WILL IRVINE (HE/HIM)
CW: Racism, Islamophobia
Last week, postal workers across Wellington refused to deliver a now-infamous pamphlet from a group known as Better Wellington. The pamphlet contained assertions that Wellington City Council “wants the city's six mosques to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer across the city” and called on Wellingtonians to “take back your city”.
Although the pamphlet has now been widely circulated, and despite complaints from NZ Post, the Postal Workers Union is standing by the decision of the posties. On Friday 30 September, RNZ reported that the union had escalated the case to the Human Rights Commission. PWU President John Maynard suggested that the lack of engagement from NZ Post was worrying. “The company still has not assured us that this document is legal”.
NZ Post, on the other hand, said that it was not the role of the postal services to intervene. “It is not appropriate for NZ Post to act as a censor in determining what it will and won't deliver.” However, the PWU contends that this could be overridden if it was found that the piece contained hate speech.
To investigate whether Better Wellington are a hateful group, I looked at their Twitter page—perhaps the world’s most depressing. Amongst various transphobic culture war comments and digs at Mayor Tory Whanau’s personal life, the page also contained a series of skits in which the cities of New Zealand interacted on a Discord chat. These skits were oddly “Gen Z internet nazi” for a page that appears to primarily appeal to racist boomers.
Wellington often played the role of the blue-haired screeching SJW, a stand-in for whichever women the account’s incel admin was angry about. Nelson and Christchurch were frequently the voices of reason—coincidentally, two of the nation’s whitest cities. Logging off Twitter after an hour on that page, I felt as if I was surfacing from a bad dream. These imbeciles might be racists who threaten to incite hate speech in our city, but more than that, they’re just losers.