Whistling up the dogs

Well done, Wanganui! Your mayor (the one who dragged you into the national sewer when the King of Tonga and Kahui twins died) is at it again.

Just when it seemed he had no better topics than his battle with the Employment Relations Authority or the Museum or the Arts Trust or the iwi … for his Sordid Sunday Sermon, an abused Rotorua toddler was unfortunate enough to end up in Star Ship Hospital. She promptly became collateral damage in Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws’ desperate dog-whistle politicking for the recognition (and votes) of the same rednecks whose racist insecurities lead them the slimy downside of the radio dial. (See Nicky Hagar’s The Hollow Men for an introduction to this sordid form of politicking as cynically employed by Barmy Brash during his brief reign, and across the Tasman by his ideological twin Horrible Howard – or for that matter, any study of Hitler’s enlistment of the anti-Semite cause. Closer to home, refer to Laws’ ignominious days of Asian and Somali refugee bashing as Winston Peters’ chief string-puller with New Zealand First).

So here he is last Sunday:

Maori culture is simply a motif to pick up when the cops come calling … What is it about Maori and child abuse? .. and then back to the familiar refrain: The time has arrived: remove these children at birth from this sub-culture.

And little more than a year ago when the Kahui twins tragedy was unfolding, he was there too – our very own racist Forrest Gump, putting the boot in and tickling the talkback tongues:

But why Maori? What dark skein twists itself within that culture to produce rogue whanau like the Kahui? … And are the Kahui rogue? Or are they symptomatic of an underclass within Maori who are resistant to both mainstream and Maori assistance?

As a LawsWatch anonymii with a penchant for numbers reminded us on July 30:

Last Sunday when yet another battered toddler made the front page of the paper he leapt in and hurled abuse at the perpetrators. How profound. In a column that used the words Maori or Maoridom eighteen times, sixteen of the references were extremely negative. He excused himself of racism on the grounds that he was throwing off the bonds of political correctness. This will give racists a righteous rallying point.

I wonder if the grand plan is for the child beaters to go to war with the racists, or if there is no grand plan and he just can’t pass up a chance to set one part of society against another.

Thanks, Watcher. And predictably, within days Mickey had his Mouthpiece John Maslin whipping up a bit of front-page and editorial page racism in our nasty little excuse for a local rag.

Meanwhile, on the home-front, he’s also stepping up the war with local iwi over that perennial whipping boy – the H! Seems those uppity iwi thought they had been commissioned to come up with a carved entranceway to the council chambers that, as Mickey proclaimed in November 2005, would:

"… recognise the invitation our local iwi gave to settlers to share this region" … “At last,” he said, in the full flush of a little bicultural tic, “we have a Council Chambers that belongs to all of Wanganui, that celebrates our heritage and of which we can all be proud."

But then he saw ‘H’ and then he saw ‘Red’ and a predictable mayoral ‘H’issy Fit ensued .. and you read it here first, Watchers.

So what, we hear you ask yet again, maketh the man(iac) who rides the troughs of gutter politics? Is it that Michael Laws is simply a father and family man beyond moral reproach (you’ll have to ask his extended whanau what they think about that proposition as paraded in the wimins’ mags) or is it something deeper, darker … altogether dafter in fact.

Turn a couple of pages in last week’s Sunday Star-Times from his breakfast bilge and we find Victoria University psychologist Dr Marc Wilson neatly assessing Michael Laws’ political personality as being “remarkably similar to the psychopath”. Says Wilson:

It’s pretty common for people standing for political office to talk about devotion to the public, their commitment to the nation’s interest, their strong sense of responsibility. It’s unusual for politicians to say ‘I’m interested in getting paid and I’m a megalomaniac.”

(And before the sad, single anonymickey of Porritt St rushes to proclaim our First Citizen’s selfless devotion to the public good that leads him to give away his salary, we would point out that the unique ‘salary cycle’ he rides simply positions the mayoralty of our unfortunate city as a means to an (inflated salary) end via the media mouthpieces and dancing spectacles that are sufficiently desperate to be wagged by his 2% redneck tail).