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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Chris Trotter.
One Third Is Enough
WITH 30 PERCENT of New Zealanders expressing support for their protest, the occupiers of Parliament Grounds must be feeling elated. Thirty per cent is a substantial minority, more than sufficient, should it be prepared to force the issue, to overwhelm the State’s weak and hesitant defenders. At this moment, and from a strictly Machiavellian point of view, the Government’s best option would be to announce the date upon which all Vaccination Mandates will cease. Give the protesters a win and live to fight another day.
It is, however, doubtful whether even this cynical gesture would now be enough to send the protesters home. With copy-cat encampments springing up like multi-coloured mushrooms all over New Zealand, it may actually be too late to persuade the genie of rebellion to squeeze himself back into his bottle.
There are several reasons for believing this to be so.
The first reason is what might be called “The Wizard of Oz Factor”.
Those who have watched the movie will recall that the Wizard, whose amplified pronouncements made him sound all-powerful, turned out to be an unimpressive little man hiding behind a curtain.
Something very similar has been revealed in relation to the New Zealand State. Its first line of defence, the New Zealand Police, have proved to be either too scared, or too ill-equipped, or both, to step up to the task of clearing Parliament Grounds. Indeed, it lacks both the necessary towing equipment, and the essential co-operation of its private sector operators, to remove even the protesters illegally parked cars.
Having given the job their best shot on Thursday, 10 February, when 122 arrests were made, the Police appear to have run out of ideas. Apparently, none of the Police commanders had given much in the way of serious thought to where the protesters arrested during the enforcement of Speaker Mallard’s trespass order, would be contained. By the end of day there just wasn’t any more room for any more detainees: the Police had run out of cell space!
Once this became known to the protesters, they knew they had nothing to fear. After more-or-less ruling out the use of brute force to clear the site, the Commissioner of Police, Andrew Coster, now has no more shots in his locker. He is powerless – and everybody knows it.
In theory, this would be the moment that the Government called upon the armed forces to “aid the civil power”, but, once again, the State’s defenders have demurred.
In a well-timed posting on his Politik blog, veteran political journalist, Richard Harman reports that:
“In a surprisingly frank admission yesterday, the Chief of the Defence Force [Air Marshall Kevin Short] said only three elements of our armed forces were capable of being deployed to what he called ‘high threat environments’.” Those three elements are: the NZ Navy’s frigates; the Air Force’s P-3 ‘Orions’; and the New Zealand SAS.
Now, it’s possible that our one serviceable frigate could shell the protesters’ encampment from Wellington Harbour, and that the P-3 Orions might capture the resulting carnage on film. (Always assuming the ship’s guns didn’t miss the pup tents and demolish Parliament Buildings instead.) As for the SAS: well, if the mission was to raze the camp to the ground and wipe out its inhabitants completely, then the SAS are certainly the blokes to do it.
Some New Zealanders, however, might be just the teeniest bit concerned that the military power was being wielded a little too heavy-handedly. The objective, after all, is to move the protesters on – not blow them to bits.
The problem, of course, is that a large number of this country’s military personnel are currently tasked with keeping watch over the inmates of our MIQ facilities. Frankly, the Government would have a more formidable force at its disposal if it persuaded the gangs to aid the civil power – for an appropriately generous consideration, naturally. The chances are high that when those guys told the protesters to move, they’d move.
The second reason the protesters might decline to heed the Government’s calls to unblock Wellington’s streets and decamp from Parliament Grounds is that they have discovered how easy it is to manipulate the media. Or, more accurately, they have observed how easy it is for one group of journalists to manipulate another.
Initially, the media’s view of the protest was almost entirely hostile. Threatened with execution by some of the protesters, they followed the Government’s line with unabashed enthusiasm. Very soon, however, they came under fire from Left and Right alike for their obvious middle-class disdain for the tatterdemalion crowd below the Speaker’s balcony.
Now, if there’s one thing you can be sure of about today’s journalists, it’s that they are acutely sensitive to charges of racial, sexual and class privilege. Almost as sensitive, in fact, as they are to being sworn at and threatened with death. This is why, in the space of a week, the protesters have progressed from being castigated in the news media as Nazi scum and Q-Anon conspiracy nuts, to being held up as salt-of-the-earth working-class Kiwi battlers standing up (however misguidedly) for the principles they believe in.
Ten days in, the more astute “influencers” among the protesters were talking amicably to mainstream journalists, and showing them around their well-provisioned “village” with considerable pride. It is to be hoped that they were just a little bit ashamed when they took in the NZ Herald’s gushing double-page spread on their encampment. To think, they used to call these people traitors! Turns out all they needed to be told was that they weren’t really middle-class snobs and wankers, but true “friends of the people”. Right on!
The third, and the most important, reason the protesters might decide to stay on a little longer at the heart of our democracy is that they are sensing the sheer, cold fear they are inspiring in the rest of the population.
A great many New Zealanders will have been stunned to discover just how many people back the protest. Like the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, they would have looked at the percentage of New Zealanders who are double-jabbed and boosted, and concluded the anti-vax-mandate movement couldn’t possibly represent more than 10 per cent of the population. The Horizon poll showing roughly a third of the country in support of the protest in Parliament Grounds has shaken them to the core.
Many Kiwis will struggle to recognise the country they are now living in. Their expectations that either the Government, the Police, or the Army, will “sort things out” have been shattered. They will study their neighbours, now, for signs that they, too, are part of the “movement”. The elderly and the chronically ill will fear for their lives, as the Prime Minister’s mutually supportive “Team of Five Million” dissolves before their eyes.
Frightened, mistrustful and disoriented, their instinct will be to stay inside their bubble and do nothing to attract the attention of the one-in-three New Zealanders who are so eagerly awaiting the coming storm.
One-third of the population is more than enough to “take back control” of a country. After all, in November 1932, in the last free election before he was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler’s Nazi Party received precisely 33.1 per cent of the vote.
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