The Culture of Complaint

An Institutional Problem

I have a book on my shelf entitled “Culture of Complaint” by Robert Hughes. I purchased it in September 1993 shortly after it was published.

It was an interesting book because although it argued primarily about problems in the United States of America, the issues Hughes describes resonate today. The book was prescient in that respect.

Robert Hughes was an Australian-born art critic, writer and producer of television documentaries. He was art editor for Time magazine and is known to television audiences for his TV series on modern art entitled “The Shock of the New” which was brilliant.

He also wrote “The Fatal Shore” which is a history of the convict settlement of Australia. His treatment of the subject is superb and eminently readable. His writing is powerful and elegant.

Hughes argued that American culture had become dominated by a politics of victimhood and grievance, where every group — left and right alike — competed to claim wounded status rather than engaging in genuine debate or shared civic life. The title captured his central observation: that Americans had replaced argument with complaint.

Hughes was particularly scathing about the academic left and the rise of identity politics. He argued that multiculturalism, as practiced in universities, had become a form of intellectual cowardice disguised as sensitivity — a way of avoiding rigorous engagement with ideas by making ethnic or gender identity the primary lens for evaluating culture

He suggested that the canon wars (fights over whether to include more non-Western texts in university curricula) were often conducted with a kind of tribal thinking that undermined the genuine value of a broad humanist education

“Victim culture”, he suggested, had become self-defeating, encouraging people to define themselves by their wounds rather than their agency

Finally he argued that language policing and speech codes were a symptom of an inability to make real arguments.

Remember, this was being advanced in 1993. But it certainly sounds familiar now. The problem is that these issues were identifiable in 1993. Now in 2026 they have become entrenched.

Hughes didn’t reserve his concerns for the Left. He went after the Right with a degree of ferocity. He argued that the religious right represented its own form of aggrieved victimhood — a sense that “real America” had been stolen by secular liberals

He considered that American conservatism had retreated into nostalgia and mythologized patriotism rather than engaging honestly with the country’s history, including slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples

And that, ironically, right-wing culture warriors were mirror images of the campus leftists they despised.

What Hughes was trying to do was to defend traditional liberal humanism — the idea that Western civilization, for all its crimes, had produced a body of art, literature, and thought worth preserving and critically engaging with; that truth and quality mattered; and that a healthy democracy required citizens capable of argument, self-criticism, and intellectual toughness rather than retreat into group identity and grievance.

He wanted to puncture the self-righteousness of both the academic left and the cultural right, and to make a case for civic seriousness over therapeutic politics.

The book was controversial but widely read and debated. Critics on the left felt Hughes was dismissive of real social inequalities; critics on the right felt he was too hostile to tradition. But many readers found his willingness to attack both sides simultaneously refreshing. It remains a significant document of the culture wars of the early 1990s, and many of its arguments feel strikingly relevant to debates still happening today.

But underlying the book, as its title suggests, the book is about complaints and their pervasiveness.

I have suggested on a number of occasions that in New Zealand we are far too willing to look to the Government and to the State for a solution to our problems. One of the approaches that is often adopted is that of complaint.

There is a particular New Zealand type who is deeply familiar to anyone who has lived here long enough. They are not necessarily angry — at least not loudly so. They are aggrieved. They have been wronged, overlooked, or insufficiently recognised, and they have learned, increasingly, that the most effective thing to do about it is to reach for the institutional machinery that has been built, over the past several decades, specifically to process that feeling.

New Zealand, which once prided itself on a no-nonsense pragmatism, a can-do egalitarianism rooted in shared effort and fair dealing, has quietly become a culture in which complaint is not merely tolerated but structurally incentivised. Robert Hughes wrote The Culture of Complaint about America in 1993. He might have written it about New Zealand today.

The scale of the shift is measurable. A survey by the Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer found that 67% of New Zealanders report moderate to high levels of grievance against government, business, and the wealthy — believing these entities actively disadvantage ordinary people.

That is a remarkable figure for a small, prosperous, and relatively stable democracy. More troubling still is what that grievance produces at the social level. Those with high grievance are twice as likely to view society as zero-sum, believing that others’ gains must come at their expense, and they show dramatically lower trust in all institutions — media trust drops from 45% among those with low grievance to just 25% for those with high grievance.

What makes this especially curious is that many of the material conditions that typically fuel such resentment are not, by historical standards, especially bad.

A paradox shapes our national conversation: growing economic grievance coincides with stable or declining income inequality.

