Karl du Fresne: Camp Freedom revisited

Where should the balance be struck between public safety and individual freedom? At what point should the latter be curtailed to protect the former? More than four years after the anti-vaccination encampment that ended in mayhem outside Parliament, the answer isn’t clear.

New Zealand in 2020 was threatened by a global pandemic. No one knew how serious it might be.

As it turned out, we escaped relatively lightly. The Royal Commission on Covid-19 cited statistics that showed case numbers here were much lower than in most comparable countries. Deaths per capita in New Zealand were among the lowest in the OECD.

Our geographical isolation may have had something to do with that, but defenders of the Ardern government argued that it was primarily the result of decisive official action to contain the spread of the disease. Those measures included lockdowns, draconian travel restrictions and vaccination mandates that had the effect of punishing people who refused to take “the jab” by excluding them from jobs and community activities such as sport and church.

These were actions that no free society would have contemplated in ordinary circumstances and they caused immense social and economic disruption, the impact of which is still being felt as retail and hospitality businesses struggle to recover.

To all intents and purposes, New Zealand became a police state where people’s daily lives and freedom of movement were subjected to strict controls. But by and large, the public accepted these as necessary because the government didn’t know what it was dealing with or how many might otherwise die.

A generous spoonful of sugar, in the form of reassuring words from the prime minister, helped the medicine go down. “Be strong and be kind” – but especially “be kind” – became Jacinda Ardern’s catchphrase. Urged on by her daily pep talks from the Beehive, the vast majority of New Zealanders fell into line notwithstanding abundant evidence of official dissembling and incompetence in the management of the pandemic. And the government, citing relatively low mortality figures, was able to claim vindication for its strategy.

But there was always a substantial body of opinion that pushed back. It wasn’t clear at the time how big that dissident group was, since its existence was largely unacknowledged by mainstream media that unquestioningly supported the government and treated the non-compliant minority as pariahs.

It wasn’t until the occupation of Parliament’s grounds in February 2022 that the country grasped the scale of this underground resistance. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere but had been gathering momentum for months out in the heartland.

I was in Wellington on the day the convoys of the non-compliant rolled into town from opposite ends of the country and remember being astonished at the unprecedented spectacle of the streets around Parliament choked by protest vehicles. Even the police seemed to be caught completely off guard.

If the scale of the protest was the first surprise, there was another to come. Most protests at Parliament last a few hours at most and then the participants drift away. This one was different. The protesters and their vehicles were still there the next day and the day after that, in steadily increasing numbers and with comprehensive resources (paid for by Russia, Trevor Mallard astonishingly claimed - with no elaboration - before a bemused audience at this year’s Featherston book festival) that suggested they were there for the long haul. They ended up staying for more than three weeks before being driven out in a violent police operation that trashed all their equipment.

A third surprise, for me, came with the release in September 2023 of the documentary film River of Freedom. This served as a powerful corrective to the overwhelmingly negative and often wildly inaccurate, if not dishonest, media coverage of the protest camp and the motives of the people who took part or otherwise supported it. In particular, River of Freedom presented a compellingly different narrative to that of the hysterically overwrought Stuff documentary Fire and Fury, which came out the previous year and framed the anti-vax protest as being masterminded by agents of the far Right.

I wrote at the time that for me, the most striking scenes in River of Freedom (the title was inspired by cabinet minister Michael Wood’s contemptuous characterisation of the protest camp as a “river of filth”) were not the ones showing the fiery climax of the occupation at Parliament. “Dramatic though those were,” I wrote, “we had seen them before. No, I was most struck by scenes we hadn’t seen; namely, the ones that showed enthusiastic crowds lining the protest routes all the way from Cape Reinga and Bluff to the capital.

“Even out in the countryside, boisterous supporters – too numerous by far to be dismissed as a mere rent-a-mob display – turned out in force to wave placards and cheer as the convoys rolled past. Motorway overbridges were shown jammed with well-wishers, even in foul weather.

“Clearly, something unprecedented was happening out in heartland New Zealand, but where were the mainstream media? Precious little of this was reported in the press or shown on the TV news. To all intents and purposes, the rolling protest was rendered invisible.”

River of Freedom reinforced a strange sense that there were now two New Zealands – one approved by the political, bureaucratic and media establishment, the other a rough-and-ready Kiwi equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables.

With no advance promotion other than word of mouth and social media, the film played to packed houses. My first attempt to see it was thwarted because screenings in Masterton were sold out. Stuff film critic Graeme Tuckett, who wrote an admirably fair review of the movie (but without straying too far from his employer’s pro-Ardern editorial line), struck the same problem in Wellington, where it took him a week to get a ticket. The movie ended up playing in 54 cinemas, mostly in the provinces, and in September 2023 became the most watched film in the country.

