Opinion: Readers who venture into the wilds of social media – or even read the papers – may have recently noticed a number of communications about something called WokeUp NZ and wondered what they’re raving about. Let me help.
WokeUp NZ is a modern demonology for concerned consumers, brought to you by the deregistered charity Family First. Its website blares most people “don’t want businesses shoving woke beliefs down their throats”, but apparently may need help detecting the throat-shoving.
So, with the dedication of the frankly deranged, the WokeUp team has spent many months hunting demons. “It was a lot more work than we realised,” admitted Family First leader Bob McCoskrie in a YouTube video.
It’s no wonder. Barely a gender pay equity target, rainbow staff social club or leadership scheme has escaped the demon-hunters. Even the sins of companies granted “not woke” status are grimly enumerated: no, Briscoes, that time you apologised to a trans woman who was repeatedly addressed as a man by a staff member has not been forgotten. For the company, the apology was based on the principle that “good customer service is built on positive and respectful interactions with all people”, but it’s clearly more important that staff should be free to upset someone who’s just trying to buy a blender.
Perhaps the strangest example of “woke exclusion” cited on the website is “climate alarmism”, which leads to “a condition called climate anxiety”. Briscoes is pinged for publishing a climate risk statement – or, to put it another way, meeting its legal obligations under the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021, which applies to large listed companies and banks.
Harvey Norman is another such law-abiding company, but fortunately, “there appears to be no mention of emissions reduction targets, etc”. Phew! WokeUp does want us to know that Mercury Energy, an electricity company, has a lot of electric vehicles in its fleet.
If you need a non-woke phone, you’re in trouble. Spark is “one of New Zealand’s most woke businesses”, One NZ is “very woke” and even 2degrees is “moderately woke”, being guilty of (among other things) “cultural virtue signalling” for referring on its corporate history page to radio spectrum as a “taonga” (this is actually the basis on which the Māori founders of what became 2degrees gained their spectrum allocation in 1999, so it’s a little hard to avoid). It’s probably safest to forgo modern telecommunications altogether and just shout at people in the street.
Don’t get McCoskrie started on banks, which turn out to be extremely woke. Even Westpac, which is “much less woke than the other major NZ banks”, “supports the Paris Agreement”, displays a Rainbow Tick and offended with a bilingual social media post about kindness (its depiction of two mates, Māori and Pākehā, sharing a cup of tea and a laugh was “a prime example of virtue signalling and tokenism”). Happily, there are many fine cryptocurrency outfits that don’t have women in leadership programmes and will literally take your money.
It’s a little harder to make a joke out of some of this twaddle. What kind of broken moral compass puts commitments to “welcome people with disabilities and neurodiversity” (Meridian) or “having accessible websites” and “caring for some of our more vulnerable customers” (BNZ) in the deficit column?
WokeUp NZ does, ironically, provide a great service for anyone looking to do business with companies that care for their staff and aren’t constitutionally bigoted. It’s unlikely to shift the dial at the businesses it is targeting, which conduct consumer research and know who their customers are. They won’t rush to punch themselves in the face just to join McCoskrie’s culture war.
In the end, the countless faces of WokeUp’s demon horde are really no more than individual signals of its failure on every possible front.
