The vicar gave thanks for the food and the drink which we were about to consume, and then said that we should give thanks also for the fact that, in just 24 hours’ time, we would have elected the members of the next Parliament “and nobody will have been shot, nobody will have been beaten to death, and the Army will still be in its barracks”. Let’s give thanks, he said, that we can say that with absolute confidence – “and we are one of only a tiny handful of countries in the entire world where this can be said with confidence”.
He was right, and we should all be profoundly grateful that what the vicar gave thanks for that night is still true. Recent polls suggest that a majority of New Zealanders are opposed to the present Government. And it is clear that a great many New Zealanders abhor the Government with an intensity that I haven’t previously witnessed. But nobody seriously suggests overthrowing it by armed rebellion. And nobody imagines that if, as I hope, the Government loses the next election in a landslide, it would attempt a New Zealand equivalent of the January 6 attempt by former President Trump to overturn that election result.
