Mandates, lockdowns, rising anger: The revolt against Jacinda Ardern

Thursday, 3 April 2025

With Covid restrictions dragging on, Aucklanders began to revolt and vaccine mandates saw Parliament’s lawn become the site of an occupation and feral riot. On top of that, Jacinda Ardern’s ministers were pushing through a mountain of controversial reforms. It saw her popularity begin to plunge.

In this five-part series, senior journalist Lloyd Burr looks back at this fascinating, turbulent, and tumultuous time in New Zealand politics and investigates the dramatic rise of Ardern, her fall and how the country fell out of love with her. This is part four.

Jacinda Ardern stood at the window of her office on the Beehive’s ninth floor, transfixed in disbelief at what was happening on Parliament’s lawn.

There were plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky from tents set ablaze as a final act of defiance by occupiers who’d camped in the area for the previous 22 days.

A line of riot police snaked its way around the perimeter of a group who were throwing anything they could at the advancing officers: chairs, umbrellas, fire extinguishers, tent poles, signs, and eventually bricks they’d dig up from Parliament’s driveway.

The remnants of nooses with her name on them were splayed on the pavement, as well as effigies of her being stabbed with syringes.

It was March 2, 2022. Anti-vaccine sentiment was at a fever pitch. People were suffering from Covid fatigue. Big reform was in the air. The economy was starting to slow. In less than a year, Ardern would no longer be Prime Minster.

Auckland lockdown drags on

A few months before the protest, lockdown fatigue was rampant in New Zealand’s biggest city. While the rest of the country lived with relatively few restrictions, Aucklanders had been living with them for months. Patience was being tested, relationships were becoming strained, and businesses were on the brink of collapse.

On numerous Covid committees was chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association Brett O’Riley. He says the way the Government handled the Auckland lockdown “was a mixture of horror and humour”.

“The Prime Minister listened to what I had to say and her response was to get us involved with the officials. But there always seemed to be a gap between the discussions had with people in the Beehive and actually what was happening on the ground and how it was being managed.”

He says the MIQ lottery, Auckland’s border checks, the slow vaccine rollout, nonsensical rules, and the perceived lack of engagement from Wellington “all accumulated to create an enormous sense of frustration”.

Then-Health Minister Andrew Little says he noticed the mood in Auckland changing at this time with the restrictions being seen more and more as “draconian”.

“Auckand had a lot more lockdowns,” he says. “Leading up to that, there were the constraints on movement in and out of Auckland and I think people felt hemmed in by that.

“They were constraints on people's freedom. We weren't used to that. We'd never seen anything like that.”

Political reporter Jenna Lynch agrees. “Auckland stayed locked down for three months. The biggest city. And people just didn't feel like she had a plan to get out,” she says.

“We didn't seem to have the vaccines as early as the rest of the world. They had a plan to get us out of lockdown by using the vaccines, but that basically meant mandates and that divided a lot of families, a lot of friend groups, and a lot of the country.”

Vaccine mandates

Arguably one of the most controversial moves by Ardern’s government was making vaccinations mandatory for those working at the border, prisons, the health and disability sector, education sector, and non-citizens coming in from overseas.

Many private businesses also implemented similar policies whereby only those fully vaccinated could return to the office. There were restrictions on events which further isolated unvaccinated people.

Phase One of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid, released at the end of 2024, says the mandates had - and continue to have - an impact on social cohesion.

“Contentious public health measures like vaccine mandates wore away at what had initially been a united wall of public support for the pandemic response [and] along with the rising tide of misinformation and disinformation, this created social fissures that have not entirely been repaired,” it says.

Lynch also remembers social cohesion beginning to fray: “For the minority of the population that really didn't want to get vaccinated, it cut really, really, really deep. People were having weddings and you were allowed 100 people if you were all vaccinated, but only like 10 if not.

“And people couldn't go to work at the place they wanted to work any more,” she says.

Numerous anti-vaccination and anti-vaccine mandate advocacy groups were up and running by this time - one of which was Voices for Freedom. It had been getting correspondence from thousands of people mandated out of a job. During Stuff’s interview with co-founders Alia Bland and Claire Deeks, they produced a pile of emails they’d received from members about Ardern.

“Probably about half of them said that they had voted for her not just once, but a lot of them twice,” says Bland. “They went along with the kindness and empathy that she was portraying. People were under her spell and they trusted her.”

It wasn’t just jobs that people lost because they didn’t want to get the vaccine, but family members too. Many families became splintered due to the polarising debate over the Covid vaccine.

“They, to this day, still don't have relationships with their family members,” says Bland. “There was a grandmother that really struck me. She has three children and at least five grandchildren.

