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Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

BooksFebruary 20, 2023

Women and the alt-right in New Zealand

Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

An abridged excerpt from Byron C Clark’s new book Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists.

Much of the alternative right in New Zealand is led by men. Action Zealandia (and, while they existed, Wargus Christi) even went so far as to restrict their membership to males. This hasn’t made women absent from the movement, of course. Globally, women such as Lauren Southern have been significant figures in the alt-right. Closer to home, Carol Sakey, with her petition and associated videos, played a big part in the campaign against the UN Global Migration Compact, even if her influence waned afterwards. It is Hannah Tamaki, rather than Brian, who leads the Vision NZ Party, Helen Houghton co-leads the New Conservatives, and Hannah Spierer is the co-host of Counterspin Media. Voices for Freedom, while having membership open to all, have specifically oriented themselves towards women, and mothers especially. Yet the role of women on the far-right is often overlooked. 

I spoke with Massey University researcher Donna Carson, whose Master’s thesis, in 2021, was titled: Breaking the masculine looking glass: women as co-founders, nurturers, and executors of extremism in New Zealand, and I asked her why they are overlooked. She mentioned the research done by Seyward Darby, the author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the front lines of white nationalism. Carson also discussed the influence of Kathleen Belew, an American historian who has documented the history of the white power movement, with titles such as A Field Guide to White Supremacy (2021), co-authored with Ramon A. Gutierrez.

As Carson told me, “I looked around the world and I was like, the women are part of the movement everywhere else, but where are ours? We can’t be that isolated. So that’s when I started unpacking it, and as I did so, I became really on board with what Seyward Darby and others were finding, that women are so integral to these movements, and yet we don’t talk about them.”

For believers in the great replacement conspiracy theory, the way to counter the replacement of the white race with people of colour is to increase the size of the next generation. To have more white babies, to put it bluntly. This couldn’t be achieved without women. Yet women in New Zealand have avoided referencing the conspiracy theory explicitly. “I haven’t heard anything that’s really blatantly come out and said we’re being replaced, we need to do something about this. But they flirt around the edges of it,” Carson tells me. 

While on a roadshow with Counterspin Media, dubbed the “Let’s not forget” tour, Hannah Spierer told an audience in Bluff, “The conditioning that I experienced growing up is that I felt bad for being white, and that I needed to take on Māori culture to make up for the sins of the colonialists. How twisted is that? I grew up with white guilt … it’s the inbuilt systemic racism that the Marxists want to tell you exists, but they’re actually now creating it, so I sided with victims [due to] the conditioning of the universities; I thought my culture – I couldn’t be proud of it. One of the most politically incorrect things you can say now as a European is that you’re proud of your heritage. I can’t even say the words in front of you right now because of the way it gets taken.” 

However, far more often than she talks about race or culture, Spierer voices her opinion about feminism. “We have to lead the charge in that conversation because if men do it, they’ll just be called chauvinist or they’ll just be called sexist,” she told Caro McKee, a Counterspin correspondent, on a livestream during the occupation of Parliament grounds. The two women had been discussing the subservient role women should be playing in the alt-right movement, and Spierer was responding to McKee who had said that women should let the men lead them. “We have to sometimes back off and be that little submissive person and let our boys stand up,” said McKee. 

During the same Counterspin roadshow, Spierer told an audience in Wānaka: “If you are a working mother, and you’ve got children in a school, and you feel that there are some things you don’t like about schools, just consider that maybe quitting your job now is a sacrifice worth making.” She went on to describe feminism as a mind-control programme that teaches women they only have value when working outside the home. “That’s not true,” she says. “We can save our kids.” 

Renewed interest in ideas around traditional gender roles for women emerged online in a space known as the “manosphere” – a loose collection of websites and forums that are best described as anti-feminist or even male supremacist. Men in this space promote a nostalgic view of a mythologised past, when men could be “real men” and women could be, as McKee phrased it, “that little submissive person”. These ideas appealed to the same demographic who had gravitated towards #Gamergate, thinking feminism was out to destroy the last bastion of masculinity on the internet, or to Jordan Peterson and his promises of sexual success if you follow his 12 rules for life.

