The House: Divergence, messaging and word choice inside party responses to Bondi attack

Parliament's week began with speeches from each party regarding the Bondi Beach attack.

Such motions of condolence are necessary all too often.

A terror attack on a close neighbour is something Parliament cannot reasonably ignore. Beyond the violence, acts of terror aim to affect opinion and emotion, to instill fear, fuel hatred and widen division - impacts that reach beyond borders.

This event will have caused fear and unease within New Zealand, especially among Jewish and Islamic communities - both of whom have long experience as targets of such hatred.

Politicians from different parties tend to respond to such events in very similar ways. During speeches in Parliament on Tuesday, leaders of every political party rejected anti-Semitism, decried violence, and saw the event as both senseless and hateful.

There were also small and interesting variations between their messages. Some differences were broad.

In a left-right divide, all three left-leaning party leaders from Labour, Green and TPM specifically mentioned the 15 March mosque attacks, but no-one from the governing coalition parties did. Other divergences were more party-specific.

National, Labour diverge on blame

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's speech was reasonably pro forma until he said this: "Ours is a multicultural country - a nation known for its courage and trying hard to address the wrongs of our past; a country whose geographical isolation means that we haven't imported the problems that come with mass uncontrolled migration."

Luxon appeared to be blaming attacks like the one in Bondi on "mass, uncontrolled immigration" and not in an off-the-cuff aside, but in a carefully read statement, finger tracing across the page as he went through it.

He did not mention our own most recent incidence of terrorism - the mosque attacks in Christchurch - nor the fact that the perpetrator was, in fact, a white immigrant from Australia. Possibly he was not thinking of Australians when he alluded to immigrants as the cause of "problems".

When Labour leader Chris Hipkins rose in response, he also began by reading a prepared speech.

That is the norm in these situations. MPs don't want to forget a crucial point, or say something unintentioned or untoward, when addressing a topic that can be a political minefield.

After his initial comments and after reading a section that remembered the Christchurch Mosque attacks, Hipkins stopped referencing his notes.

The previous section had concluded with "everyone has a role to play to ensure that there is no place for terrorism and for violent extremism.

"Terrorism is designed to divide us. It is designed to turn us against each other.

"It is designed to create more polarisation."

At that point, he made an apparent response to that immigration line from the prime minister.

"The terrorist attacks are nothing to do with immigration - they are terrorist attacks and they should always be called out as exactly that," Hipkins said. "That kind of hatefulness should never be confused with any legitimate debates that are taking place around world events.

"They should never be blamed on anyone other than the people who did them, who are the terrorists, who must be held accountable for their actions and they should never be excused on the basis of any other form of blame shifting."

Green/TPM v ACT/NZF

There was also divergence in the messages of the four smaller parties.

Broadly, there were two blocs, with Greens and Te Pāti Māori up against ACT and New Zealand First.

Some messages were shared by all or most of the four. All four smaller parties decried anti-Semitism.

In a short speech, New Zealand First's Winston Peters focused entirely on that message, but the other three had things to add. Green and Te Pāti Māori speakers spoke about wider rights and injustice.

ACT leader David Seymour's speech even broadened into a paeon to libertarian values (see below).

Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick broadened her philosophy in a section on innate human rights, concluding that "real freedom does not and cannot come from the oppression of other people".

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer used similar messaging and also made a specific point of differentiating peoples from governments.

"We must also reject the rhetoric that Jewish people are responsible for the actions in Israel," she said. "This attack was fuelled by extremist ideology that seeks to dehumanise and divide us with fear and violence.

"It's the same ideology that motivated the March 15 attack in Christchurch."

Seymour said something similar to Ngarewa-Packer: "No matter your thoughts on that conflict, it is illogical to blame people of the same faith or the same race on the other side of the world for those events.

"In fact, it's not just illogical, it's bigoted."

The Green and Te Pāti Māori co-leaders were not the only speakers to mention the brave actions of a hero who intervened to disarm one attacker, but they both subtly alluded to his background, by using his name.

Swarbrick said: "Hanukkah carries the message of light over darkness.

"In this reprehensible darkness and senseless violence, there was a flicker of light. Ahmed Al Ahmed tackled and disarmed one of the murderers.

"As Ahmed sits in a critical, but stable condition in St George's Hospital in Sydney, people over the world have seen what it means to be a light in the darkness."