“She wrote ‘But I don't know how many more I have now because my family has disowned me’. All of them. Because of the mandate, because of her position on Covid and not wanting to take the vaccine,” says Bland.

Little says it was frustrating trying to get the Health Ministry to act with compassion when it came to vaccine exemptions.

“I remember dealing with a family who was referred to me by their MP. I just thought it was completely ridiculous that they couldn't get an exemption. I wrote to Ashley Bloomfield and said ‘I don't understand this, what's the story here? I'm going to specifically request that they be given an exemption’.

“And they still didn't get it. People saw - in addition to everything else that was going on and restrictions of freedom - some of the aspects of the way we approached the pandemic, we lacked the compassion that we could have exhibited.”

While the Royal Commission was critical in parts, it’s worth pointing out it concluded the government’s measures - including closing the border, locking areas down, and the vaccination drive - “ undoubtedly saved lives”, although the total number of lives is hard to calculate.

“Vaccination is estimated to have saved more than 6,500 lives and prevented more than 45,000 hospitalisations,” it states.

Growing frustrations from businesses

With the vaccine rollout seen as the key to unlocking the lockdown, businesses were keen to see it ramp up. However, O’Riley says it was frustrating because there was never a vaccination target early on.

“I said to the Prime Minister ‘So what's the size of the prize here? Because if you want to incentivise people to undertake a particular behaviour, what do they get for it? Is it that once we get to an 80% vaccination rate, you're going to open the borders?’

“You've got to have something to compel people, and not everyone likes to be vaccinated as we discovered,” O’Riley says. He was referred to other ministers and to the Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield. “Everyone just fluffed around it. No one answered the question”.

The eventual answer came - temporarily - by the end of October 2021. The country would move to a new traffic light system once the country had reached 90% vaccination. But Ardern’s government rescinded this a month later which exacerbated the frustrations of many of those in Auckland because - apart from Counties-Manuaku and Waitemata DHBs - the region had surpassed that 90% target.

Vaccine passes and an app were rolled out, and a new traffic light system came in December. Auckland though, was placed in ‘red’ - the most restricted. Rapid antigen testing (RAT) was seen as a way to get things restarted.

“I'll never get over the RAT test fiasco,” says O’Riley, whose EMA members had ordered 25 million of them and they were sitting in storage in Australia. It was impossible to get them approved for use by the Ministry of Health which “had no sense of urgency”.

“Then the Ministry of Health grabbed all the RAT tests, including RAT tests that we'd ordered for our members and took them on.” He says that behaviour really impacted business confidence in the Government.

He says the proposed restrictions for crossing the Auckland border heading into Christmas 2021 was also a fiasco, with initial talks of vaccine checkpoints eventually scrapped.

Little knew business confidence was turning. “In 2021, the number of business people who said ‘Thank God you did what you did’ were by 2022 saying ‘We've had enough, we've just had enough’”.

On reflection, he says the Labour government may have overcooked the economic response: “We did a lot of stuff to prime the economy to get the stimulus going. And I think it was overdone. I think the economy bounced back more quickly than we had expected.

“That then fuelled inflation and that then became its own problem. We weren't alone in that plenty of other countries and economies had the same experience, but it was getting that balance right,” Little says.

Occupation, agitation, and eviction

Parliament’s forecourt has seen its fair share of shenanigans. But the events in February 2022 that started as a protest, quickly morphed into a 23-day occupation, and ended in a violent riot, were completely unprecedented.

Thousands of people set up camp on the lawn and surrounding streets, brought together by either disdain of the Government, vaccine safety concerns, opposition to vaccine mandates, or annoyance at continued lockdowns.

It became so entrenched, they installed a kitchen and even a shower and toilet block. Some of Parliament's gardens had been planted with vegetables, and someone even brought a trampoline for the many kids to play on.

“Some of them had nothing left,” says Bland. “They had nowhere to live. We had a pilot sleeping in a hammock in the trees from Air New Zealand. These people had been absolutely destroyed.

“They'd had their employment taken away from them, their homes taken away from them, their family, their friends. They couldn't go into a cafe, they couldn't get their haircut,” she says.

Lynch was working at Parliament at the time and says the protest was awful, scary, and intimidating.

“When they first turned up, there were nooses hung on the trees. It was abusive and people were saying that their school kids were being abused on the way to school for wearing a mask. The business owners around Parliament were fed up with it. None of the politicians wanted to go out and address it,” she says.

Voices for Freedom says the nooses and gallows weren’t theirs. “You're gonna get a few silly people amongst that,” says Bland. “But the vast majority of people, even Mongrel Mob members, were in there behaving themselves.”