Most notoriously, this view of women has been adopted by men who self-identify as “incels” or involuntary celibates, and blame their romantic misfortune on the rising cultural and economic power of women, in particular the power to choose sexual partners. Incels, and others in the manosphere, long for a world where they have access to and control over women. But the ideal of an obedient mid-twentieth-century (or earlier) housewife appeals not just to men but also to a number of women who openly embrace the idea of being a “#tradwife”. This is where the “traditional” lifestyle of a home and family is seen as being denied to a certain demographic – a situation they blame on feminism; their anti-feminism becoming an entry point into the alternative right. 

I’d not really considered the possibility of anti-feminist women before this trend. We’ve all met women who reject feminism, but I thought of them as an anomaly. However, Western feminism hasn’t been a good fit for every woman.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a traditional wife at all, right?” Carson asks. “It’s when you add in the real stringent racism that’s at the core of the far right, that’s when it becomes dangerous.” Young would-be tradwives encounter the same economic realities as men, making their preferred lifestyle impossible for many. “In very few countries would a family survive on one income,” says Carson, “so it gives them another victim narrative. My wife would be at home with the children if society were set up better, if we were following traditional values, if feminism hadn’t told her she could do everything, and that’s where feminism falls over.” 

This then becomes a means for anti-feminist sentiments to draw women into the alt-right. A community of women embracing traditional femininity has grown online via tradwife blogs and communities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It has also found adherents among evangelical Christian and traditionalist Catholic communities. It was in part this overlap that prompted Hannah Blake to start her activism. “Hearing the same viewpoint about women belonging at home, about feminism being dangerous, about women needing to have children young, about women needing to shut up and let men talk, the concept that suddenly we are over toxic masculinity, all these talking points I had heard from all my religious instruction growing up were suddenly being parroted, and I was like ‘Oh no, oh no’,” she told Michelle Duff, a journalist who wrote an article in July 2022 titled How women are being weaponised by the “freedom movement”

While one doesn’t have to be white to adopt the tradwife lifestyle, it’s an ideology based heavily in white, Western cultural constructions of gender. Gender is seen as biological, binary, heterosexual and universal – something all people share regardless of history or culture. This is what gives rise to homophobia and transphobia among these communities. “A lot of people seem to think that for the Christians who are anti-queer, that it’s just they don’t understand. I don’t believe that’s the case,” Blake tells me. “They see any kind of sexuality … any queer identity to be a direct attack on the reason God created people.” Even without the oft-quoted Bible passages about homosexuality, Blake says this attitude would still exist. “They saw feminism as like, one of the ultimate enemies of the Church, because it was women stepping out of their place, stepping out of their God-ordained place and it was ruining everything in society; our birth rates are dropping because of all these feminists having abortions all the time, or they’re being lesbians, or anything like that … basically, we’re scared because we’re not having as many babies as we want.” 

According to Dr Ashley Mattheis, in a chapter titled #TradCulture: Reproducing whiteness and neo-fascism through gendered discourse online, which she contributed to the Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness, the nostalgic romanticism of the tradwife movement “obscures a long historical relationship between white mothers, the maintenance of white supremacy, and fascist nation-building”. While not everyone participating in the tradwife subculture is a white supremacist or a fascist, the far-right have made incursions into this space specifically because it’s not explicitly fascist, meaning extreme ideologies can be laundered via more socially acceptable misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic ideas of “natural” gender and sexuality, a reactionary response to what Mattheis describes as “feminist and queer notions of gender”. 

Carson argues that a “masculine lens” pervades the field of counter-terrorism, leading to women in extremist movements being rendered invisible. She cites New York Times journalist Annie Kelly, who found multiple social-media accounts she described as being designed with purposeful “hyper-feminine aesthetics” to mask the ideological authoritarianism within the tradwife subculture.

It’s likely that at least some of the opposition to children receiving Covid-19 vaccinations is driven by a fear of it being the government rather than parents making decisions about child health. This has brought women into the fold of the antivaccine conspiracy movement, not just the predominantly white mothers of Voices for Freedom, but Māori and Pasifika women as well. These women are then used to deflect accusations that the wider anti-government movement which has coalesced around the Covid public health response contains a sizable white supremacist element. 

