The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
Veteran old-school leftist Don Franks deftly skewered the hypocrites in a poem published on this blog, but it hasn’t deterred them from continuing to recoil in disgust at the sight of the “rabble” (a word suddenly much favoured by the illiberal Left, as opposed to those like Franks who believe in free speech) on the lawns outside Parliament.
There’s an unmistakeable note of panic in the posturing of the woke Left. They suddenly realise they no longer control the public debate and are wildly lashing out at the scruffy mob that usurped their right to make a nuisance of themselves. How dare they!
First, the government has announced, "All school students would now be able to participate in school activities despite if they were vaccinated or not and gathering limits would no longer apply when unvaccinated students were participating."
In other words, mandates for kids have been dropped. Clearly, the government did not say it that simply because they did not want to be seen to be backing down to the protesters, but that's exactly what they have done.
The reported assaults on police at the protest these last two mornings are completely unacceptable.
None of us are going to be ok with protestors throwing faeces at police, and spraying officers with what they suspect is acid.
Unless that kind of nonsense stops, the protest will lose any public support that it has, and I suspect, frankly, it has already lost a great deal of public sympathy.
I know lots of people are over the protest, and I feel a bit that way too, and I know that’s easy to say if you're not sitting in the same city as it. Even those in Wellington, just not near the CBD, say they’re sick of it as well.
But then there are those at the epicentre who say it’s horrific, don’t underestimate the gruesome time we’re having. The students who can’t catch the bus, the law students who can’t get on campus, the local businesses being punished, the commuters held up.
But for those of us for whom it's out of sight, it's out of mind. If it doesn’t affect you, do you really care? And many don’t care.
Police are the meat in the sandwich.
This not the first time in recent history that police have
found themselves in the middle of civil disobedience created by politicians and
which, in the case of where Red Squad found themselves in 1981, civil
war.
Commissioner Coster did not create the problem in
Wellington.
The Government created the cause for the original protest in Wellington last week where former National M P Matt King was the stand out among a crowd of mostly reasonable Kiwis registering their disapproval of MANDATES.
Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on the anti-mandate/anti-government protest in Parliament grounds!
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
– George Orwell.
Over the last two years, Jacinda Ardern’s Government has instituted a raft of unprecedented emergency restrictions aimed at safeguarding our population from Covid-19.
In March 2020, using exaggerated modelling that predicted tens of thousands of deaths, Prime Minister Ardern made a Captain’s Call to abandon the New Zealand Pandemic Plan that had kept us safe during the 2009 Swine Flu epidemic, to introduce the first ever lockdown of healthy New Zealanders.
It turns out, however, that severely curtailing individual rights and freedoms creates enormous economic and social injury, with mounting evidence now showing that lockdowns have caused more harm than good.
Normally politicians are scrambling over each other to get out on the front steps of Parliament to address protesters.
It's a political skill to be able to handle vocal critics, which the anti-mandate camp dwellers out on the front lawn of Parliament and beyond most certainly are.
But across the political spectrum they've decided those who have been singing and dancing out the front are a bunch of low lifes, white supremacists, Māori separatists and everything else in between. It seems they've come to that conclusion by looking at them and reading their placards from the safety of their offices because they most haven't been outside to find out.
One could be forgiven for assuming that would be a short article. It isn't. It's well worth a read, simply because it exposes the mentality of the man who holds one of the highest and most respected positions in our Parliament. Regrettably, while many respect the position of Speaker, few respect the man who holds the position.