Early attempts to move them on included Speaker Trevor Mallard installing a sound system on the roof and bombarding them with Barry Manilow music all night. He also turned the sprinklers on. It not only didn’t work, it encouraged them.

Also adding to the occupation’s staying power was the lack of dialogue from MPs. All the parties in Parliament had agreed not to meet with the group, nor talk to them.

The Royal Commission Phase One report says the occupation was “perhaps the most visible expression of the pandemic’s impact on social cohesion and trust”. “The Chief Human Rights Commissioner viewed the decision by senior ministers and officials not to engage directly with the protestors as detrimental,” the report says.

Andrew Campbell was the Prime Minister’s chief press secretary at the time and says Ardern was pretty disappointed by the protest. “She had such bravery in the face of that opposition, because the easiest thing to do would have been to compromise, but you can't compromise with the virus.

“I've worked in politics a long time. I've opposed governments. I've marched on the streets,” he says. “But I feel in that one there was a level of vitriol that we hadn't really seen in protests in New Zealand before.”

Day after day, the protest grew. And day after day, frustrations grew too. Police eventually intervened and it predictably turned feral. The entire eviction was livestreamed from Parliament’s balcony by members of the press gallery and also by the protesters themselves to their numerous channels.

Afterwards, Ardern held a press conference, where she told reporters she was “angry and deeply saddened”. Talking about the behaviour of rioters, she said she would “never, ever excuse it”.

“It was an attack on our frontline police. It was an attack on our Parliament. It was an attack on our values. And it was wrong. We will not be defined by this,” she said.

“We have all, at times, felt angry during this occupation. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, have 400 people hospitalised, and 20,000 people becoming sick in just one day.

“One day, it will be our job to try and understand how a group of people could succumb to such wild and dangerous mis- and dis-information,” Ardern said.

By then, her press conferences had been part of people’s lives for nearly two years. But the communication skills that were her secret weapon had started becoming her achilles heal.

Overexposure

Those near-daily updates from Ardern and other officials were hard to escape. They interrupted scheduled programming on television and radio. They were livestreamed on news websites, social media pages, and dominated headlines in newspapers.

Political commentator Grant Duncan says while Ardern’s communication skills were great, Kiwis soon became overexposed to her and felt like they couldn’t escape her.

“It was both the making and the breaking of her leadership,” he says. “It switched really from positivity to increasing negativity.”

“Once public opinion started to change and switch or when people started to get tired or annoyed or angry about what was going on, the attitude was focused on her personality,” Duncan says.

Victoria University politics Associate Professor Lara Greaves says the barrage of press conferences and messages from Ardern gave her an unavoidable association with Covid.

“It became an Ardern = Covid,” she says. “People have been exposed to you and their lives haven't gotten better materially. People just get sick of you.”

Overexposure wasn’t her only problem, so was under-delivering.

Reform fatigue and failing to deliver

Ardern was elected on a swathe of promises to address climate change, slash child poverty, and fix the housing crisis. Her government had an enormous policy agenda and because of Covid, much of this was pushed to 2022 to get through.

There were Three Waters, the merger of TVNZ and RNZ, Fair Pay Agreements, the RMA overhaul, and a proposed universal income insurance.

Little was busy reforming the health sector and he remembers looking at the pipeline of Cabinet work thinking it was hefty.

“There was a lot going on. She was concerned about how much was going on.” He says Three Waters bogged the Government down and it struggled to manage brewing discontent over co-governance.

Lynch says there was always going to be a bit of a “spiral down” because they'd been in power for five years and hadn’t delivered some of their promises.

“The Labour Party had made a bunch of promises to New Zealand that just never happened, like 100,000 houses, light rail in Auckland, they were trying to do a lot of things and none of it was really coming off and it was all a bit fumbled.

“The failure to deliver was quite apparent.” Lynch says.

Labour was also failing to deliver in the polls too, which were sliding by the end of 2022. The economy was in decline, Parliament was drowning in unpopular reforms, and Kiwis were hungry for normality. Ardern was exhausted, and after a summer break, was about to drop a bombshell.

On Friday, in the fifth and final part, senior journalist Lloyd Burr covers Ardern’s shock resignation and the enduring hate towards her. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the Auckland region had long-surpassed the 90% target before the Government changed its policy on Nov 22. In reality, the Counties Manukau and Waitemata DHBs hadn’t achieved 90% and while the other Auckland’s DHBs had surpassed the target, they hadn’t “long surpassed” it. That has been clarified. “Tax reform” has also been removed from the reform section because a wealth tax had been taken off the table at this stage.