Despite both Green and Te Pāti Māori speakers decrying anti-Semitism, both Seymour and Peters decided this was an opportunity to point the finger at those parties - though not by name - for exactly that.

Seymour's version was: "The Kiwi Jewish community has, sadly, like so many around the world in the past two years, received an intensification of hate mail, threats and harassment since 7 October 2023.

"Horror and events in the Middle East have bled into anti-Semitism at home. Sadly, some politicians have allowed it to happen and, shamefully, others have encouraged it."

Winston Peters employed the same attack, saying: "We too, in the past few years, have witnessed our own incidents and examples of anti-Semitism, and we should have absolutely no tolerance at all for it.

"Too often in recent times, rhetoric has been used - whether 'from the river to the sea' or 'globalising the intifada' - that hasn't promoted understanding or justice, but rather praised and raised the temperature, and caused division between our communities.

"That was wrong before and it is wrong now."

Word choices and wider messaging

Seymour included one other particular message in his speech. He offered his own political philosophy as the salve to such woes, saying "we must rediscover New Zealand exceptionalism".

Seymour used the term 'exceptionalism' as shorthand for his dream of New Zealand as a libertarian utopia. He even tied that back into the symbolism of Hanukkah.

He continued: "The idea that, on the edge of the map, we are building a unique society based on respect for each person's inherent dignity, each person's right to live as they please and use their time on earth for their benefit as they judge it, so long as they are not harming anybody else.

"Only when we recommit ourselves to those values will we truly be able to say that we are on the side of the light driving out the darkness."

There's a lot to unpack there, but the idea of New Zealand "rediscovering" a libertarian utopia might draw historians' minds back to New Zealand's early pre-colonial whaling days, when very 'free' western enclaves caused us to be referred to as the 'hellhole of the South Seas'.

Whether or not that is what he was referring to, harking back to glory days has a long political history. More typically, the word 'exceptionalism' is heard in the phrase 'American exceptionalism', which is often interpreted as an expression of supernationalism, wherein the USA is special, different, better and which inherently rejects criticism of the state.

Another example of a word choice carrying a lot of extra meaning came from Peters, who described the attack as "barbaric". Some might see that word as a problematic slip.

Only he could say what he intended. On the surface, the word 'barbaric' means extremely cruel, brutal or uncivilised, but it has other connotations.

It derives from a Greek word meaning babblers, used to describe foreigners generally, conflating 'foreign' with 'cruel' and 'uncivilised'.

Throughout history it has been used to refer to foreigners as civilisational threats, including Goths and Huns (as barbarian hordes threatening Rome). This usage is why the indigenous north-African Amazigh people were given the pejorative name 'Berber' (which they are often still called).

This usage references the Islamic invasion of medieval Spain and, as such, arguably has connections to the great replacement conspiracy theory that is strong in modern White Supremacy movements, and which some suggest is echoed in Donald Trump's recently promulgated Security Strategy that talks of "civilisational erasure".

I am not suggesting that Peters' choice of the word was meant to connote any of that - only that political word choices can carry many layers of meaning.

Reading v ad-libbing

The issue of contentious word choice is one reason political leaders tend to carefully read out this kind of speech from prepared notes. On a contentious topic, there are many ways a politician might screw up.

Careful preparation can ensure a speech hits all the right notes, mentions key groups or people, and doesn't omit a key message.

This helps avoid the possibility of a mistake becoming the story. Luxon's pre-prepared immigration message opened him up to political attack, although his phrasing and Hipkins' response did not appear to be widely noticed.

Another smaller example that also went unnoticed illustrated that even the smallest slips can accidentally send the wrong message and have unintended ramifications.

Every speaker on the Bondi motion that numbered the victims enumerated "15". When Seymour spoke, he acknowledged "those 16 people who perished at Bondi on Sunday afternoon, their families who grieve them".

He emphasised the number 16, as if he was correcting an error in the just-completed speech of Chlöe Swarbrick.

His count included one of the attackers, which was likely not what he intended. If Swarbrick had miscounted in this way, it is possible the Green Party's political enemies would have taken that slip as evidence they sympathised with the anti-semitic killers.

Small errors on highly charged issues can be wielded against you, so politicians tend to play it safe and read. That Hipkins stepped outside his notes to rebut the prime minister's immigration remark was notable in this context.

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