James Barron - 45O1

15/08/2026

Weekend longer read ...

Summary: Uncle Winstons prediction that "snivelling wokesters will work themselves into a lather" over naming a ferry "Cook" seem to be wrong!!!
Considering the possible reasons...
1. I dont know any wokesters (snivelling or vaccinated or other). (unlikely)
2. Said wokesters DI***AF and theres more important things than a ferry name (probable on the evidence) and Uncle Winston isn't astute eneough to know that (highly unlikely)
3. 2 but Uncle W does know and was just throwing raw meat to his pack. (Yep sounds about right)

https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/waikato-times/20260815/281715506444688

The age of out­rage Are we becom­ing more polar­ised?
There are ‘wokesters’ on one side and ‘extrem­ists’ on the other, while the middle is shrink­ing. Philip Mat­thews reports.
Waikato Times
15 Aug 2026

Four weeks is a long time in polit­ics, but see if you can recall this moment from mid-July. Win­ston Peters, in his role as rail min­is­ter, had news about the two Inter­is­lander fer­ries that should be con­nect­ing the North and South islands by 2029. Spe­cific­ally, their names. One will be called Kupe, the other will be Cook.

On the face of it, those names, reflect­ing Pākehā and Māori sea­far­ing tra­di­tions, were no big deal. What mattered was Peters’ attempt to make them a big deal.

Oppor­tun­ity Party leader Qiulae Wong out­lines the party’s list in Wel­ling­ton last month. Claire Robin­son sees only good in Par­lia­ment con­tain­ing mul­tiple parties.
He warned that “sniv­el­ling wokesters will work them­selves into a lather” over call­ing a ferry Cook. How dare we hon­our the evil col­on­ising white man?

The NZ First leader was reignit­ing an argu­ment that goes back dec­ades.

His­tor­ian Tony Bal­lantyne’s well-timed new book, Cap­tain Cook and the Unsettled After­lives of Empire, opens with a media drama from 1989.

Vis­it­ing Hawaiian act­iv­ist Haun­aniKay Trask caused such an uproar when she called Cook a “syph­il­itic tuber­cu­lar racist” and com­pared him to Adolf Hi**er, that she was invited onto the prime-time Holmes show, not once but twice.

Trask caused genu­ine upset. By con­trast, no-one seemed to care much about the ferry names, per­haps because Peters so labor­i­ously set up the con­tro­versy.

But more recently, his com­ments about Chinese-born politi­cian Lawrence Xu-Nan, and China more gen­er­ally, cre­ated a much greater drama, per­haps even big­ger than Peters anti­cip­ated.

There is an effort to see Peters as our ver­sion of over­seas, far-right pop­u­lists such as Pau­line Han­son of Aus­tralia and Nigel Far­age of the United King­dom, and his party as sim­ilar to Ger­many’s Altern­at­ive für Deutsch­land (AfD), with the 2026 elec­tion dom­in­ated by the same kind of polar­isa­tion.

While that might be tempt­ing, it is ulti­mately inac­cur­ate, accord­ing to polit­ical sci­ent­ist Dr Claire Robin­son.

Robin­son is focused instead on the unusu­ally low com­bined polling of Labour and National, which adds up to about 62%. That means about 38% do not like what the main­stream offers.

“I think it’s an inter­est­ing moment,” she says. “I’m not sure what the moment is just yet.

“We think we fol­low over­seas trends and the major-party reduc­tion is something we’re see­ing in the UK and Aus­tralia. A lot of it is to do with gen­eral dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the way things are: the eco­nomy, the cost of liv­ing crisis, things like that.

“But we aren’t quite the same as Aus­tralia and the UK because we have MMP. It is an out­let for polit­ical frus­tra­tion.”

One big dif­fer­ence is immig­ra­tion. If it is an issue in New Zea­l­and, it is around capa­city, rather than ideo­logy. In the UK and Europe, immig­ra­tion argu­ments come with heavy philo­soph­ical bag­gage about the rise of Islam and the so-called decline of the West.

Some in New Zea­l­and polit­ics have tried to make con­nec­tions to those argu­ments.

Dur­ing racist riots in North­ern Ire­land in June, sparked by a bru­tal knife attack, ACT MP Simon Court pos­ted on social media that while the viol­ence was “appalling and unac­cept­able”, it should serve as a warn­ing about what hap­pens when a gov­ern­ment loses the pub­lic’s trust on immig­ra­tion.

