‘An overview of New Zealand’s radical right tradition’: Matthew Cunningham

New Zealand History

In seeking to understand the terrorist attacks of March 2019, several commentators observed the similarities with the murder of an elderly Chinese man named Joe Kum Yung by Lionel Terry in 1905. It is tempting to draw a direct causal line between the two attacks, both as a concise way of framing an uncomfortable subject and as an emotional salve against the possibility that New Zealand’s radical right tradition is more than the occasional ‘lone wolf’. But this obscures far more than it explains.

In this talk, historian Matthew Cunningham explores some of the many threads of New Zealand’s diverse radical right tradition between the murder of Joe Kum Yung and the rise of identitarianism and the alt-right. Drawing on his recent co-edited book, Histories of Hate, this talk suggests that the radical right is a diverse mix of ideas, ideologues, organisations, social clubs and political parties animated by different combinations of ideas in different ways and at different times. It also draws out some common themes across this disparate tradition in terms of ideology, structure, and political behaviour.

Matthew Cunningham is an independent historian residing in Wellington, New Zealand. He has a diverse publication history, including books, edited collections, oral histories, peer-reviewed journal articles, Waitangi Tribunal commissioned research reports, Marine and Coastal Area reports, public history articles, and journalistic and general interest pieces. He is also a published children author.

Download a transcript of this talk: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/files/pdfs/transcript-matthew-cunningham-pht.pdf