I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time. NEW ZEALAND IS THE CANADA. Australia is the US. That is the relationship, those are the facts

And by “being the Canada,” by the way, I also mean that New Zealand is the not-actually-that-liberal nation that gets to coast on a much better rep than it deserves based on its adjacency to a completely dysfunctional and often evil, much larger, and dominant neighbor

It’s a dynamic defined both by proximity (with the smaller nations benefiting extraordinarily by simple contrast) and also by being overlooked, overshadowed, and therefore unexamined. A lot of bad stuff happens and continues to happen when people aren’t looking at you too closely

Canada is a glorified petro-state that builds tanks for the Saudis and steals native land for oil pipelines. But you plonk it next to the shitshow that is the US...and suddenly it doesn’t look so bad. It’s like a permanent unearned +1,000,000 reputation boost

New Zealand, my god. We congratulate ourselves on being the first country in the world to give women the right to vote (1893) — but abortion was literally a crime there until two seconds ago

Our immigration system has always been fundamentally unfair and exclusionary, riddled with racist country-of-origin preferences that continued under governments led by both major parties, and we have always relied on guest workers whom we treat as expendable

Of course, Australia imprisons refugees on remote islands

And those gun laws that NZ got so much credit for changing in the wake of the Christchurch mosque terror attacks? All the loopholes and problems were well-known. There were reviews of our gun laws going back to the mid 90s and most recently in 2017, all of which called for reform

Every single government basically said “thanks we’ll take that under advisement” and did nothing. Am I glad we changed the laws after Christchurch? Of course. But why the fuck did it take a terror attack in my hometown to spur a known and needed change!

Let’s also not overlook that the police and intelligence services were too busy surveilling journalists, Maori activists, and leftists to notice a white supremacist terrorist training for a massacre — despite complaints. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/03/christchurch-terror-attack-rifle-club-was-perfect-breeding-place-for-murder.html