But the Ipsos Issues Mon­itor had just 8% of respond­ents pick­ing immig­ra­tion as one of their three top con­cerns, and it was the 11th-rank­ing issue over­all. Infla­tion/ the cost of liv­ing was far ahead of all oth­ers at 62%.

Nor do we have the tri­bal hatred of other parties seen in lar­ger demo­cra­cies, plus New Zea­l­and is small enough that most of us social­ise with people who vote dif­fer­ently.

“We have a lot of name-call­ing at the moment which trig­gers people to think things are get­ting worse,” Robin­son says. “But racism, sex­ism, ageism, ableism have always exis­ted. It’s just that people are more com­fort­able with verb­al­ising them in pub­lic.”

There was the dis­in­hib­it­ing effect of social media, and “then you apply the whole free-speech move­ment to that”.

Robin­son sees divi­sions other than the tra­di­tional left/right paradigm as National and Labour gen­er­ally share a vis­ion, which is coales­cing in the centre.

She pic­tures a bell curve in which NZ First is drag­ging the chain on one side as a nos­tal­gia-focused party and on the other side, there are the “trans­form­a­tion­ist” parties. About 26% of voters are in that space, and “that’s the fas­cin­at­ing space to watch”.

All the change-ori­ented parties are in there: ACT, Green, Te Pāti Māori and, of course, Oppor­tun­ity.

Robin­son would like to see Oppor­tun­ity come into Par­lia­ment by get­ting over the 5% threshold. “We should be hav­ing third parties com­ing in reg­u­larly. It should be a fea­ture of MMP. We need an injec­tion of something new. We’ve been very staid for too long.”

There are polit­ical rewards for people who polar­ise. The atten­tion eco­nomy rewards the extreme.
Ed Coper, Aus­tralian polit­ical com­mu­nic­a­tions expert
A new paper by two Vic­toria Uni­versity aca­dem­ics, Thomas Jam­ieson and Sarah Bakewell, sup­ports Robin­son’s view. It found that “affect­ive polar­isa­tion”, mean­ing the divi­sion between sup­port for one’s own party and dis­like of another, has declined since 2014.

That year’s chaotic elec­tion cam­paign was mem­or­able for “dirty polit­ics”, Inter­net Mana and Colin Craig’s Con­ser­vat­ives. It was a high-water mark of polar­isa­tion.

Affect­ive polar­isa­tion was higher in 2023 among left-lean­ing voters than other voters, espe­cially among sup­port­ers of Te Pāti Māori.

But there was less affect­ive polar­isa­tion over­all that year than in pre­vi­ous elec­tions, “sug­gest­ing the con­tem­por­ary polit­ical envir­on­ment in Aotearoa remains less polar­ised than in some other demo­cra­cies”.

Jam­ieson and Bakewell also found that sur­veys and ana­lysis show “New Zea­l­and has faced com­par­at­ively pos­it­ive, less polar­ised atti­tudes towards immig­ra­tion and other ideo­lo­gical issues com­pared to its peers”.

Like Robin­son, they see MMP’s poten­tial for stra­tegic vot­ing as a shield against polar­isa­tion. “If people are will­ing to vote stra­tegic­ally instead of rigidly sup­port­ing their pre­ferred can­did­ates, they must con­sider other parties and can­did­ates accept­able,” they wrote.

The idea is that MMP breaks us out of our tri­bal cages.

That’s anger­tain­ment
But Jam­ieson and Bakewell were look­ing back at 2023. They had a tent­at­ive pre­dic­tion that 2026 could be more polar­ised again.

“With increased expos­ure to con­tro­ver­sial policies from parties in gov­ern­ment and sub­sequent con­sid­er­able counter-reac­tions from the oppos­i­tion, we may see increased levels of polar­isa­tion across the 2026 gen­eral elec­tion as people form more firm opin­ions about the parties involved in Par­lia­ment,” they wrote.

Peters’ grow­ing use of pro­voc­at­ive online phrases such as “woke mind virus” shows that he has been adopt­ing the divis­ive lan­guage of inter­na­tional pop­u­lists. But he is a chamele­onic and con­tra­dict­ory fig­ure.

