New Zealand envoy to the UK fired for questioning Trump's knowledge of history

[SunSeeker]

Source: CNN

Speaking at international think tank Chatham House on Tuesday, Phil Goff, the former mayor of the city of Auckland who has also served as foreign minister, said: “I was re-reading Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in 1938 after the Munich Agreement, and he turned to Chamberlain, he said, ‘You had the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, yet you will have war.’”

“President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office,” added Goff. “But do you think he really understands history?”

Goff was making a comparison between Trump’s efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, and the 1938 agreement signed by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the leaders of France and Germany which gave Adolf Hitler permission to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The Nazi leader invaded Poland a year later, triggering World War II.

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters later fired Goff over his comments and said he would have done the same if he had said something similar about other countries.


Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/world/new-zealand-diplomat-goff-sacked-trump-scli-intl/index.html

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New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters sure is a let down after Jacinda Ardern's strong leadership during covid. Peters appears to be a firm believer in obeying in advance.

Hey Peters, what other country would be telling the world to roll over for Putin? And why would you want to legitimize such a statement?

[Martin68]

1. It looks like New Zealand has turned fairly hard toward the right.

[SunSeeker]

2. Sadly, yes.

New Zealand Veers Sharply Right, Leaving Jacinda Ardern’s Era Behind

Two small populist parties are responsible for accelerating the shift, which has been felt acutely by the Indigenous Māori.

A year before American voters’ anger over the cost of living helped Donald J. Trump win the presidency, similar sentiments in New Zealand thrust in the nation’s most conservative government in decades.

Now, New Zealand bears little resemblance to the country recently led by Jacinda Ardern, whose brand of compassionate, progressive politics made her a global symbol of anti-Trump liberalism.

The new government — a coalition of the main center-right party and two smaller, more populist ones — has reversed many of Ms. Ardern’s policies. It has rescinded a world-leading ban on smoking for future generations, repealed rules designed to address climate change and put a former arms-industry lobbyist in charge of overhauling the nation’s strict gun laws.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/world/asia/new-zealand-conservative-maori-protest.html

[Martin68]

11. I've long been interested in New Zealand, having a closer friend who grew up there and moved back after some time

abroad. I visited him and his wife there and traveled a great deal of the country. There is a very conservative, British element of New Zealand society that has recently become more active in opposition to perceived bias against whites as the government strived to meet promises made in the historical treaty with the Maori to make up for centuries of discrimination. Sound familiar? I would not be at all surprised if supporters of the bill to undo progress made in the treatment of Maori, which conservatives there deride as "woke," think Trump is a good thing.

[Bev54]

3. The man should be given a medal.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

4. So it's not just us being betrayed by assholes.

Sympathies, NZ. The family of the West will abide.

[SunSeeker]

5. They have their own Trump (Seymour) who is trying to pass a bill taking away Maori rights, like our DEI ban.

New Zealand reckons with its own divisive culture war

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a 22-year-old lawmaker in New Zealand’s Parliament, shot to international fame last year when she ripped up a controversial bill and performed a haka, or Maori war cry, in front of its author. Her protest quickly went viral and — coming barely a week after Donald Trump’s presidential victory — offered some Americans a glimpse of raw but effective resistance to culture war politics.

Now Maipi-Clarke, a representative for the Maori Party, is hoping her actions — and the historic levels of opposition from across the country — will stop the polarizing Treaty Principles Bill from advancing any further in coming months.

New Zealand is deeply divided over the Treaty Principles Bill, which seeks to reinterpret the de facto constitution. David Seymour, the leader of the libertarian ACT Party and a junior partner in the conservative coalition government, wants to change that, saying New Zealand has become an “apartheid” state that favors Maori. Seymour, whose office said he was not available for an interview, has insisted his Treaty Principles Bill merely “gives every New Zealander the same rights and dignity” and would ensure “the Treaty can no longer be used to justify separate public services, race-based health waitlists, and creeping co-governance.”

This stance, critics say, does not reflect the status of Maori as the Indigenous people of New Zealand or the toll of colonization.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/06/new-zealand-maori-treaty-principles-bill/

Finlayson said the bill is “very badly drafted” and dangerous. “What Seymour has done is identify a problem which isn’t there and then try to solve it in this rather grotesquely divisive way,” he said. “The trouble is, as Brexit showed, you play a particular line like that and it ends up as ashes for the country.”

Sound familiar? Like the attack on the nonproblem of DEI and trans athletes, it's all culture war and dog whistles to legitimize bigotry.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

6. I didn't know things had gotten that bad in NZ.

Is Russia targeting them too, or is this just toxic blowback of everything else going on?

[SunSeeker]

7. Russia is targeting every democracy using their bot farms.

And has been for years. https://journalism.csis.org/digital-warfare-russias-attacks-on-democracy/

The bigotry and stupidity of a large chunk of each country's population have made them an easy target. There is also of course toxic blowback of everything else going on, including the discomfort with people of color being a larger and larger share of each country's population.

[AmericaUnderSiege]

8. I think I've had enough of Russia.

I think we all have.

[MadameButterfly]

9. I worry how bad things will have to get

before the low information voters with no critical thinking skills who will tell you they don't like politics will become enlightened and stop doing this to the rest of us.

[moniss]

10. There is never a shortage of

cowards with a title behind their name.