“I understand the strength of feeling and I understand the sentiment and I understand that sense of urgency…we see that in a globalised world.“
PM Jacinda Ardern
Our Prime Minister, addressing the feeling of grievance and marginalisation felt by those protesting at parliament?
Some hope. She was commenting on the highly irrelevant Black Lives Matter embarrassment back in March 2020.
On the current protests in Wellington, she slandered them as “imported”.
So emphasise we live in a “globalized world” if you agree with the protestors, call them “imported” if you don’t. Nothing but the usual hypocrisy of the flailing politician there I guess. But it gets worse.
“I think it would be wrong to in any way characterise what we’ve seen outside as a representation of the majority.”
PM Jacinda Arderm
Well, yes, with high vaccination rates and opinion polls still showing support for Covid restrictions, those actively protesting vaccine mandates are in a definite minority. And the actual unvaccinated are only around 5% of the population.
But, Prime Minister, with (dwindling) respect, so bloody what?
One of the strengths of liberal democracies such as ours is that minorities enjoy equal protection under the law. It marks us out from less civilised systems of government. If the Prime Minister has forgotten this key difference, maybe the Uyghurs in China or Christians in Iran could remind her.
Or perhaps, steeped in socialist thinking from her time as President of ‘The International Union of Socialist Youth’, she takes the view of lefties from Robespierre to Stalin that only the majority matter. Any group that stands in the way of plans to protect or improve conditions for this majority deserve to be crushed as ‘enemies of the people’. If you think this is unfair, view the clip below, where she enthusiastically endorses the creation of two classes of people with different sets of rights.
Her questioner even gives her an out, “you probably don’t see it like this…” which she discards with a smirk, a head nod, and the damning words “that is what it is”.
Well so be it. Create a two-tier society and see where that gets you. You’d be seeing it now if you weren’t in hiding.
So who is this minority raising a ruckus outside her window?
If you went by NZ Herald headlines you’d be very concerned.
“The possible involvement of far-right groups was concerning and the terror attacks of March 2019 were ‘front of mind’’ Superintendent Corrie Parnell told the NZ Herald.
NZ Herald
Or if you followed the Twitter stream of friend of the BFD and world-class political analyst, Siouxsie Wiles, who called them “white supremacists”. White supremacists who apparently go in for mass haka performances and the waving of the Maori sovereignty flag. According to other media, they are M.A.G.A. hat-wearing Trump tragics or drooling delusional conspiracy theorists.
Perhaps. Protests of all kinds are idiot magnets.
Or perhaps they are just people who have lost their jobs, their businesses and their liberty for refusing to undergo a state decreed medical procedure.
People who for whatever reason, sane or not, just want to be left the hell alone. But the Ardern government won’t let them, at the cost of their livelihoods.
I have to admit to some initial queasiness at the lawlessness happening in Wellington. It’s my conservative instincts; when I see some dreadlocked ninny with a loud hailer marching for ‘change’, I march in the other direction. But the wish to be left alone by the government is a conservative cause. Uber-Tory, Edmund Burke, supported the American Revolution (but not full independence) while abhorring the French version. The French were ripping up the rule book, spurning God and the natural order and attempting to remake society in man’s image, with terrifying results. The American colonists, Burke saw as merely asking that the rule book be followed and the freedoms guaranteed to them as British subjects be recognised.
And so are our friends in Wellington. They are demanding something our Bill of Rights (1990) guarantees all New Zealanders – the right to refuse to undergo medical treatment. While technically the government isn’t holding them down and jabbing a needle in their arms, it is using all the coercive powers of the state for the same purpose.
Critics from the Left such as Chris Trotter, who earlier this week labelled the protests “selfish anarchy“, have no qualms about such heavy-handed state tactics. Conservatives should. Unlike libertarians we recognise that there are times when the government may have to act to protect the majority, limiting freedoms when it does so. But these should be acts in extremis, justified by a genuine emergency and acknowledged as temporary exceptions. This government knows no limiting principle on their restrictive actions.
At the present time maintaining the mandates over omicron infection when 50% of us are not ‘boosted’ is an absurdity. The ‘unboosted’ such as myself can get and pass on the less severe omicron and yet we face no sanction. The time to end the mandates is now.
“This too, will pass”, says the Prime Minister of the protest.
No, it won’t. Not if conservatives – are there any left in the National Party? – stop holding their noses and make common cause with the reasonable majority of protestors.
Then it will become a glorious time-calling on a government that has far exceeded what a government should ever do.
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