Another polit­ical sci­ent­ist, Grant Duncan, has argued that Peters’ com­plex­ity has been his Achilles heel. Incon­sist­ency might be another way to put it. Duncan com­pares Peters’ mer­cur­ial nature with Italian Prime Min­is­ter Gior­gia Mel­oni, a pop­u­list who suc­cess­fully transitioned into gov­ern­ment.

It is pos­sible that the noise of out­rage drowns out nuances. There is even a word for it. Anger­tain­ment. That is the title of a book by Aus­tralian polit­ical com­mu­nic­a­tions expert Ed Coper, who explained the idea in an ABC pod­cast.

“There are polit­ical rewards for people who polar­ise,” he said. “The atten­tion eco­nomy rewards the extreme.”

Coper said the goal of social media com­pan­ies was to keep users on plat­forms as long as pos­sible, and noth­ing kept them engaged like out­rage, which trig­gers a primal anger response. “All pro­por­tion is lost,” he said. “It’s all theatre now.”

As an example, Coper poin­ted to Aus­tralian broad­caster Karl Stefan­ovic, who aban­doned the main­stream and plat­formed Han­son and Brit­ish far-right act­iv­ist Tommy Robin­son.

The sud­den reappear­ance of polar­ising broad­casters Michael Laws and Paul Henry in our polit­ics might sig­nal an attempt to gen­er­ate that kind of out­rage, or it might simply express a wider bore­dom with the polit­ical middle.

If the same politi­cians who led Labour, National, ACT, NZ First and Te Pāti Māori in 2023 are lead­ing those parties again in 2026, with only the Greens chan­ging a co-leader, is it any won­der voters look for nov­elty?

But as Peters’ unsuc­cess­ful attempt to wind people up over ferry names showed, the age of out­rage is not always pre­dict­able. Some­times out­rage back­fires or fizzles out.

As a recent art­icle on the Quil­lette web­site argued, an entire “eco­sys­tem of influ­en­cers and anonym­ous accounts” made a huge fuss about the cast­ing in Chris­topher Nolan’s The Odys­sey, but as an attemp­ted boy­cott, it failed. The film is a massive hit and no-one cares about who played Helen of Troy.

New Zea­l­and’s most high-pro­file non­main­stream journ­al­ist is Sean Plun­ket, founder of The Plat­form. He agrees that he and Peters are also prob­ably the coun­try’s lead­ing users of the insult “woke”.

He is not sure we are see­ing a greater sense of griev­ance in our polit­ics than before. “I think every­one from every­where is pretty quick to take offence,” he says. “Is it polar­ised? Remem­ber the Cos­sacks dan­cing across the screen with Mul­doon? Hard, aggress­ive polit­ics.

“Push­ing people into corners is noth­ing new. And I per­son­ally think it’s kind of healthy that every­one has a go.”

Research tells him The Plat­form’s audi­ence is older and broadly mid­dle­right, but not extreme. They are people with grown fam­il­ies who are fin­an­cially inde­pend­ent, who run their own busi­nesses and have indi­vidual views.

But does The Plat­form also demon­strate how the media has become polar­ised?

Plun­ket says he has been “ghos­ted” by Labour leader Chris Hip­kins, although the occa­sional Labour MP such as Wil­lie Jack­son still phones in.

Prime Min­is­ter Chris­topher Luxon never appears either. Nor do the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, which means NZ First and ACT lead­ers dom­in­ate.

Just as The Plat­form is bey­ond the pale for politi­cians on the left and centre-left, there are some on the right who never get main­stream cov­er­age, Plun­ket says. He names Fam­ily First national dir­ector Bob McCoskrie, a con­ser­vat­ive influ­en­cer, as one example.

People “simply do not engage, and it’s not healthy and it pi**es me off”, Plun­ket says. “I’m doing my best to be as bal­anced as I can.”

But Oppor­tun­ity is the latest group to ban itself from The Plat­form after the party sent a formal let­ter to Plun­ket say­ing it would not appear.

Plun­ket says his crime was that he merely phoned deputy leader Daniel Eb after Eb said the party was not doing inter­views yet appeared in other out­lets.

