The film 8 Mile culminates in a rap battle where the protagonist, a poor white guy who has had a pretty crappy life thus far, played by Eminem, verbally obliterates another battle rapper for the sin of putting on a fake gangster persona while in reality coming from a loving and wealthy nuclear family.

Eminem's character had a far worse past compared to his opponent, and is highly likely to have a worse future too, but in that moment, he is the victor because he is who he is and isn’t pretending to be anything else.

At the pōwhiri to welcome the parliamentary opposition to Waitangi on Saturday, former Cabinet minister Peeni Henare told the crowd, “This fight [against the new government] will not be fought just in Parliament. I lift my gun, and I let the shots do the talking.”

While he was quick to clarify that it was a figurative gun, Henare is the last person who should be adopting such false machismo.

Apart from the time he posted a shirtless selfie to offer his thoughts and prayers to the victims of a natural disaster, the parliamentary career of Peeni Henare has not been one of “all action”.

While initially promoted and given public-facing roles by Labour, after 10 years as an MP and Cabinet minister Henare has failed to gain the support of either an electorate or enough of his own party to make him a serious leadership contender.

As high-flyers such as Kiri Allan were promoted above him, for a decade Henare has only been trusted with minor Cabinet roles, lacking the talent and vision to lead from the front. His reputation around Parliament is that he would be the last person to let his figurative gun do the talking.

“A space filler,” was a description of him given to me by a senior Labour Party staffer. “Lucky to be there,” was another.

He is non-threatening, uninspiring, exactly what you would expect of someone who earned his place in politics through whakapapa, not hard mahi.

A smiley young dad from a privileged background, destined from birth to be the next Henare to hold the old Northern Māori seat. Henare’s greatest asset as a political candidate, beyond his famous whakapapa, is that he's generally a more moderate voice in Labour’s Māori caucus - which is already an ideological moderation on Te Pati Māori’s.

His narrow victories in the Māori seat of Tāmaki Makaurau, a seat held 110 years ago by his great-grandfather Taurekareka Henare, were over Māori Party candidates like John Tamihere who adopted more radical language and were offering more radical solutions to Henare.

In 2022, Newsroom reported that Henare informed Labour Party president Claire Szabo that he did not want to contest Tāmaki Makaurau during the 2023 general election, preferring instead to contest the election as a list-only candidate.

The downside of being a list MP is you need a good list rating to survive long, which means you have less control over your future. The upside of being a list MP is that it's a much easier life. You don’t have to win over a community, just members of a party you’re already in.

When Henare lost his electorate to Te Pati Māori’s Takutai Tarsh Kemp, it felt like the end of his political career was nigh. Sure, he got what he wanted - a list-only seat - but relying on the generosity of the list ranking committee is a tenuous position for such a long-standing MP.

Instead of bowing out semi-gracefully, it appears Henare has taken to the old adage “if you can’t beat them, join them” and is reinventing himself.

He’s been reborn, as a Hone Harawira/John Tamihere ”shoot from the hip” reactionary. This new firebrand persona contrasts dramatically with Henare’s actual life and experiences, but he is not alone in this stoking of violent and insulting rhetoric.

Journalists and pundits have been uncritically running this narrative that we are a nation facing a dangerous or revolutionary threat since the election - describing the relationship the new coalition Government seeks to have with Māori as tense and somehow already broken.

Controversy gets attention for minor media commentators and unpopular political parties. It is easier to stand in, and campaign on, righteous judgment than it is to provide constructive solutions. It works for them, but it achieves nothing tangible.

Telling these narratives where we Māori are facing, in this government, an existential threat that requires an almost revolutionary response, only benefits the people who are promoting it.

Anyone genuinely fearful for our national soul should look at what a country facing a true violent threat looks like.

On Tuesday, January 9, the live studio broadcast of Ecuadorian state news station TC was interrupted by masked men carrying military-grade firearms and explosives. While still on-air, one of the gunmen shoves a shotgun into the neck of a news presenter. Staff at their equivalent of TVNZ hide under desks and post to social media their fears that they would soon all be dead.

Sadly, this was only an early taste of what was to come for Ecuador, where street violence breaks out daily between police and gangs lucratively financed by the global drug trade. Once an outlier in the region for its low gang-related violence, Ecuador has become yet another cautionary tale of how violence can spiral out of control in a nation without strong and stable institutions.

Compared to Ecuador, all this gun talk and doomsday prophecies - the “fight” against the government, “attacks” on Māori - is all a bit childish.

We deserve a more mature discourse than this and I truly sympathise with anyone feeling overwhelmed by it all - people who see how lucky we are and who wish everyone could just get along.

Sadly, as brooding Sopranos matriarch Livia Soprano once said, “some of us don't wanna!”

While certainly a level of responsibility for the current tension is due to Act and NZ First policy, I believe two pretty uncontroversial things to be true.

First, the Treaty Bill was and is a mistake because it's exactly what Act is meant to be against – it's tokenistic and provides no clear value add for the taxpayer. Even if completely rewritten in the select committee, the bill won't make anyone safer, grow the economy, or do much good.

Second, beyond starting a debate that may benefit no one, it wasn't an act of aggression.

The removal of the previous Government's policies, by a government elected on a campaign of promising to do just that, is not a shocking or violent experience. We are not facing a hollowing out of our institutions or erosion of our safety, just a different guy named Chris being in charge.

What we have is a coalition government that united just enough of the nation behind its policies to create a government, and some people who benefitted from the largesse of the last government throwing their rather flash toys and using the language of the violently oppressed.

While Ecuador may seem an extreme example, we often forget as New Zealanders how lucky we are to be so far removed from instability and chaos. Billions of people around the world would trade places with Henare in an instant, taking his privileged background and comfortable life over their pasts and futures filled with real-life violence.

We’re not the main characters of a hard-luck story. We, like Peeni Henare himself, are the kids of a stable privileged nation who can’t pull off fighting talk and machismo. It's not authentic. Behind all gun talk is a warm home, a loving whanau, and hope. All of which would make for a terrible, tension-less movie, but they make for a pretty great nation.

We should take the lesson of 8 Mile and embrace what we are, rather than, like Peeni Henare, pretending to be something we’re not.