Now Gaylene Barnes, the director of River of Freedom, has collaborated with movie publicist Sian Clement, to produce a follow-up book called Heart of the Protest. It’s a substantial piece of work: 423 pages, liberally illustrated and comprehensively footnoted with references to sources. It sets out how the protest came about, documents in detail the occupation of Parliament’s grounds and introduces the reader to key participants.

The book doesn’t pretend to be impartial. It's as relentlessly positive in its depiction of Camp Freedom as mainstream media coverage was dismissive and disparaging. But like Barnes’ film, it serves as a valid and necessary counterpoint to the often grossly lopsided narrative presented by mainstream journalists and commentators who made no attempt to engage with the anti-vax protesters, preferring to portray them as, at best, a motley collection of oddballs and, at worst, dupes of shadowy malevolent alt-Right agitators and, bizarrely, white supremacists. (Did they not notice the number of brown faces and the distinctly Maori vibe of the protest? Probably not, since the closest most reporters got to the protest was looking down – literally and figuratively – with Mallard from the balcony of Parliament.)

Heart of the Protest manages to be less emotionally incontinent than Fire and Fury (which, it should be noted, was made with taxpayer funding via NZ on Air, and therefore had the greater obligation to be even-handed). Perhaps the book’s greatest fault is that in its desire to give a voice to a wide range of protesters, it becomes tediously repetitive.

And the range of protesters was wide, including people who had willingly been jabbed themselves but objected on principle to others being forced to accept vaccination and losing their jobs if they didn’t. And while the protesters included some who were named in the media as inciting anti-vax fervour for nefarious ends (which were never specified), the worst that most people in the book could be accused of – including the authors themselves – is sheer earnestness. Their distress at what they saw happening to friends and families as a result of lockdowns and vaccination mandates, to say nothing of their hippy-ish delight in the communal togetherness of the protest camp, was palpable and genuine. Arguably, the book should come with a publisher’s warning that it contains more hugging, tears and New Age-speak than some readers will be able to tolerate.

Heart of the Protest reminds us of some things that we might otherwise be tempted to forget, such as the complicity of journalists and opposition parties when what was sold to us as compassion morphed into coercion and authoritarianism. People whose function was to question, scrutinise and challenge those in power went missing in action.

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that politicians emerged from the pandemic with less dishonour than the mainstream media. The government could claim justification for its actions on the basis that it was dealing with an unprecedented crisis. That, however, didn’t release the media from their duty to hold those in power to account. It was the media’s choice to function as the state’s PR apparatus and in doing so, they may well have contributed to the well-documented decline of public faith in journalism.

Parallels with other events in New Zealand history? The 1981 Springbok tour is an obvious reference point. On that occasion too, a determined minority took direct action over what they saw as a compelling moral cause and ended up in a head-on confrontation with the forces of authority. Robert Muldoon’s National Party government was rewarded with a narrow win in the subsequent general election.

Ardern’s government had no such luck. By the time the 2023 election rolled around, the mood of the country had changed. Ardern’s magic had lost its potency and perhaps sensing that, she had stepped down.

But a more striking point of comparison is the epic 1951 waterfront dispute, when the state exercised its power to force militant wharfies and their allies in other unions into submission, even to the extent of criminalising statements of support for the unionists and prohibiting gestures of help such as food donations to their families. On that occasion, a National government used emergency powers in the Public Safety Conservation Act to enforce media silence and minimise public resistance. National resoundingly won a subsequent snap election then, too.

Both events provided a lesson in how easily a society can be persuaded that the suspension of basic rights – freedom of speech in 1951, freedom of movement and the right to refuse medical treatment in 2021-2022 – is justified in the public interest, and how easily people who don’t fall into line can be “othered”. New Zealanders who opposed lockdowns and mandates were seen as letting the side down. In a New Zealand Herald opinion poll at the time, only 12 per cent of respondents supported the protest camp.

But the passage of time has a way of altering the public perception of such events. Seventy-five years on, the suspension of fundamental civil liberties during the waterfront dispute seems inconceivable by the standards of a modern liberal democracy, just as the harsh treatment of conscientious objectors during wartime – then regarded as uncontroversial – now strikes many people as shocking.

Then there was Bastion Point. Much of the country cheered (I admit I did) when the police ended Ngati Whatua’s occupation of their ancestral land in 1978, but the public today would probably take a much more sympathetic view of the iwi’s protest.

Whether the anti-vax movement will eventually be the subject of similar historical revisionism remains to be seen, but River of Freedom and now Heart of the Protest at least introduce a semblance of balance into what was previously an overwhelmingly one-sided narrative. They also provide an alternative perspective without which the question posed at the start of this article can’t properly be answered.

■ The authors of Heart of the Protest struck resistance from the book trade, so you may not find the book in mainstream book shops. However it’s available for $39 (plus postage) from the River of Freedom website, which also lists outlets that stock it.

Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.