Parliament protest: The siege might be over, but the propaganda war is just beginning

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Anti-Covid mandate protesters were cleared from Parliament grounds in Wellington by NZ police. (Video first published on March 2, 2022)

Two hours after the children’s playground at Parliament was set on fire, a young boy, aged around five, stood at a Wellington intersection. He wore a pair of Batman pyjamas, sometimes kicking his slippered feet against a lamppost and sometimes looking across the road, where protesters shouted profanities at a line-up of helmeted police holding riot shields.

“What are you going to tell your kids tonight?” someone yells at the cops, who stand impassively against the abuse they’ve now been subject to for days. “Who are you protecting?” another shouts. The smoke from the fires lit by protesters earlier when police launched a major operation to remove them from Parliament’s lawn, where some had been camping for more than three weeks, has mostly dissipated. An acrid burnt smell lingers in the cold air, mixed with weed.

Police clash with protesters as they remove tents and camping equipment from the occupation site on Wednesday.

Protesters affected by pepper spray used milk to ease the sting.

* Protesters disperse after major police operation ends Parliament occupation

* The follies of Camp Covid mask a serious challenge to the state

* Parliament occupation leaders blame 'plants' for escalating violence

Police patrolled and operated cordon lines around Parliament hours after they cleared the grounds in a confrontational engagement with protesters.

“Oh, look how cute that dog is!” Victoria University student Caitlin says, walking with her friend Jacinta past Victoria University’s Law School campus, where police are piling up tents and locking the gates. They can hardly believe it. “It’s absolutely crazy. It’s a little bit funny because they’re kind of brain-dead. I kind of understood the anti-mandate, but this is not a peaceful protest.”Just before, a male protester had yelled at them to go and masturbate. “He said ‘That’s all you’re good for,’ and told us ‘We are what’s wrong with Wellington’,” Jacinta said. “I’m just like, a bit dumbfounded.”

Other Wellingtonians like Emily, who watched the clashes from a Lambton Quay rooftop, said they would be happy to walk the streets around Parliament without fear again. “I’m very glad they are getting rid of the protesters, I’m relieved. I haven’t felt safe in the city,” she says.

The protest and occupation at Parliament will lead to changes in security.

As commuters walk past, the protesters are making a last stand at the intersection of Bunny and Featherston streets. One rips his shirt off, striding towards police and throwing a hard object that clunks against a shield. Another man stashes an iron bar in the side of a van. About 100 people on the intersection of Featherston and Bunny Street are standing or sitting around the concrete bollards placed by police days ago to stop other cars joining the occupation, facing police, taking turns at taunting them. “Shame on you! Shame on you!” a chant breaks out at one point, but it’s mostly random insults, and nonsensical or homophobic slurs.

About the same number of people are walking around, most armed with a smartphone or camera, recording each other and the police, interviewing each other, doing Facebook Live streams or posting to TikTok. Riverlets of milk, used by protesters as homemade first-aid when police used pepper spray to disperse hundreds of them earlier, run into the gutters.

A group identify a Stuff videographer and I, and start verbally abusing us. “Ah, there’s the mainstream media. Is this what you wanted?,” a woman yells. A moment later another woman comes over, shouting in my face. “Are you guys the media? Why don’t you report the truth!” she says. After that, for the first time in 15 years of reporting, I slide my notebook into a jacket pocket.

Around the corner on Whitmore St, a woman is one of a few stragglers looking down an empty street towards a police barricade. “It’s just shocking,” says Kate, who says she’s from Kāpiti. What does she mean? “I’m listening to everyone who said it was peaceful and calm and the police trapped the fox in the corner, and the fox bit back, didn’t it. They’re tired, they’re grumpy, they’ve lost their jobs, they’re losing their homes because they can’t pay rent, what more do they have to lose?” She says she isn’t anti-vax, but anti-mandate.

It’s now 7.30pm at the end of a day that has seen police take back Parliament grounds, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern condemn the protest as an attack on New Zealand’s values fuelled by mis- and dis-information, 87 arrests and injuries among police and protesters, and Speaker Trevor Mallard reiterating his promise to build a fence.

The vibe, extolled throughout as one of “peace and love,” by attendees, is now that of a giant house party that’s gone horribly wrong and been broken up, with a bunch of people high on adrenaline and anger and unsure of where to go.

Just up from McDonalds, a woman stands with her two young children. “Mummy, why is the police officer on top of the building?” the young boy asks, of the police officers now visible on Parliament’s roof.

Is she a protester? “No, I just came to pick up my husband from work and thought we’d come have a look,” she says. The Wellington Railway Station has been closed, for public safety. There’s renewed yelling and bangs as police begin retreating back down Bunny Street, spraying rubber bullets at the crowd that tries to advance. “You should leave,” I tell her. Moments later, another line of police that’s been quietly amassing further down Featherston Street surges forward, pushing the remaining protesters back towards the railway station. “They’re gonna trap us!” one man shouts, storming past another man quietly holding a single rose and a sign pronouncing “Stop all Mandates.”

As I walk home, I check social media. The disinformation propaganda machine and its peddlers are hard at work, lying and fabricating, distorting the pure hard facts of this historic moment. The confusion, fear, and anger palpable on the faces of those left on Wellington’s streets is already being twisted and used by those who stand to gain the most from an anti-vaccination, or anti-democracy, or alt-right agenda. They variously claim that fires were deliberately lit by police and that “Antifa activists” were planted in the crowd.

This fight for our nation’s physical Parliament, along with the fight for people’s lives from Covid-19, is only the beginning. The misinformation pandemic is full steam ahead, and it’s fought in words, pictures, minds, and little hearts you can press on your smartphone. What’s the vaccination for that?

What version of this story are people going to be telling their kids, tonight?

Me? I got home, and I hugged my kids, tight. I couldn’t sleep, though.