OPINION
I’m not so much flabbergasted as flubergasted – astonished – by the treatment meted out to Emma Chatterton, the relatively young National candidate for Remutaka (running against Hipkins) in the upcoming election, at the ‘climate protest’ [on Friday].
The mandatory ‘Kia ora, tatou’ hadn’t been squeezed from her lips before coordinated booing began. Thanking the protestors for turning out for the environment brought jeers, abuse, insults…It continued throughout her talk. Is this the vile misogyny the left speak of female politicians receiving on a daily basis – that someone of a similar age cohort, with significant empathy for their cause should be subject to public abuse because she wore the wrong colour jacket? To her great credit she refused to be cowed.
When moral amoeba James Shaw deplored: ‘I think that’s appalling behaviour on their behalf,’ he was talking about National, not the boorish inclusive rabble, heatedly harassing Chatterton, saying National ‘completely strung their candidate out to dry’. The slime ball, or unctuous orb if you prefer, positively aroused by the vile mob-mentality on display, couldn’t resist a dart of moral supremacism, victim-blaming Chatterton: ‘It doesn’t surprise me that that kind of frustration was flowing through.’ Clearly, her dress was too short.
Strange, but true; the Labour speaker Ginny Andersen was subject to the very same offensive behaviour, but amazingly, in her case, the clouds and crowds parted for pacifiers to descend: ‘Two School Strike 4 Climate representatives were seen to approach the main instigator’ and the mistreatment mysteriously desisted. Amazing, eh? It’s a shame the behaviour-modifiers couldn’t find sufficient motivation to articulate their anxiety about Ms Chatterton’s ugly reception. Perhaps they were searching for a bearing on their moral compass while she was being abused?
Welcome to our beautiful green future: secure, sustainable, inclusive, insulting, offensive; drooling over dining-out on ‘deniers’ like Pavlov dogs, but with only one-tenth the latter’s table manners. What a disgrace.