Treasury’s 2024 analysis confirms that income inequality actually decreased between 2007 and 2023. Yet perceptions of unfairness keep growing. In other words, New Zealanders are not becoming more oppressed. They are becoming more fluent in the language of oppression.

The Waitangi Tribunal

No discussion of New Zealand’s culture of complaint can begin anywhere other than the Waitangi Tribunal, which has become the most institutionalised grievance mechanism in the country’s history — and the most contested.

The Tribunal was established in 1975 to provide Māori with a formal avenue to raise concerns about Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. The original scope was modest: it could only examine contemporary issues.

For its first few years, the Waitangi Tribunal made little impact on New Zealand life, and many Māori therefore regarded its creation as a token gesture to appease the protest movement, a way of avoiding Māori demands.

The real transformation came in 1985, when the Fourth Labour Government extended the Tribunal’s jurisdiction to cover Crown actions dating all the way back to 1840. Since that extension, well over 3,000 claims have been filed with the Tribunal.

The settlements that followed were, in many cases, well-warranted. Land was taken. Promises were broken. The first major Treaty settlements with iwi groups were completed with Waikato-Tainui in 1995 and Ngāi Tahu in 1998. The historical injustices addressed in these early settlements were real, documented, and serious. Few serious observers disputed that some form of redress was appropriate.

But the process that was meant to be temporary and reparative has become a permanent and expanding institution. National Party leader Don Brash complained in his controversial 2004 Orewa speech about a growing Treaty “grievance industry” and called for the Tribunal to be wound up once historical claims were settled.

Others thought the Tribunal was growing progressively more radical in its findings and recommendations, as well as stepping beyond its remit. The term “grievance industry” stuck, and for good reason. The 2004 Orewa Speech was the first time the National Party formally adopted the phrase “Treaty of Waitangi Grievance Industry.”

The concerns were not merely ideological. Quite small family groups began calling themselves tribes; personal disagreements with relatives were blown into major claims. And the taxpayer kept paying. A Māori minister in the Labour government spoke of “the next generation of grievances” despite he and his colleagues having voted in Parliament for “full and final” settlements.

Critics argued that the industry’s self-interest lay in perpetuating itself — that lawyers, researchers, and Tribunal staff had a structural incentive to keep new claims flowing.

The Tribunal’s reach has expanded well beyond land. In 2021, several members of the New Zealand Māori Council filed an application for an urgent Tribunal inquiry into the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that vaccination rollout policies placed Māori at risk. The Tribunal ruled that the government’s vaccination rollout breached Treaty principles.

By this logic, virtually any government policy touching on outcomes for Māori can be hauled before the Tribunal as a Treaty violation. By 2021, the Treaty of Waitangi or its principles are referred to in over 35 principal Acts of Parliament. The Treaty has been transformed from a founding agreement about sovereignty and land into a jurisprudential toolkit applicable to almost any domain of public life.

This is not to say that all Treaty claims are frivolous, or that historical injustices were not real. They were. But there is a legitimate distinction between addressing documented historical wrongs and constructing an open-ended, permanently funded mechanism for translating any Māori dissatisfaction into a legal claim.

The Treaty-based politics of grievance make the country both inward-looking and backward-looking. Public discourse about economy and society inevitably centres on the state, yet no consensus exists about its foundations.

The Politics of Grievance

What makes Hughes’ analysis so applicable to New Zealand is his insistence that the culture of complaint is not a disease of the left alone. In New Zealand, both ends of the political spectrum have learned to weaponise victimhood.

On the left, the language of systemic oppression, colonial harm, and structural disadvantage has become so dominant in public institutions — universities, the public service, state media — that it is increasingly the default register for discussing almost any social issue.

Intellectual conformity has been added as another layer to the trust crisis: those questioning the prevailing consensus on social issues face professional consequences, academic freedom faces constraints, and public servants self-censor to avoid repercussions.

The result is not honest engagement with difficult problems but a kind of ritual performance of sensitivity, in which the goal is not to solve inequality but to demonstrate correct feeling about it.

On the right, a counter-grievance has taken shape with equal energy. Some politicians now depict Treaty settlements, equal opportunities programmes, and the creation of ministries to address the needs of women, Pacific Islanders, and Māori as forms of privilege, stoking popular resentment.

Movements like Groundswell, which began as a legitimate protest by rural communities against environmental regulation, became entangled with a broader sense that “real New Zealand” — white, rural, practical — was being condescended to and overridden by urban progressives and Māori elites. The grievance was mirror image, not opposite.

The Architecture of Complaint

New Zealand has not merely developed a culture of complaint — it has built the infrastructure for it.

