In brief

• Woke ideologies appear contradictory unless you look at what they aim to do, not just what they say.
• These academic theories have often been adopted by administrators without a public mandate.
• They justify growing numbers of bureaucrats without addressing real problems.
• The conflict of interest is increasingly obvious to voters, leading to a rightward swing in many Western countries.

Previously we discussed the new Marxism of culture, being the radical deconstruction of Western values via critical theories.

Woke theory reshaping NZ

The creation of all these Marxist theories in supposedly scientific academia was seen by many outsiders as wasteful, but not particularly dangerous. Now these ideas have come down from their ivory towers into the practice of public administration, where they have rapidly become Government policy, to the consternation and alarm of many.

Labour’s creation of the Māori Health Authority and its attempted rash of co-governance arrangements are an explicit application of post-colonial theory.

Applying queer and transgender theories, the Ministry of Education now recommends schools work to denormalize heterosexuality and teach children they can change their gender. Yet only 10% of Kiwis polled support this.

Kiwis can now change the gender on their birth certificate, and effectively alter history with no official recording of their original gender. With this one change, all NZ’s sex-based policies and social norms are severely undermined. For instance, there is no legal defence of women’s spaces against biological men who are now officially women, and men who identify as women are starting to be placed in women’s prisons in NZ.

Is wokism reaching its peak?

Neo-Marxism’s continued popularity among administrators is due in large part to how it justifies growing the ranks of public servants, academics and corporate bureaucrats without reference to material problems. While its stated aim is to empower people at the bottom, it uses their plight as a reason to demand higher taxes without needing to produce effective results. This only benefits people at the top, and can be seen clearly in the modern political left’s lack of concern for unprecedented bureaucratic waste and its focus on identity politics ahead of the struggles of the working class.

Many from both sides of the aisle have written about this phenomenon, both in NZ and overseas. After the 2023 election NZ joins a growing populist trend in the West with many voters realising the political establishment is far from representing their interests.

The left-wing political elite is increasingly composed of career bureaucrats who lean on the “expertise” of the academia described in this series. Increasingly censorious tendencies ensure they don’t encounter different views. They have become ensconced in a circle of woke thought, particularly in universities and the ministries of Wellington, detached from ordinary Kiwis and opposed to their values.

The Wellington bubble was made painfully obvious during the 2022 Parliament protest, where marginalised working class people from around the country turned up on the doorstep of the politicians. The members of the House didn’t like what they saw, and the cultural clash in the most masked city gave both sides of the aisle the excuse to call them all kinds of nasty things, using many of the sacred words we described in part three. The representatives of Parliament completely refused to engage with a crowd whose most common vote was for Labour. A crowd that was poorer and twice as Māori as the general population, who were disproportionately affected by the mandates they were protesting.

The bureaucrats following an ideology obsessed with oppression, when faced with the actual suffering and oppression their expert policies smugly created, were unmoved.