This is Eb’s recol­lec­tion: “In June, Sean cold-called me in my capa­city as deputy leader after we had declined an inter­view. He did not indic­ate that the call was live on air and after I con­firmed that, I declined to con­tinue the inter­view.

“We are happy to engage in robust con­ver­sa­tion done in good faith and appear on a vari­ety of other media out­lets. But we con­sider Sean’s actions to be clear breaches of the broad­cast­ing stand­ards, so our pos­i­tion is that we will not engage with The Plat­form going for­ward.”

Put­ting someone on air without their know­ledge is a breach of the Broad­cast­ing Stand­ards Author­ity (BSA) rules. Of course, Plun­ket has said he is not a broad­caster and he was instru­mental in the BSA’s upcom­ing dis­es­tab­lish­ment.

If we want to talk about polar­isa­tion, there are two entirely oppos­ing views of what is accept­able.

Nearly a third are ali­en­ated
So are we together or apart?

Eco­nom­ist Shamu­beel Eaqub would describe New Zea­l­and as frac­tured rather than polar­ised, in that there are three main groups rather than two.

Eaqub has been research­ing social cohe­sion for the Helen Clark Found­a­tion. The first of at least five annual reports appeared in 2025.

Accord­ing to the 2026 report, which appeared in April, about 30% of people are con­nec­ted and exper­i­ence high cohe­sion. About 41% are ambi­val­ent, with a mid­dling sense of cohe­sion and low par­ti­cip­a­tion. They tend to be older.

The remain­ing 28% or so are ali­en­ated, mean­ing they have “dis­con­nec­ted from tra­di­tional civic and social con­nec­tions, but are often engaged in protest, online and other activ­it­ies”.

The report sum­mar­ised the ali­en­ated like this:

“Almost half of Māori and Pasi­fika are in this group. So are nearly half of Green voters and seven in 10 NZ First voters, who dis­agree on most other things, but share the same struc­tural pos­i­tion. They are the loudest voices in our pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion, and the ones most likely to feel the coun­try is not for them.”

While the social cohe­sion study did not meas­ure polit­ical polar­isa­tion per se, “from what I can see from our data and the NZ Elec­tion Study it seems likely we’re going to move towards more of the griev­ance-led vot­ing, more of the oppos­i­tional beha­viour in the way we prac­tise polit­ics,” Eaqub says.

He found atti­tudes towards immig­ra­tion have worsened slightly, with 36% say­ing immig­ra­tion num­bers are too high. NZ First and ACT voters are the most likely to say that, and Green voters the least.

But 67% say mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is good for New Zea­l­and, and 54% say immig­rants are good for the eco­nomy. Yet only 47% agree immig­rants make good cit­izens and the same num­ber say immig­rants improve soci­ety.

As for polit­ics in 2026, Eaqub agrees with Robin­son that the 38% of non­main­stream vote means “a pretty big chunk of New Zeal­anders are say­ing we want something else”.

But unlike the Vic­toria Uni­versity aca­dem­ics, he sees polit­ical iden­tit­ies becom­ing more tri­bal and entrenched.

The frag­ment­a­tion he describes has been a long unfold­ing trend since the 1980s, with poverty and inequal­ity as the back­ground cause.

There was a small and unusual moment of solid­ar­ity dur­ing the first year of the Covid pan­demic before the trend against social cohe­sion accel­er­ated again.

What about social media? While it is not a cause of social frag­ment­a­tion, it can be a mul­ti­plier, Eaqub found.

For people who are com­fort­ably off, with good social con­nec­tions, social media is just an exten­sion of their extro­ver­sion. But it amp­li­fies the neg­at­ive views of those who already feel ali­en­ated.

Over­all, Eaqub has good and bad news about the state of social cohe­sion in New Zea­l­and.

For the first year, the big shock is we are less socially cohes­ive than Aus­tralia. That was sur­pris­ing, given Aus­tralia’s grim race rela­tions head­lines.

Aus­trali­ans are hap­pier, more con­nec­ted and more likely to par­ti­cip­ate in soci­ety. But they are more neg­at­ive about immig­ra­tion and less trust­worthy of elec­tions.

The pos­it­ive side for New Zeal­anders, espe­cially in this year’s sur­vey, is that young people in par­tic­u­lar are “super­aspir­a­tional” about their coun­try.

