The stand-off between a waspish stale pale male, and a waspish woke woman.

In this piece, I’m deviating a little from the norm. I’m going to talk about two people - a ‘stale, pale, male’ called Michael Laws, who is a talkback host on a media platform called The Platform. He’s not someone I’d normally dedicate much time to, but he recently got New Zealand’s mainstream media in a kerfuffle, and that amused me. The other is Irish-born wokester Andrea Vance, who in her role as a national affairs editor for The Post and Sunday Star-Times, was amongst those who contributed to that kerfuffle.

Although the details of this might be lost on overseas readers, I’m sure the broader story won’t be exclusive to these small islands at the edge of the world. People are, after all, much the same everywhere.

Michael Laws is rather ‘waspish’, to borrow the word that a friend used to describe him. I tend to be a little less polite, and opine that he’s a bit of a pr!ck. However, I only know of one talkback host at the moment who isn’t waspish – it seems to be part of the job’s requirements. Mind you, I might be waspish myself, if I was a talkback host/ess, just quietly.

I have called in and spoken to Michael on his talkback show on two or three occasions, when he’s been speaking about a topic that interests me, and I’ve been interviewed by him once. That interview was terrible, because I was new at doing that sort of thing, and nervous as heck. Between that and the call-ins, he has been a mixture of reasonably pleasant – for Michael - and, in the words of my sister, a c*nt.

However, being an older woman, I find that I’m a bit more “yeah, whatever” over insults and barbs now, so I tend not to lose sleep over them, nor their utterers. Quoting my sister again, “it’s like water off this ol’ duck’s back”. I should give some credit to the terf wars, though, because the sort of invective that transactivists trade in has helped me develop a great line in shoulder shrugs.

Michael has now joined the ranks of NZ First, a smaller political party on the rise, to stand as a candidate for the Waitaki electorate in NZ’s upcoming November general election. Waitaki is in the South Island, about halfway between Christchurch and the bottom of the island. The word is that he will continue with his gig on The Platform, but if he makes it into Parliament, I’m guessing it will mean no more Michael the talkback host.

He’s no newbie to both national and local politics, nor to scandal and controversy. He’s already done a stint with both National and NZ First in the past, including as NZ First’s campaign manager back in 1996. The party has won some Parliamentary seats in nine out of eleven general elections, and is currently experiencing a surge in popularity. They’ve been called the new party for the working class, now that Labour’s become a party for the lanyard wearers.

The news about him throwing his hat in with NZ First rattled a surprising number of cages in the mainstream media, not least that of Andrea Vance’s. Andrea is woke up the wazoo, and very waspish towards our centre-Right coalition government. For some reason, but true to form, a wasp got right up into her knickers about Michael Laws’ selection by NZ First. In fact, her opinion piece in the Sunday Star Times ‘Welcome to the NZ First manosphere: now featuring the undead’ (paywalled) is a wasps’ nest of mammoth proportions.

A quick peep inside it shows us the multiple stings we can expect, if we dare venture further -

“Winston Peters’ roll-call of candidates is basically a doomscroll through the darkest, most aggrieved corners of the internet.

It’s an algorithmic collection of outrage merchants, culture-war hobbyists, and men convinced Western society is on the brink of collapse, and they’re only one homemade podcast away from saving it.

With the party polling at a steady 11 or 12% and chasing its 1990s glory days, a cast of embittered political zombies has shuffled back onto the scene, looking to reanimate their dead careers.

On Friday, Peters dug up his old crony Michael Laws, helped along by broadcaster Sean Plunket, who’s kindly given Laws gainful employment at The Platform, his second-hand shop for washed-up talk show hosts.

Laws has spent the better part of four decades finding new and creative ways to keep his snout firmly attached to the public trough. For a man who built a lucrative talkback brand railing against bureaucratic waste and privilege, Laws has spent almost his entire adult life being paid by your rates or your taxes.”

This is the tone of the piece for several hundred more words. To be fair, in a strange kind of way, its ugliness is almost a thing of reverence. I come close to admiring the talent of someone who can come out with line after line after line of vitriol like Andrea has. But maybe the real talent is not doing it.

You couldn’t call Michael a charmer by any stretch of the imagination, whilst I understand Andrea can turn it on. In a prior article about the revision of the pay equity law, she even got away with using the ‘c’ word about some female MPs, although admittedly the word was written as “c….”

I’m sure Michael has called both men and women the ‘c’ word before, too, but I doubt it will have ever made it into an article published in the mainstream media – unless they were quoting him. And I would put money on it that he never said it under the guise of moral righteousness.

I’m tossing up between who’s the more obnoxious - a waspish stale, pale, male; or a waspish woke woman with ‘progressive’ morals.

Tough choice - or is it?

• Header image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay