There are moments when the ordinary configuration of reality shudders and slips. Structures taken for granted; the familiar features of our everyday landscape can disappear in an instant. The spire of Christchurch Cathedral. The peace of Europe. The re-election hopes of Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government.
“If your National Party is tired, lacking energy, don’t despair – just add Luxon!” That is the joke doing the rounds as the smart money on the 2023 general election shifts decisively from the government to the opposition. It’s been a long time coming but, just like the sudden transformation of Vladimir Putin – from the shrewd, chess-playing Russian president into Ivan-the-Terriblemeets-Dr Strangelove – the change, when it comes, is swift and shocking.
This political slide began with the Labour government’s sudden abandonment of its hugely successful covid-19 elimination strategy. In its place, the Prime Minister rolled out a new, constantly changing plan which a great many New Zealanders, even now, have real trouble understanding. Confusion replaced certainty and confidence was replaced by fear.
Perhaps the shift was inevitable, perhaps not. But if elimination had to be ditched, then the government should, at the very least, have had a new, improved and just-as-easily-understood strategy fully developed to take its place. A strategy that retained its predecessor’s key symbolic focus on the team of five million and which continued to make full use of the empathy and formidable communication skills of the team captain.
Fatal flaw
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that the government’s new strategy for protecting the population from covid-19 – ie, mass vaccination incentivised by the introduction of vaccine mandates and passes – possessed a fatal flaw. It did not sufficiently take into account the presence in New Zealand society of a bloody-minded community of anti-vaccination activists. The government blithely assumed these anti-vaxxers, estimated at 5% to 10% of the population, posed no serious threat to its plans.
As subsequent events have proved, that assumption was incorrect.
The same strange psychological architecture that so easily accommodates the notion that vaccines are harmful contains plenty of additional space for other, equally bizarre fears and fetishes. Spaces that, in the age of social media and the dark web, are easily filled with all kinds of harmful disinformation, made available to the mentally fragile by all manner of sinister suppliers.
In these all-too-vulnerable minds, ideas that ordinary citizens dismiss out of hand take root and grow into dangerous certainties.
The anti-vaccination community may not be particularly large as a percentage of the population but it is more than enough to cause the New Zealand state considerable grief.
And that is exactly what it has done.
Volatile and aggressive
The unlawful occupation of Parliament grounds by a crowd fluctuating in number between 500 and 1,500 who purport to be protesting against the continuation of vaccine mandates and vaccination passes, but which also contains adherents of a host of outlandish political and medical conspiracy theories, as well as a hard core of violent extremists, has resisted all attempts by the police, Parliament’s Speaker, the Wellington City Council and mana whenua to move them on.
Were the occupiers the jobless vaccine refuseniks – resourceful anarchists and superannuated hippies, their defenders claim – the protest, while unlawful, might be tolerable. The truth of the matter, however, is that the protesters are a volatile and all-too-often aggressive collection of marginalised New Zealanders who have fallen out of love with both their fellow citizens and the government they elected, and mean to harm them both.
The rest of New Zealand observed this protest with mounting frustration. How is it possible, they want to know, that a group of people can park their cars in the streets of the capital for weeks on end without them being towed? How can they harass and assault adults and children passing by their encampment without being arrested? Why have they been permitted to erect structures on Parliament grounds in defiance of the Speaker’s orders? And, most importantly, why have they been permitted to hurl objects at and scuffle with police officers without being hauled off to jail?
‘Do something’
Most New Zealanders have an idea about ‘the government’ that invests it with irresistible power. If something untoward is happening in Godzone, then ‘the government’ is supposed to ‘do something about it’.
Kiwis are convinced that their elected representatives have at their disposal the police, the army and the courts (in roughly that order) to whom they can issue instructions and to which these key defenders of the state are obliged to respond promptly and effectively.
Ours is a majoritarian nation with scant regard for the rights of minorities and where the whole concept of the separation of powers strikes all but the historically and legally educated as absurd.
The Kiwi’s constitutional catechism is nothing if not succinct: Parliament is in charge; what it says goes. Most New Zealanders struggle with the notion that the Prime Minister cannot tell the Commissioner of Police what to do and find it even harder to believe he is legally entitled to ignore her instructions.
It matters little that commissioner Andrew Coster is firmly of the view that a forceful evacuation of Parliament grounds is likely to trigger significant violence, not only in the capital but also right across the country. His continuing failure to ‘do something’ about the protest (now entering its fourth week) is making New Zealanders very angry.
Many of them are beginning to ask themselves whether or not they are a bunch of mugs: dutifully obeying the laws of the land, paying their taxes, rates (and parking fines) while a malodorous collection of weirdos camped on Parliament grounds are daily offering proof that the police are a bunch of gutless wonders and the rule of law not much more than a useful political fiction.
Democracy is supposed to be about electing representatives of the people to govern the country. They get to do it because the rest of us are too busy just trying to get on with our lives. The police are supposed to enforce the law and keep the peace so ordinary citizens are not obliged to do it themselves. The army is supposed to protect the nation from its enemies – foreign and domestic. The courts are supposed to put bad bastards in jail – and keep them there.
Now, that’s not the way the constitutional purists would put it but that is the way most of the New Zealanders who vote would put it.
They look at Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues and they see a government that hasn’t achieved much at all, except keeping us safe from covid but which now struggles to do even that.
As the number of Omicron infections soars, they no longer hear their Prime Minister talk about the team of five million but about how everybody is now on their own. They know they should follow the rules but cannot help thinking that if the state is unwilling to clear its own Parliament’s grounds of unlawful protesters, then why should they bother?
While this witches’ brew of anger and disillusionment swirls and bubbles, all Christopher Luxon has to do to become New Zealand’s next Prime Minister is sit very still and not be Jacinda Ardern.
Providing, of course, Vladimir Putin lets him.
Chris Trotter is a political commentator and writer of more than 30 years’ experience. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog.
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