“That gives me hope,” he says. “There is a deep love for New Zea­l­and that I didn’t expect. There is a strong found­a­tion to build on.

“The idea of New Zea­l­and is still strong, even if that is no longer true for a lot of people in their local com­munit­ies and lived exper­i­ences.”

As we saw in 2020, New Zeal­anders can unite in a crisis.

“The ques­tion I have not resolved yet is how we do that united response when there is not a crisis.”

Eco­nom­ist Shamu­beel Eaqub sees New Zea­l­and as frac­tured, not polar­ised. But there is hope as well.
Polit­ical sci­ent­ist Claire Robin­son is inter­ested in the new, non­main­stream vote.

Four weeks is a long time in politics, but see if you can recall this moment from mid-July. Winston Peters, in his role as rail minister, had news about the two Interislander ferries that should be connecting the North and South islands by 2029. Specifically, their names. One will be called Kupe, the other will be Cook.

On the face of it, those names, reflecting Pākehā and Māori seafaring traditions, were no big deal. What mattered was Peters’ attempt to make them a big deal.

He warned that “snivelling wokesters will work themselves into a lather” over calling a ferry Cook. How dare we honour the evil colonising white man?

The NZ First leader was reigniting an argument that goes back decades.

Historian Tony Ballantyne’s well-timed new book, Captain Cook and the Unsettled Afterlives of Empire, opens with a media drama from 1989.

Visiting Hawaiian activist HaunaniKay Trask caused such an uproar when she called Cook a “syphilitic tubercular racist” and compared him to Adolf Hi**er, that she was invited onto the prime-time Holmes show, not once but twice.

Trask caused genuine upset. By contrast, no-one seemed to care much about the ferry names, perhaps because Peters so laboriously set up the controversy.

But more recently, his comments about Chinese-born politician Lawrence Xu-Nan, and China more generally, created a much greater drama, perhaps even bigger than Peters anticipated.

There is an effort to see Peters as our version of overseas, far-right populists such as Pauline Hanson of Australia and Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom, and his party as similar to Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), with the 2026 election dominated by the same kind of polarisation.

While that might be tempting, it is ultimately inaccurate, according to political scientist Dr Claire Robinson.

Robinson is focused instead on the unusually low combined polling of Labour and National, which adds up to about 62%. That means about 38% do not like what the mainstream offers.

“I think it’s an interesting moment,” she says. “I’m not sure what the moment is just yet.

“We think we follow overseas trends and the major-party reduction is something we’re seeing in the UK and Australia. A lot of it is to do with general disillusionment with the way things are: the economy, the cost of living crisis, things like that.

“But we aren’t quite the same as Australia and the UK because we have MMP. It is an outlet for political frustration.”

One big difference is immigration. If it is an issue in New Zealand, it is around capacity, rather than ideology. In the UK and Europe, immigration arguments come with heavy philosophical baggage about the rise of Islam and the so-called decline of the West.

Some in New Zealand politics have tried to make connections to those arguments.

During racist riots in Northern Ireland in June, sparked by a brutal knife attack, ACT MP Simon Court posted on social media that while the violence was “appalling and unacceptable”, it should serve as a warning about what happens when a government loses the public’s trust on immigration.

But the Ipsos Issues Monitor had just 8% of respondents picking immigration as one of their three top concerns, and it was the 11th-ranking issue overall. Inflation/ the cost of living was far ahead of all others at 62%.

Nor do we have the tribal hatred of other parties seen in larger democracies, plus New Zealand is small enough that most of us socialise with people who vote differently.

“We have a lot of name-calling at the moment which triggers people to think things are getting worse,” Robinson says. “But racism, sexism, ageism, ableism have always existed. It’s just that people are more comfortable with verbalising them in public.”

There was the disinhibiting effect of social media, and “then you apply the whole free-speech movement to that”.

Robinson sees divisions other than the traditional left/right paradigm as National and Labour generally share a vision, which is coalescing in the centre.

She pictures a bell curve in which NZ First is dragging the chain on one side as a nostalgia-focused party and on the other side, there are the “transformationist” parties. About 26% of voters are in that space, and “that’s the fascinating space to watch”.

All the change-oriented parties are in there: ACT, Green, Te Pāti Māori and, of course, Opportunity.