Concurrently, though, it is white femininity that has given the far-right and conspiracy-theory movements an acceptable presentation. During the protests at Parliament, Chantelle Baker, once a reality TV participant and the daughter of former New Conservative Party leader Leighton Baker, grew her Facebook audience to over 96,000 followers. Described as the “Instagram-ready face of the protest” she brought disinformation to a much wider audience than the likes of Kelvyn Alp, whose violent rhetoric would have been off-putting to those not already radicalised. Appearing like a respectable, conservative “news personality” (how her since-deleted Facebook page was categorised), Baker gives an easy entry point into the world of anti-government conspiracy theory. Women may be relegated to particular roles within the alternative right, but it’s clear that the movement wouldn’t be where it is without them.

Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists by Byron C Clark (HarperCollins NZ, $39.99) can be ordered from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland

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Poet laureate Chris Tse is a descendent of a Cantoneses-speaking poll tax payer (Photo: Supplied / Design: Archi Banal)
Poet laureate Chris Tse is a descendent of a Cantoneses-speaking poll tax payer (Photo: Supplied / Design: Archi Banal)

BooksFebruary 19, 2023

Sorry seems to be the hardest word (to hear in the wrong language)

Poet laureate Chris Tse is a descendent of a Cantoneses-speaking poll tax payer (Photo: Supplied / Design: Archi Banal)
Poet laureate Chris Tse is a descendent of a Cantoneses-speaking poll tax payer (Photo: Supplied / Design: Archi Banal)

Poet laureate Chris Tse reflects on this week’s government apology for the discriminatory poll tax legislation that treated our early Chinese New Zealand community so poorly – and why it’s so important that the apology was finally delivered in Cantonese.

Every year parliament holds an event to celebrate Chinese New Year. I’ve been to a few of these and they play out as you might expect – perfunctory speeches from officials peppered with statistics and positive statements about New Zealand–China relations, interspersed with a smattering of cultural performances to help keep the audience awake. Perfectly fine, in a Groundhog Day sort of way. However, this year’s event had an extra special item on the agenda: an apology for the poll tax in Cantonese.

First, a tl;dr history lesson: in 1881, parliament passed the Chinese Immigrants Act, which was designed to tax Chinese immigrants to New Zealand and restrict migration from China. The initial poll tax was £10 per person (about $2000 today). In 1896, the tax was increased to £100 and Chinese passenger restrictions on ships became even more stringent.

In the book Aliens At My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them, a collection of historical political cartoons edited by Manying Ip and Nigel Murphy, there’s an image that always catches my eye. It’s a 1905 cartoon titled ‘Still They Come’ that features grotesque caricatures of Chinese men bounding over a wall, startling a pair of stout, well-dressed Englishmen. “The wall’s got to go up a bit higher,” says part of the caption. “If a £100 poll tax won’t keep the yellow agony out then we’ll have to slap on another hundred.” Other cartoons in the book echo the calls for raising the tax, as well as the introduction of an education test for Chinese immigrants. (In 2002, months after the original poll tax apology, the government tightened language requirements for prospective immigrants, who were now expected to have English proficiency at a post-graduate university level.)

The poll tax legislation was repealed in 1944, long after other countries had abandoned such measures. On 12 February 2002, then prime minister Helen Clark made a formal apology to Chinese New Zealanders who paid the poll tax and were subjected to the discriminatory legislation. She said it marked the beginning of “formal process of reconciliation with the Chinese community”. 

The apology promised to be a momentous step forward in addressing and making amends for the government’s shameful treatment of early Chinese New Zealanders. Although the apology was welcomed by the community, there was one decision that left many in disbelief – the Chinese language version of the apology was delivered in Mandarin. It’s estimated that 98% of those who paid the poll tax came from the Cantonese-speaking regions of southern China. In other words, the Mandarin apology would’ve meant nothing to them or their descendants.

Last year’s public criticism of New Zealand Chinese Language Week (NZCLW) highlighted the delicate politics at play when it comes to the use and promotion of Chinese languages in Aotearoa. I’m not here to rehash my disappointment in NZCLW, but it’s important to re-emphasise that Cantonese has an important place in New Zealand’s history and, by association, its relationship with the Chinese community. As Jenny Too, president of the New Zealand Chinese Association, noted in her speech on Monday night, “Cantonese is the heritage language of our original settlers. We honour them by continuing to speak it.” Aotearoa is not alone in this sentiment – many other Chinese diaspora communities around the world are attempting to preserve Cantonese as their heritage language.

