Time & Perspective Quote by Michael King

King is doing something very historian-ish here: turning national character into a working tool, then using it to manage a present-tense dispute. “Great continuities” frames New Zealand not as a nation of ruptures and revolutions, but of habits - moral and practical ones. “Decency and common sense” are deliberately plain words, almost anti-ideological. They flatter the civic self-image while also smuggling in a standard: if you’re being shrill, absolutist, or punitive, you’re not just wrong, you’re un-New Zealand.

The subtext is faith in process over drama. “Up until now” is the tell - a small, nervous hinge that acknowledges history doesn’t guarantee the future. He’s implicitly aware that whatever “this issue” is (in King’s era, that often meant heated arguments over Treaty of Waitangi settlements, cultural identity, and the legacy of colonisation), it carries the potential to break the familiar script. The line “we’ve been able to talk them through” positions conversation as a national technology: the preferred method of conflict resolution, and a quiet rebuke to culture-war thinking imported from elsewhere.

King’s intent isn’t naïve optimism so much as preventative rhetoric. By asserting that decency and common sense are continuous, he’s trying to make them contagious, to pre-commit the public to a tone of negotiation rather than escalation. It’s also a historian’s wager: that the story a country tells about itself can become a self-fulfilling restraint, keeping politics inside the guardrails of civility even when the stakes - land, sovereignty, recognition - are anything but “common sense.”