Danyl McLauchlan: Why are our politicians fighting over issues that don’t fix the country?

But if we change the name of the country, doesn’t that change the country itself? Conservatives and their mortal enemies, the intelligentsia, believe it does. Winston Peters explodes with fury at Green MPs and journalists who use the te reo Māori name. Act minister Brooke van Velden has reversed the order of Aotearoa and New Zealand on passports. The Green Party has launched a petition to restore the te reo name of Rongotai to the capital’s newly named Wellington Bays electorate.

This happened alongside a controversy about the government removing kupu Māori from the Ministry of Education’s Ready to Read Phonics Plus series, promoting an outcry from writers and academics. And New Zealand First is introducing a member’s bill that will ban “woke flags” from government buildings.

At a time when they’re struggling to keep the hospitals open, the ferries running and the power on, why are our MPs obsessing over flags, children’s books and passport design?

There are many reasons. The most uncharitable: they don’t know how to fix any of our serious problems so they’re pivoting to the trivial. And they personally are not affected by the economic downturn – our MPs across the left and right are largely sorted, to use the Prime Minister’s term for his own financial good fortune. But politicians as a species have always been attracted by symbolic conflicts.

Consider a substantive problem, such as the secondary school teacher’s strike. There’s a lot of money and the cohesion of the education system at stake. It’s real politics. It’s hard work. It will require negotiation and compromise to solve.

In a fight over public servants having the right to fly the trans-rights and Palestine flags over their offices, there’s nothing at stake except the symbolism – which a clever politician can present as existential. Yet it doesn’t really matter if they win or lose.

Thus the torrent of squabbles over names and language. For the left, the adoption of te reo signifies decolonisation – liberating the nation from the legacy of white supremacy and imperialism. For conservatives, this is the dreaded “Māorification of everything” and must be resisted at all costs. It’s all nonsense, based on the fallacy that words have a magical power over the things they describe.

“New Zealand” was named after Zealand, a Dutch province; Wellington was named after the Duke of Wellington – but neither name signifies the province or the politician any more, just the country and the city. Neither of which are flourishing, no matter what you call them.

The late-20th-century turn towards symbolic conflicts – otherwise known as the culture wars – is often described in the social-science literature as “post-material politics”. It’s supposed to be a marker of affluence: when concerns about jobs, wages, growth and personal safety diminish, politics becomes about self-expression, identity, cultural cleavages and social etiquette (what is “wokeness” other than the etiquette of the educated class?).