That moment when you realise you've picked the wrong protest

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Teddie Martin works at Shosha on Lambton Quay, where some staff have received abuse from protesters.

Andrew Gunn is a Christchurch-based film and television scriptwriter, and columnist.

OPINION: You have to wonder just when the penny might have dropped that you had picked the wrong protest to be part of. That moment when you looked around and thought ‘’Oh ….’’.

Maybe it was when Bishop Brian’s followers turned up. That’s always a good first rule of self-examination. Am I shoulder to shoulder with Destiny Church? Time for a cup of tea and a rethink.

A man wearing a tinfoil hat during the parliamentary protest in Wellington. Just one of the signs that maybe you’ve picked the wrong protest, says Andrew Gunn.

Maybe it was the influencers with (quelle coincidence!) a side-hustle in peddling natural remedies. Or the oh-so-concerned anti-vax mums with the oh-so-opaque funding, whose concern never quite extended to condemning the carnage which followed.

**READ MORE:

An apartment block in Kyiv hit by a Russian missile last week. That’s a real denial of freedom, writes Gunn.

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Andrew Gunn: “Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time I saw the current administration described as ‘communist’ I could afford my own Mao cap embroidered in actual gold.”

Maybe it was the screaming abuse at passers-by, schoolkids and inner-city workers wearing the traitor’s mask. Maybe it was the talk of nooses and Nuremberg.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Note to protesters: this is what a real totalitarian looks like.

Maybe it was when you looked around at the embedded journalists telling it like it is. Not the actual qualified professional journalists, obviously. They were to be executed. More like the narcissistic live-streamers with links to the American far-right, who blamed any bad behaviour in the crowd on government plants and Antifa.

‘’Antifa’’, incidentally, not really being a word that’s part of the political discourse here in New Zealand. More the kind of thing you’d hear on Fox News or worse. Strange when you think about it. If you thought about it.

Maybe you had the inkling of a doubt when the actual tinfoil hats went on, and the sickness spreading through the unvaccinated was blamed on the state’s radiation weapons.

Or maybe it was just when they set the children’s slide on fire.

This was an omnishambles from the start, a volatile mix of bad faith actors, opportunists and useful idiots. Loose units with a looser agenda, which in public anyway boiled down to a couple of whiny demands:

“We just wanted to be heard.” Heard? Let me tell you, I could hear you – too loud and too clear – for 22 days in a row, and I’m 400 kilometres away. Somehow I could even hear you over the sound of Russian missiles slamming into buildings, and Ukrainian kids crying as they left their dads behind on railway platforms. You have been heard. Ad nauseum.

And: “If only the prime minister came and talked to us.” Why? What was there to talk about?

This isn’t a complex and nuanced trade negotiation. Your wishlist was both simple and simple-minded. There was nothing to be gained from standing within spitting distance just to hear it being screamed again.

To be clear, consultation with trespassers calling for the Government to be hanged is not a recognised part of our law-making process. It does not go ‘’first reading, select committee, second reading, committee of the whole House, third reading, pop down to the front lawn to see if the angry man who calls the prime minister a ‘girl in a skirt’ has anything he’d like to change, royal assent’’.

And while we’re reclaiming some facts here, it is not a ‘’dictatorship’’ when the government does things you don’t like. There was an election in 2020, and there will be another next year, and your anti-vax party will shine just as dimly as it ever did. In between, the Government governs.

Neither is it ‘’communist’’. Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time I saw the current administration described as ‘‘communist’’ I could afford my own Mao cap embroidered in actual gold. Here’s a tip: if the means of production and distribution ain’t being nationalised, it ain’t communism.

Though for a taste of how actual communist regimes deal with protesters, do google ‘’Tiananmen Square massacre’’. You’ll find the authorities there resorted to something a little harder than sponge rubber bullets (sidebar thought: if the New Zealand police can send the protesters sponges, can they send some of them soap as well?).

And if that was you calling New Zealand a ‘‘totalitarian state’’ then, I really don’t know, try maybe reading an actual book. Perhaps a dictionary. Or, just for comparison, try standing in front of the presidential palace in Pyongyang and calling Kim Jong-un a witch and see how far that gets you.

Finally, a special shout-out to those who brought their children along for the wild ride. In years to come, they’ll ask you if you can remember what you were doing when the war in Europe kicked off. You can proudly tell them: ‘’Yes, I certainly can. I had important business at Parliament, giving you Covid and crapping where I felt like it, all in the name of freedom.’’

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to dip into the large wheelbarrow of cash that each of us in the mainstream media are given in exchange for our fealty to the communists in the Beehive.

Time to make a donation to the Red Cross Ukraine Humanitarian Crisis Appeal. There’s some people there actually doing it tough, for whom real freedom hangs by a thread. Not like this circus.

Correction: A previous version of this story said Brian Tamaki was at the Parliament protest. While members of Destiny Church were there, Tamaki himself did not attend. Amended 10:31am on March 5, 2022.