It's a disgrace what you're doing with your climate positive, Prime Minister. It's an absolute disgrace and we're suffering now.
You're listening to a bunch of protesters heckling the Prime Minister. They're yelling shame as he gets into his car. And yesterday, Chris Hipkins mentioned climate change in his message to victims' families.
Now, everybody in this country knows how political climate change has become. Well, not, no, that's wrong. Not so much climate change, but how we respond to it.
So to wave banners and bring into the debate about climate change, absolutely they're right. The protesters, they have the right to do that.
It's also the right of the Leader of the Opposition to mention it in his address as well. But the question is whether it's in good taste. And I reckon it's a bit off for a couple of reasons.
One, we still have teenagers trapped under a landslide at the Mount. Their families, desperate, emotional as you can well imagine, banners shouting anger through the news at a time like this, I would have thought was a bit much.
Number 2, the idea that by closing a few farms and getting rid of some cows in New Zealand, you will somehow stop the rain from falling and the landslides from slipping is just wrong. All the scientists agree it would take unified global action, most importantly, from the big four players to move the dial even an inch.
And right now, as everybody well knows, those players, especially the US, doing the opposite.
Our dear friends across the Tasman have just struck a deal to extend the life of their biggest power plant. That plant, by the way, runs on coal.
As I say, I back everyone's right to protest and say what they like. There is nothing illegal or even really nasty about it. I just think it's probably a bit in poor taste so soon after such a personal tragedy, and one that people are feeling so deeply.
You've also got to wonder who's benefiting from all this. Are the protesters going to be flooded with supporters after an outburst like that while the families are still waiting to hear news of their loved ones stuck under a landslide?
Ryan Bridge is a New Zealand broadcaster who has worked on many current affairs television and radio shows. He currently hosts Newstalk ZB's Early Edition - where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
I am reminded of the February 2011 Earthquakes in Christchurch. Left wing activists were whipping up trouble for John Key in certain suburbs. As a result police decided it was too dangerous for Key to go and have a look. The level of manpower required to protect him wasn't available as police were dealing with a disaster.
I suspect the nowadays irrationally disproportionate heckling and on line hounding of public figures, along with the huge risk of cancellation and of personal, family and property security, is a major factor deterring very many of the more able and appropriate persons entering the field.
Ryan’s column is a reminder of something journalism used to understand instinctively: there is a time and a place.
He acknowledged the right to protest. He acknowledged the political reality of climate change. Then he did the unfashionable thing — he applied judgement.
When people are missing, trapped, or buried, when families are waiting for news that may never come, not every cause needs to be advanced that morning through a megaphone.
Some moments demand restraint, not slogans.
What greeted the Prime Minister in Thames had an uncomfortable familiarity. It felt like the same travelling protest circus we saw with Palestine — the same obnoxious megaphones, the same choreography, just a different slogan pulled from the backpack as the car door opened. Outrage, repackaged for the day’s headline.
Stuff’s editorial on the same tragedy today takes the opposite approach. It begins with human loss, properly enough, but quickly summons certainty and prescription. Enter the doom-goblin prophet, arriving early to declare the lesson already settled and the climate apocalypse duly scheduled.
Readers who feel uneasy about politicising events while bodies are still being searched for are briskly corrected. If it feels “too soon”, the editorial insists, that instinct is wrong — it may already be “too late”.
That line doesn’t advance an argument. It shuts one down. It replaces judgement with insistence.
And this isn’t new.
During the Tom Phillips shootout, the same instinct was on display. Inside Stuff, the question of responsibility was raised — and overridden. Editors were warned about police protocol, legal risk, and the safety of people on the ground of practically live blogging police radio calls. They published anyway. Not because judgment was absent, but because immediacy — the scoop — was allowed to outrank it.
The pattern is consistent. Tragedy is not a moment for sequencing or pause, but fuel for narrative acceleration.
That’s why Ryan’s point matters. He restores a basic journalistic discipline some outlets have mislaid: that when you say something matters as much as what you say.
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