Anderton Jim: Motions — Norway—Bombing and Mass Shooting 
Anderton Jim: Motions — Norway—Bombing and Mass Shooting 
[Volume:674;Page:20161] 
Hon JIM ANDERTON (Leader—Progressive) 
: 
 I join with colleagues in the House in expressing profound sympathies to the people of Norway. How moving and poignant this tragedy has been for those of us who have spent our lives encouraging young people to believe that politics can make a difference for the better and to believe in the politics of hope. Among the many tragedies and outrages of these killings towers a brutal truth: they died because of politics; they died because of hatred. They were at a summer camp conceived to nurture a new generation of young people and they were targeted because they symbolised the future. 
The attacker was of course deranged. Atrocities are always the work of a perverted mind. Therefore the atrocity is not a reflection on mainstream political ideas. Right-wing extremism is not the same as conservatism and it is unhelpful to confuse the two and offensive to collate the resulting possibilities. There are vital lessons for mainstream politics nevertheless: that we should challenge hate speech and the politics of hate wherever we see it. Those who set out to divide one group of people from another are always wrong. When hatred and racial divisiveness are seen as deeply abnormal the obsessions and ravings of extremists will stand out more obviously. The more abnormal their hatred becomes the more it is obvious that we need to intervene. 
Just because the attacker’s ideas were twisted we should not say that his actions were isolated. It is too complacent to just dismiss him as a madman. We do not make that claim about jihadist terror. If it is offensive that the murderer in Oslo used Christianity as a justification for his crimes we should use our feelings of offence to understand how offensive it is to Muslims when the extremist haters of al-Qaeda use their religion as a perverted justification for hate crimes too. In both cases a toxic mix of political and religious hatred results in people using a perverted interpretation of their religion as a justification to commit unspeakable crimes. 
However it is wrong to believe that this hatred is conceived in a vacuum and that it is just a case of one person gone crazy. Atrocities are brewed in a sewer of hatred. Many commentators have noticed the rise of an especially ugly form of racial divisiveness across Europe. It objects to the presence in Europe of large Muslim communities. Those promulgating these views cannot expect to promote an ideology of hatred call it Christianity and then pretend to be surprised when that ideology descends into criminality and mass murder. 
We have been fortunate in New Zealand to be spared the worse excesses of racial hate politics and the return of neo-Nazism but we are not immune from it and we need always to be vigilant. We should not be cowed from discussing sensitive issues just because they touch racial boundaries but we also have a responsibility to make sure we err on the side of love not hate on the side of welcoming not dividing and on the side of peace not violence. 
The ideas of love tolerance and peacefulness have always been the underlying values of progressive politics of all shades. Those are exactly the values the mass murderer hated and tried to destroy. That is why Labour parties progressive parties and social democrats around the world feel that a part of us was attacked on that summer’s day in Oslo. But we know this too: no haters can ever succeed because they cannot kill ideas. They cannot kill values. They cannot kill humanity. 
All of us are shocked by the horrifying violence in Norway. On behalf of the people of my electorate Wigram members of the Progressive party and my colleagues in this House I say that we stand with the people of Norway in our sympathy and in sending our deepest condolences.