Some 2,000 protesters assembled outside the New Zealand Parliament building in Wellington on Tuesday to protest their government’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, particularly its vaccine mandates.
The demonstration was energetic but less disruptive than a similar protest in February, which was modeled after Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” trucker uprising. The February demonstration involved blocking roads in Wellington and “occupying” Parliament grounds for several days, while Tuesday’s protesters said they would not camp on the grounds or interfere with legislative operations. The police nevertheless erected barriers to protect the Parliament building and deployed a heavy security presence.
“Our government, they’re not really working for us,” one of the demonstrators told Reuters.
The coronavirus and vaccine mandates were only one item on the protest agenda. There were also farmers demonstrating against crushing environmental regulations, and protests against a controversial government plan to confiscate regional water supplies.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during a press conference at the Beehive in Parliament on January 23, 2022 in Wellington, New Zealand. (Mark Mitchell-Pool/Getty Images)
The Associated Press (AP) dismissed some of the protesters as merely “lingering discontentment” about harsh vaccine mandates that have mostly been lifted. Some of the attendees denounced restrictions that remain in place, such as mask mandates for public venues.
Anti-Government “Freedom” protestors arrive at Parliament on August 23, 2022 in Wellington, New Zealand. (Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images)
“We’re not here to be controlled. We just want to live our lives freely. We want to work where we want to work, without discrimination,” protester Carmen Page told the AP.
Anti-government protesters gather outside New Zealand's parliament https://t.co/jSKo9Xkazt pic.twitter.com/gl1jvDQXKr
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 23, 2022
“We’re just here for the day, a peaceful day, just to get our message through to the public and the people of Wellington,” added Mania Hungahunga, a member of the group that organized the demonstration, the Freedom and Rights Coalition.
Socialist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose approval ratings have plummeted amid persistent coronavirus outbreaks, expressed her support for the free speech of the protesters but did not come out to address them. A much smaller group of counter-protesters turned up to express their support for the vaccine mandates and denounce members of the larger demonstrations as racists and homophobes.
Ardern’s coronavirus policy — once hailed as a shining example of effective pandemic authoritarianism, before fresh waves of infections began erupting across the country — included border shutdowns that were later ruled illegal in court, travel restrictions that stranded New Zealanders abroad, vaccine mandates that explicitly treated the unvaccinated as “second class citizens,” and bizarre politicized exemptions to draconian coronavirus restrictions.
“Rising prices for food, fuel and rent are making life increasingly difficult for many New Zealanders, and an explosion of gang violence has shocked suburbanites not used to worrying much about their safety,” the New York Times (NYT) noted in June.
A common theme in the rising discontent of New Zealanders, expressed by many of the Parliament protesters on Tuesday, is that Ardern’s authoritarian socialist policies simply do not work. The NYT observed that she gets rockstar treatment from leftists around the world, but many of her constituents back home are angry they paid a steep price in lost freedom and economic pain to fight Chinese coronavirus — and then they got infected anyway. The same is true of intractable problems from before the pandemic that Ardern promised to solve with maximum government power, such as high home prices, high poverty rates, and even carbon emissions.
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