Winston Peters
Leader of NZ First
Posie Parker had every right to be here. Our High Court ruled it so.
She had the right to speak freely and to have the freedom to express her views. That’s the New Zealand I grew up in. That’s what our country used to lead the world in – freedoms, women’s rights and striving towards equality for all.
That’s not the New Zealand we just had exposed to the world.
What we got instead was a mob headed by a refugee who just internationally imaged our country as being intolerant and violently opposed to the very values our forebears fought and died for.
What’s more, that refugee who physically assaulted Posie Parker then fled New Zealand – ironically from the very country with the values they purportedly came here for.
If that deluded individual doesn’t like New Zealand, our Western values or our rule of law, then they should go back to where they came from.
As for the rest. Make no mistake. They weren’t protesters. They were a mob.
Protesters march down the streets, they sit on parliament grounds, they voice their opinions, they disagree, they hold signs, they want their voice heard and allow others to have theirs heard in opposition. This was not a protest. This was a mob who had one goal and only one goal – to shut down Posie Parker and shut down what she had to say by any means necessary – including violence. And their reason? Because they disagreed with what she had to say.
This wasn’t a protest voicing their views. This was a thuggish intolerant mob violently shutting down freedom of speech.
You tell me the last time a teachers’ or workers’ union did that. There’s a reason you can’t.
It wasn’t so long ago that a certain regime used ideology in justifying violence to shut down speech, shut down freedoms, shut down a certain type of people and shut down other points of view. We remember it ending in the burning of books – and much worse.
What we saw at the Posie Parker event was the sudden exposure of the latent violent underbelly of a minority of narcissistic cultural leftists who think their wacky daydreams are more important than what our country stands for.
We should not, and will never, accept that.
This is not us. And never was. That mob who think they represent the mass majority of New Zealanders are sadly mistaken. We do not accept it, and we will never allow our country to be dragged into the mire of leftist activism.
The most worrying aspect of it all is that we had government Ministers participating in that mob. Not only were they in that mob, they were voicing their racist, sexist and violent intolerance towards “white cis men”. The Prime Minister then excused it.
The media seem to have just conveniently forgotten all of it.