I confess that I don't really know anything about the "Dominion Post" other than occasional references to it in media. On 14th April the owner and CEO of Stuff proudly announced that the word "dominion" was going to disappear from the newspaper's name. This piqued my interest due to the historical nature of the term and how much it seems to have triggered the journalists who worked under it. I presume the paper is an extreme left-wing mouthpiece and so carrying a right-wing sounding name must have been the cause of much embarrassment for its employees.
Seeing the headline "under no one's Dominion" posted on Twitter by Sinead Boucher solicited an actual laugh-out-loud moment from me. It was the kind of childish statement you might hear from an actual child, a naive anarchist, or a Reddit atheist who hates God.
Is Sinead Boucher declaring independence from the government and becoming a sovereign citizen?
This announcement revealed more than they wanted to let on, both their complete ignorance of history and their hatred of lawful authority. The "Dominion of New Zealand" is largely a historical term, but completely accurate to use today. A "dominion" is a sovereign state and refers to our self-determination as a country.
I suspect the term itself became British policy due to the nature of the Christian Empire. The "Dominion Mandate" was given by God to man as part of the creation ordinances and established our sovereignty over the whole earth. The word must have had some appeal to the Foreign Office in that context. In 1907, King Edward VII symbolically passed this mandate on to his subjects in New Zealand as he formally put us in charge of our own destiny. A colony no longer, but a Dominion with our own government and with it the right to our own laws, taxes, borders, and the duty to maintain order.
Reading comments from the poor journalists in the Dominion Post newsroom it appears their level of understanding of the term goes no deeper than scanning a Wikipedia page. They weasel with revisionism on how Dominion status didn't really mean anything. They even claim New Zealand as a Dominion became obsolete when we joined the United Nations—which sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory.
Did we give up our sovereignty to the United Nations? Oops.
We can laugh at the absurdities that obscure their cowardice.
They won't admit the truth about the newspaper's name change: they were triggered by the Christian connotations of the word "dominion" and being reminded of one of God's creation mandates made them feel uncomfortable. They can't help but remind us how much they loathe our faith, our history, any semblance of hierarchy, the British Empire, and any authority greater than their own.
In the words of Auron MacIntyre: "You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't."