Robinson would like to see Opportunity come into Parliament by getting over the 5% threshold. “We should be having third parties coming in regularly. It should be a feature of MMP. We need an injection of something new. We’ve been very staid for too long.”

There are political rewards for people who polarise. The attention economy rewards the extreme.

Ed Coper, Australian political communications expert

A new paper by two Victoria University academics, Thomas Jamieson and Sarah Bakewell, supports Robinson’s view. It found that “affective polarisation”, meaning the division between support for one’s own party and dislike of another, has declined since 2014.

That year’s chaotic election campaign was memorable for “dirty politics”, Internet Mana and Colin Craig’s Conservatives. It was a high-water mark of polarisation.

Affective polarisation was higher in 2023 among left-leaning voters than other voters, especially among supporters of Te Pāti Māori.

But there was less affective polarisation overall that year than in previous elections, “suggesting the contemporary political environment in Aotearoa remains less polarised than in some other democracies”.

Jamieson and Bakewell also found that surveys and analysis show “New Zealand has faced comparatively positive, less polarised attitudes towards immigration and other ideological issues compared to its peers”.

Like Robinson, they see MMP’s potential for strategic voting as a shield against polarisation. “If people are willing to vote strategically instead of rigidly supporting their preferred candidates, they must consider other parties and candidates acceptable,” they wrote.

The idea is that MMP breaks us out of our tribal cages.

But Jamieson and Bakewell were looking back at 2023. They had a tentative prediction that 2026 could be more polarised again.

“With increased exposure to controversial policies from parties in government and subsequent considerable counter-reactions from the opposition, we may see increased levels of polarisation across the 2026 general election as people form more firm opinions about the parties involved in Parliament,” they wrote.

Peters’ growing use of provocative online phrases such as “woke mind virus” shows that he has been adopting the divisive language of international populists. But he is a chameleonic and contradictory figure.

Another political scientist, Grant Duncan, has argued that Peters’ complexity has been his Achilles heel. Inconsistency might be another way to put it. Duncan compares Peters’ mercurial nature with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a populist who successfully transitioned into government.

It is possible that the noise of outrage drowns out nuances. There is even a word for it. Angertainment. That is the title of a book by Australian political communications expert Ed Coper, who explained the idea in an ABC podcast.

“There are political rewards for people who polarise,” he said. “The attention economy rewards the extreme.”

Coper said the goal of social media companies was to keep users on platforms as long as possible, and nothing kept them engaged like outrage, which triggers a primal anger response. “All proportion is lost,” he said. “It’s all theatre now.”

As an example, Coper pointed to Australian broadcaster Karl Stefanovic, who abandoned the mainstream and platformed Hanson and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

The sudden reappearance of polarising broadcasters Michael Laws and Paul Henry in our politics might signal an attempt to generate that kind of outrage, or it might simply express a wider boredom with the political middle.

If the same politicians who led Labour, National, ACT, NZ First and Te Pāti Māori in 2023 are leading those parties again in 2026, with only the Greens changing a co-leader, is it any wonder voters look for novelty?

But as Peters’ unsuccessful attempt to wind people up over ferry names showed, the age of outrage is not always predictable. Sometimes outrage backfires or fizzles out.

As a recent article on the Quillette website argued, an entire “ecosystem of influencers and anonymous accounts” made a huge fuss about the casting in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but as an attempted boycott, it failed. The film is a massive hit and no-one cares about who played Helen of Troy.

New Zealand’s most high-profile nonmainstream journalist is Sean Plunket, founder of The Platform. He agrees that he and Peters are also probably the country’s leading users of the insult “woke”.

He is not sure we are seeing a greater sense of grievance in our politics than before. “I think everyone from everywhere is pretty quick to take offence,” he says. “Is it polarised? Remember the Cossacks dancing across the screen with Muldoon? Hard, aggressive politics.

“Pushing people into corners is nothing new. And I personally think it’s kind of healthy that everyone has a go.”

Research tells him The Platform’s audience is older and broadly middleright, but not extreme. They are people with grown families who are financially independent, who run their own businesses and have individual views.

But does The Platform also demonstrate how the media has become polarised?

Plunket says he has been “ghosted” by Labour leader Chris Hipkins, although the occasional Labour MP such as Willie Jackson still phones in.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon never appears either. Nor do the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, which means NZ First and ACT leaders dominate.

Just as The Platform is beyond the pale for politicians on the left and centre-left, there are some on the right who never get mainstream coverage, Plunket says. He names Family First national director Bob McCoskrie, a conservative influencer, as one example.

People “simply do not engage, and it’s not healthy and it pi**es me off”, Plunket says. “I’m doing my best to be as balanced as I can.”

But Opportunity is the latest group to ban itself from The Platform after the party sent a formal letter to Plunket saying it would not appear.

Plunket says his crime was that he merely phoned deputy leader Daniel Eb after Eb said the party was not doing interviews yet appeared in other outlets.

This is Eb’s recollection: “In June, Sean cold-called me in my capacity as deputy leader after we had declined an interview. He did not indicate that the call was live on air and after I confirmed that, I declined to continue the interview.

“We are happy to engage in robust conversation done in good faith and appear on a variety of other media outlets. But we consider Sean’s actions to be clear breaches of the broadcasting standards, so our position is that we will not engage with The Platform going forward.”

Putting someone on air without their knowledge is a breach of the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) rules. Of course, Plunket has said he is not a broadcaster and he was instrumental in the BSA’s upcoming disestablishment.

If we want to talk about polarisation, there are two entirely opposing views of what is acceptable.

So are we together or apart?

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub would describe New Zealand as fractured rather than polarised, in that there are three main groups rather than two.

Eaqub has been researching social

cohesion for the Helen Clark Foundation. The first of at least five annual reports appeared in 2025.

According to the 2026 report, which appeared in April, about 30% of people are connected and experience high cohesion. About 41% are ambivalent, with a middling sense of cohesion and low participation. They tend to be older.

The remaining 28% or so are alienated, meaning they have “disconnected from traditional civic and social connections, but are often engaged in protest, online and other activities”.

The report summarised the alienated like this:

“Almost half of Māori and Pasifika are in this group. So are nearly half of Green voters and seven in 10 NZ First voters, who disagree on most other things, but share the same structural position. They are the loudest voices in our public conversation, and the ones most likely to feel the country is not for them.”

While the social cohesion study did not measure political polarisation per se, “from what I can see from our data and the NZ Election Study it seems likely we’re going to move towards more of the grievance-led voting, more of the oppositional behaviour in the way we practise politics,” Eaqub says.

He found attitudes towards immigration have worsened slightly, with 36% saying immigration numbers are too high. NZ First and ACT voters are the most likely to say that, and Green voters the least.

But 67% say multiculturalism is good for New Zealand, and 54% say immigrants are good for the economy. Yet only 47% agree immigrants make good citizens and the same number say immigrants improve society.

As for politics in 2026, Eaqub agrees with Robinson that the 38% of nonmainstream vote means “a pretty big chunk of New Zealanders are saying we want something else”.

But unlike the Victoria University academics, he sees political identities becoming more tribal and entrenched.

The fragmentation he describes has been a long unfolding trend since the 1980s, with poverty and inequality as the background cause.

There was a small and unusual moment of solidarity during the first year of the Covid pandemic before the trend against social cohesion accelerated again.

What about social media? While it is not a cause of social fragmentation, it can be a multiplier, Eaqub found.

For people who are comfortably off, with good social connections, social media is just an extension of their extroversion. But it amplifies the negative views of those who already feel alienated.

Overall, Eaqub has good and bad news about the state of social cohesion in New Zealand.

For the first year, the big shock is we are less socially cohesive than Australia. That was surprising, given Australia’s grim race relations headlines.

Australians are happier, more connected and more likely to participate in society. But they are more negative about immigration and less trustworthy of elections.

The positive side for New Zealanders, especially in this year’s survey, is that young people in particular are “superaspirational” about their country.

“That gives me hope,” he says. “There is a deep love for New Zealand that I didn’t expect. There is a strong foundation to build on.

“The idea of New Zealand is still strong, even if that is no longer true for a lot of people in their local communities and lived experiences.”

As we saw in 2020, New Zealanders can unite in a crisis.

“The question I have not resolved yet is how we do that united response when there is not a crisis.”

Article Name:The age of outrage Are we becoming more polarised?
Publication:Waikato Times
Section:Weekend
Start Page:B1
End Page:B1