Judith Collins no doubt imagines she has done what her friend Cameron Slater would call a hit job.
What her letter to the people of New Zealand is actually doing is giving us a teachable moment about the art of propaganda.
Doing propaganda! Lesson #1
Cast your opponents as extreme, give them a bloody good othering
Oh watch her go!! She’s even taking a swipe in the title of the thing, with an implicit go at the useless bloody media who cannot be relied upon to take down this stuff as she reads it out to them slowly.
Dear The People of New Zilland. With my patience sorely tested, I write to give you the facts
She then proceeds to pretend that the people who are going on strike, the teachers and doctors and nurses, are mere biddable pawns in an evil game. It’s their representatives who are really pulling the strings, don’t you know, and what is it they’re doing, customers? They’re only putting Palestine at number one on the meeting agenda. Palestine!!!!
For many of us, that is a byword for being anguished about innocent children being maimed starved and traumatised. But in this context what Palestine means is insufferable lefties: you know the type, from Minto to Swarbrick, the wrong sort of people taking the wrong side of things with their commie greenie agenda.
Never mind that the order of a meeting agenda usually means nothing about the order of priorities, Judith is busy doing what she can to demonise and disqualify. This will do nicely thank you.
Doing propaganda! Lesson #2
Impute your opponents with bad and wrong motives and never mind if what you’re saying makes no bloody sense at all
It’s all politically motivated!! she says. Meaning: Politics is something only other people do. What we do is JustGeddingOnWithIt.
What she is really saying is: You’re engaging in politics I disapprove of, so I’m going to delegitimise it by calling it ‘politics’ while pretending my own political positions about values and interests are just reality.
Of course because this argument makes no bloody sense at all but it’s an easy line to parrot, her Idiot Boss has been intoning it all over the media.
It’s all politically motivated, Ingrid, it’s the unions Mike, he goes, trying to do it the way Muldoon did but with no clue how to do the glare.
Doing propaganda! Lesson #3
Lies damn lies and statistics
She got burned in her first go at this when she picked the biggest pay number for nurses she could find, tried to use it as representative and got sprayed with shit. So this time around she’s been a bit more artful.
How she’s done this is by pivoting on a figure that once represented big, big pay, ie 100k, and which remains still potent because pay for many remains meagre. Look at all this pay, is her subtext, how greedy are they being?
This is artful tap dancing because, for example, among her peers in the field of law you will find plenty who would be indignant if you asked them to work for such a rate. Although such peers might also say that they are rare birds of immense worth and how very dare you etc. But without wheeling out a million charts let me make this essential point. In previous decades, teacher pay was better, relative to other professionals with similar education and responsibility: your lawyers, your engineers, your accountants, your middle management. Teachers have been squeezed down toward the median, while the top end has pulled away.
Does that look sensible if we’re putting our faith in a future that has well-educated kids?
Doing propaganda! Lesson #4
Ignore the inconvenient
But above all, in propaganda, what’s usually most telling is what’s left out.
And what’s left out here is everything. This strike is as much as anything about working conditions, about what our teachers and doctors and nurses are being asked to take on each day at work, a lot of it the extra problems we have created and dumped on them.
They talk about struggling and facing burnout, and they have been talking this way for a long time.
And instead of listening, this idiot Prime Minister and Judith Collins, cynical penpal to the nation, are just slopping up we love our teachers and doctors we just hate their political unions and gosh darn it we’d love to pay them more but we just don’t have the money.
It’s as empty as the clapping they did at the end of the streets at the end of each day in Covid UK, and it ignores the truth - THE FACT - that if we hadn’t made a fetish out of so-called tax relief and had a realistic tax rate regime the money would be there. All the more so if we weren’t blowing it on roads and landlords.
Return to bloody sender.
For much more around this track please see the wonderful Dianne Swann
