What is the Far-Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Matthew Cunningham, Paul Spoonley, and Marinus La Rooij (eds.)
Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand
Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2023, 444pp

In 1988, Stuart Hall published The Hard Road to Renewal, a collection of essays written over the previous decade that attempted to grapple with the nature and significance of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain. The Thatcherist neoliberal project, Hall argued, attempted to reconfigure the common sense of the people. The aim of the neoliberal project was to dismantle social democracy and the post-war welfare state and construct a new modernity characterised by free-market enterprise, imbued with conservative values of tradition,
family, and nation.