Oceania nation resonates as perfect sounding board for social activist Atlantic policies
United Nations exercises a supranational influence over New Zealand’s body politic in a way that has not been experienced since the waning of Westminster’s sway followed soon after by Washington’s.
Nothing emphasises this realignment more than the view that the nation’s highest office, that of prime minister, is but a way station en route to assuming the real power which resides in the real high office which is that of secretary general of United Nations.
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark had, at best, a good outsider’s chance in her determined run for the secretary-generalship of United Nations.
Current prime minister Jacinda Ardern is said to be heading into poll position should she at any time in the next 30 or so years either seek the assignment or be tapped for it.
The nation’s bureaucracy has long been attuned to the United Nations ethos and this was demonstrated by its unquestioning belief in a Clinton victory at the last US presidential elections.
Also discarded in this new version of progressive realpolitik is the alignment that once centred on Canberra, notably during the Whitlam and Hawke eras.
Canberra, like Washington and Westminster has been shouldered aside in this new orientation to a new magnetic north.
Prone to believing polls, whole segments of New Zealand’s government found it hard to disguise their fervour in the forecast electoral victory of Bill Shorten and their sense of loss when this failed to come to pass.
From self-dramatizing inquests into its own rumoured official bullying (actually, officiousness) through hate speech (offensive), diversity and multi culturalism and the unifying climate movement, it is United Nations that now incarnates the yearnings of New Zealand’s parliamentary Labour government.
So what caused the inspirational compass to swing so abruptly from East to West?
Beijing’s Marco Polo attractions continue to fade, and only partly due to awkward and embarrassing trade imperatives.
New Zealand’s political Prester John impulse to lead the East into following its more progressive ways have simply dissolved amid Beijing’s ferocious militarism and intolerance of things like diversity, multiculturalism.
Contrary to a view once accepted as a geopolitical article of faith and voiced by former National Party prime minister Jim Bolger that New Zealand was “part of Asia,” those were his words, the nation instead has reconfigured itself on a trans Atlantic axis.
The New Zealand body politic draws its inspiration from an axis rooted in New York at United Nations.
Britain never truly on-message since Tony Blair’s day is nonetheless dipped into.
But merely to superheat on views on climate from only a very few selective sources such as The Guardian and the BBC.
Then the short hop across the English Channel to the terminus of this particular axis which is Paris, the city of enlightenment for this repositioning.
The body politic involved in this realignment includes the nation’s regional and district councils usually referred to as local bodies.
Once pre-occupied with the administration of roads and rubbish collection their elected members nowadays so often put a priority on the rather more rarified and thus engaging globalist procedures involved in podcasting their support for the policies of United Nations.
New Zealand has been a member of the UN security council on several occasions. Even more significantly its diplomats Sir Leslie Munro and more recently Terence O’Brien have served as presidents of the security council.
United Nations has traditionally sought as its secretary general someone from a non-aligned nation meaning a candidate beyond the Western Alliance or the old communist bloc.
As New Zealand politics at so many levels enters a new, and supercharged phase of institutional moral reformation its elected at so many levels see an opportunity to transcend the mundane in echoing this new Atlantic policy centred on United Nations Plaza on Manhattan’s East River.
Globalism suddenly means more than trade, in which nations are encouraged to focus on what they do best.
It now means a transnational approach to the free exchange of moral movements and without the frontiers and thus the boundaries of geography or even hemispheres.
