Citizen Science laughed like a drain last week when former Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere announced she will not be joining Te Pāti Māori.
"I came to Parliament to work. I was put in here and that's what I'll continue to do as an independent”, she said as she left the Health Select Committee, of which she is a member.
What is the work that Elizabeth Kerekere has been doing for the past six years? Has she been working day and night on the “climate emergency”? Predator Free 2050? Carbon emissions? Pollution, biodiversity, conservation – all those issues the Green Party was formed to address?
Why no, Dr Kerekere has been busy pushing trans ideology into our health system. Her title derives not from a medical qualification, but from the Ph.D. she was awarded for a thesis on transgenderism in Polynesian culture, which she claims was part of tikanga Māori until the colonists brought shame to New Zealand along with all those pest species.
Inconveniently for her, a sizeable contingent of wāhine Māori take issue with her - let’s generously call it - interpretation of their culture. Posie Parker was invited to New Zealand by Mana Wāhine Kōrero, a gender critical Māori women’s group co-founded by Dianne Landy. In a recent article for Quillette, Landy dismantles and rejects Kerekere’s claims. She points out that Māori are not an amorphous group and that, “There are no examples of anything resembling western ideas about “gender” in any of [our] cultural traditions.”
Kerekere knows that her lies will be challenged by her own, and she will not be joining the Māori Party because she has only one cause – transgenderism. That’s why she joined the Greens. Over the past ten years they have attempted to broaden their appeal because the middle-class whiteness of old school environmentalism was a bit embarrassing. They sought the edgy, cool issues and were perfectly happy to park their brains and bring in the edgy, cool people. Ten days before she was elected Kerekere tweeted, “My highest priority for our community? Trans health!” She didn’t even pretend to care about the environment and the Greens didn’t mind.
They have got what they deserved. Kerekere has used her time as an MP undermining them. She is widely believed to be the force behind the recent temporary ousting of James Shaw as co-leader, and apparently she’s shown a pattern of bullying staff and Green Party members. Other Green parties around the world have been taken over by the trans faction, and Kerekere and her supporters no doubt had that in mind here. No wonder the Greens’ leadership jumped at the chance to push her out, no doubt hoping that her fellow travelers will follow.
Unfortunately she’s used her time in Parliament pushing through the Conversion Practices Prohibition Act, ensuring that gender identity ideology continues to benefit from a false teaming with gay rights, and that the brainwashing of a generation can not only continue unchecked, but escalate. Simon Bridges deserves honourable mention for ensuring that parents are not criminalised in the Act for refusing to affirm their children’s adoption of gender identity ideology – as was first proposed - but psychologists essentially are.
In the speeches for the third reading of the Bill, the speakers from other parties reminisce about gay friends, their own experiences of being gay, hiding under the cloak of gay rights yet again - almost as if they desperately want to avoid talking about that thing they’re about to do: effectively criminalising the sensible care of confused kids and enabling them to mutilate themselves with the assistance of the State. But not Kerekere, she had this to say –
“I don't know about you, but I was keeping a note of submitters who admitted on live streamed and recorded hearings that they were flouting their own code of practice to perform conversion practices in their workplace. They may never be prosecuted for that, but the very least I would expect is that they lose their right to practise in this country.”
If you read the context and know her history, it’s perfectly clear that this was a direct threat aimed at gender critical psychologists and their livelihoods, uttered on the record in the House. She was instructing professional associations to go after their dissenting members.
Who knows if she succeeded? It would never be reported in our complicit media.
So Elizabeth Kerekere continues to sit on the Health Select Committee until the election, doing who-knows-what but we can all guess. She has work to do.
Citizen Science is a pseudonym