Labour's Trotter

The latest round of Chris Trotter vs the left is in the pages of the Dominion-Post this morning, with Trotter taking exception to a line in Don Franks' Safer Communities Together Blues [audio] (a song criticising the recent police raids on Maori, greens, and peace activists) which labels him as "the pigs' Trotter". But Trotter devotes the bulk of his column to sending a clear message to the left: shut up:

While last Saturday's images of massed Maori sovereignty flags, painted Tuhoe warriors brandishing taiaha and dreadlocked anarchists wearing Che Guevera T-shirts may have quickened the heartbeat of middle-aged radicals, they almost certainly produced a very different set of reactions in the rest of the community.

[...]

Nothing is more certain to mobilise the Right in this country than the militant assertion of tino rangatiratanga, especially when its advocates imply and/or ascribe second-class citizenship status to non- indigenous New Zealanders.

So, in order to avoid giving ammunition to authoritarian hatemongers and "mobilising the right", we should all just shut up and bow our heads in the face of what looks to be a very shonky police operation, in which the principles of open justice have been suspended and charges laid which even the police admit they have no evidence to support. Fuck that! What the police are doing is wrong. Their behaviour in Ruatoki was wrong. Their approach of going wide and "rounding up the usual suspects" was wrong. Their use of terrorism law is wrong - even if the allegations are supported by evidence, the relevant offence is conspiracy to murder, not "terrorism". And this is not something any person of conscience should be silent in the face of.

More telling is Trotter's reason for remaining silent:

How tragic it would be if, at the very point when Maori seemed poised to take their rightful place at the heart of the New Zealand State, a handful of radical relics from the 1970s and 80s and a pack of play-acting paramilitaries ended up supplying the Right with precisely the terrifying "revolutionary" iconography it requires to roll back eight years of advance.

You get that? It's not the thirty years of advance which have occurred since the Treaty was recognised in New Zealand law, that Trotter wants us to silence our consciences to protect, but the "eight years of advance" under Labour - eight years of "advance" which have seen Maori stripped of their right to test the ownership of the foreshore and seabed in the courts, and an arbitrary and unjust deadline on the filing of Treaty claims imposed, all in the name of pandering to the same authoritarian rednecks Trotter wants us to pander to again.

Despite his rhetoric, Trotter isn't actually concerned about Maori and Maori rights. All he cares about is Labour's election chances, and he's willing to sacrifice justice and human rights in order to boost them. In short, he's not the pigs' Trotter - he's Labour's.