Esther Fung and Harvey Wu giving their right of reply. (Photo: Supplied)

These days I’m pleasantly surprised when I hear snatches of Cantonese in public. Over the years it’s become less common, in keeping with the rise of Mandarin as the most spoken Chinese language in New Zealand. On the day before the Parliamentary event, I watched the first episode of Sik Fan Lah! with my Mum. We turned to each other and beamed every time someone on screen spoke in Cantonese. In addition to being a fantastic showcase of the diversity of Chinese food culture in Aotearoa, the show is a potent reminder that language, often politicised, has a power and value to ethnic and minority communities that cannot be underestimated or taken for granted.

Earlier this year I came across a translation of a Cantonese quote: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” This sums up what it felt like to be in the room when interpreter Dr Henry Liu delivered the apology in Cantonese on Monday night. I’m by no means a fluent speaker these days, but I was surprised at how much of the apology I could understand. It was an incredibly moving moment knowing that the decision to apologise in Mandarin was not only being acknowledged, it was being redressed. Dr Liu was not given a choice to deliver the original apology in Cantonese back in 2002; 21 years later, he was finally allowed to do what should’ve been done in the first place.

Interpreter Dr Henry Liu delivering the apology in Cantonese. (Photo: Supplied)

Community elders Esther Fung and Harvey Wu followed Dr Liu with a right of reply to the apology. Both were present at the 2002 apology, along with some of the last surviving poll tax payers. They spoke of the frustration by those who could not understand either the English or the Mandarin versions of the apology. Since then, Esther and others have lobbied the government to correct this decision. That persistence paid off, but it was sad to note that those who deserved to hear the Cantonese apology – those who were subject to the racist actions of the government – would never hear it for themselves.

How, then, to follow such a powerful moment? With a poem from me, apparently. Before I read my poem, I held the Matua Tokotoko aloft and explained how it was the parent tokotoko that presides over all the Poet Laureates’ individual tokotoko. Although I’ve had many public appearances since my appointment as Poet Laureate last August, this was my first event with the Matua Tokotoko by my side (I’ll receive my own customised tokotoko in April). To me, the Matua Tokotoko is a symbol of legacy and it felt fitting that I had it with me during this milestone in our community’s history, particularly as a descendant of a poll tax payer.

Chris Tse with the Matua Tokotoko. (Photo: Chris Yee)

The poem I chose to read is about my great-grandfather’s journey to Aotearoa. I’ve heard many stories about him and his contributions to the Chinese New Zealand community, including his involvement with the New Zealand Chinese Association and the Poon Fah Association, which were both present at Monday night’s events. He may never have expected an apology for the poll tax to be given by the government, but I know that he too would’ve fought to ensure that it be delivered in the right language.


Landing (A Thursday, A Calm)

Call on those perfect gods and light will turn. / He left familiar doors

and their Protector / for a sharper grace / to seek what the stars sing. /

The shore is here! / Water loose in the air / breath caught in the stillicide /

unbearable itch in his mouth / white noise crashing through all thoughts. /

There is no design. / When it comes to solutions he dances in circles / though

some would say  / (through gritted teeth) / it was never his turn to lead. /

A stained line / on his prosperous map / his wife’s belief in unison /

a wave in the dark / with nowhere to crash. / The Maheno deposits

its contribution / to the growing land / of plenty. / In single file

he passes through / tax paid, no photo provided / fingerprints

taken for identification. / Joe Choy Kum / arr: 23 October 1919 / #853


The formalities wrapped up with a traditional red lantern dance performance from a troupe of adorable kids. As we mingled afterwards, the first episode of Sik Fan Lah! played on screens in the banquet hall. The young dancers darted through the crowd clutching boxes filled with fried noodles and dumplings. There was a palpable energy in the room as people embraced each other and spoke about how moved they were by the apology. One person told me that they felt a sense of closure. For the first time, this felt like an event for the community and not just a diplomatic lovefest. My heart had been spoken to.

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