
years to find common cause and to deliver the best for New
Zealand.”
The Ardern government adopted NZ First’s
anti-immigrant proposals and its call for a major increase
in police numbers. The Greens’ Shaw worked directly with
NZ First’s defence minister Ron Mark to argue for
increased military spending, on the false pretext of
providing disaster relief to the Pacific. The real purpose
was to align New Zealand more closely with US war
preparations against China.
At the same time, ACT and
NZ First have benefited from the fixation of the Greens and
Labour, and their pseudo-left supporters, on divisive
identity politics based on race, gender and
sexuality—which explicitly blames white and male workers
for social problems caused by capitalism.
As is the
case in the US, Europe and Australia, the entire political
establishment has worked to elevate the far-right and
promote every form of backwardness, in order to divide the
working class and defend the profit system. Democratic
rights, including the rights of LGBT people, immigrants and
other minorities, can only be defended by unifying the
working class in opposition to this system. This requires a
political struggle against all the parliamentary parties,
including the Greens, based on a socialist and
internationalist
program.