The Human Rights Commission, the Employment Relations Authority, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, the Privacy Commissioner, the Ombudsman, numerous industry-specific complaints bodies, and of course the Waitangi Tribunal — these institutions provide formal channels through which grievances can be lodged, processed, and adjudicated.

In many cases they serve a legitimate purpose. But they have also created a feedback loop: the existence of complaint mechanisms generates complaints, and the processing of complaints validates the culture that produced them.

The workplace has become a particularly rich site of this dynamic. What were once managed through direct conversation or informal resolution are now routinely escalated into formal HR processes, Personal Grievance claims, and Employment Court proceedings.

New Zealand’s personal grievance regime — among the most claimant-friendly in the developed world — has generated a cottage industry of employment lawyers and mediators.

Every “difficult conversation” between a manager and an employee carries the latent potential to become a legal proceeding. The effect is to make robust management difficult, to encourage defensive behaviour, and paradoxically, to make workplaces more brittle rather than less.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority provides another example. There is always someone offended somewhere, and these days if they announce their offence it gets publicity — not just from the mainstream media, but from social media, where controversies can lose all sense of perspective rapidly.

A single complaint can now generate national media coverage, compel corporate apologies, and derail careers — not because the complaint is necessarily meritorious, but because institutions have learned that the cost of not responding is higher than the cost of capitulating.

Social Media Amplification

All of this has been dramatically accelerated by social media, which provides not just a platform for complaint but an audience for it and a reward mechanism — the likes, the shares, the righteous solidarity of the like-minded pile-on.

New Zealand’s small population, tightly networked professional class, and intense social conformism make this especially potent here. The country is small enough that reputational damage travels fast, and insular enough that the fear of exclusion from professional and social networks is acute.

Cancel culture, which was once described as the weapon of choice of the left, has been adopted by conservatives and the right with equal enthusiasm. The tactic has migrated across the political spectrum because it works — or at least, because it produces the satisfying sensation of having done something, of having registered and punished a wrong, even when the actual outcome is minimal or counterproductive.

What unites the Twitter\X pile-on over a thoughtless tweet and the formal grievance lodged with the Human Rights Commission is the underlying psychology: the conviction that the appropriate response to any perceived slight is escalation rather than engagement.

What We Have Lost

Hughes argued that the culture of complaint was ultimately a flight from difficulty — a way of avoiding the hard work of genuine argument, genuine reform, and genuine engagement with people who think differently. That seems right as a description of what is happening in New Zealand.

The country faces real problems: a productivity crisis that has persisted for decades, with GDP per capita having declined by 2.8% in the two years to mid-2025; a housing shortage that has locked a generation out of ownership; an education system whose results have been declining across multiple measures; and genuine inequalities of health and wealth that fall disproportionately on Māori and Pacific communities.

These are problems that require hard choices, honest assessment of what has and hasn’t worked, and the kind of civic solidarity that comes from shared purpose rather than competitive grievance.

Political discussions revolve around grievances rather than solutions. Without trusted sources of shared facts, New Zealanders retreat to echo chambers. The energy expended in the grievance economy — the legal proceedings, the Tribunal hearings, the Twitter campaigns, the HR investigations, the media pile-ons — is energy that is not being spent on solving anything.

It is, in Hughes’ phrase, the performance of complaint in lieu of the work of repair.

Changing the Focus

None of this is to say that genuine grievances should go unaddressed. The history of Māori dispossession is real. Workplace harassment is real. Institutional discrimination is real. A society without mechanisms for redress is one that tolerates injustice.

The question is not whether grievances should be heard, but whether a culture that has made grievance its primary mode of public expression is one that can actually solve its problems — or whether it has confused the expression of injury with the cure.

New Zealand was once, rightly or not, associated with a certain practical optimism: a young country that could build things, figure things out, and treat people as capable of getting on with it.

That self-image may always have been partially mythological. But the myth pointed at something real — a disposition toward agency rather than complaint, toward fixing rather than protesting, toward building rather than litigating.

As a nation, escaping the cycles of grievance and counter-grievance requires remembering that shared prosperity came from cooperation and problem-solving, and that solutions to challenges require evidence-based policies, not competing narratives of victimhood.

The question is whether New Zealand has the cultural confidence and political will to return to that mode — or whether the grievance industry, now so thoroughly institutionalised, has become too comfortable, too lucrative, and too flattering to those who profit from it, to be easily dismantled.

Robert Hughes ended The Culture of Complaint with a defence of complexity and difficulty — the idea that the only way through hard problems is engagement with them, not retreat into the consoling certainty of victimhood.

New Zealand would do well to read it.