In the wake of the Anti-Mandate protests at Parliament—the rubbish, the vitriol, the delusions, the arson, the violence—contempt, disgust, and a retaliatory attitude towards those who participated pervades public opinion. I can’t count the recriminations, the innumerable characterisations of participants as “mad, bad and sad” or the area afterwards as filthy, befouled by the protesters.* It is unsurprising, though no less disheartening, that key members of the government of New Zealand, such as Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, are cynically floating the possibility of limiting all protests going forward. We must not allow the New Zealand state to capitalise upon this exception to obstruct meaningful and necessary action in the future!

A frequent refrain of those aghast (myself included) at the protracted spectacle on the grounds of Parliament has been “if only this was about something important.” Issues such as the exacerbating climate catastrophe, vaccine nationalism and corporate profiteering needlessly prolonging the pandemic, skyrocketing inequality, the unjust imprisonment (if not outright murder) of political and environment activists, obscene wars of aggression and the backsliding of representative democracy globally. And yet what compelled a segment of New Zealanders to occupy parliament seemingly had little to do with these existential issues of our time.

I hesitate to say that the protests had nothing to do with these issues. They were there beneath the surface, constituting a fount of alienation, anger and fear readily syphoned by key protest influencers (comprised of, to put it lightly, opportunistic charlatans) towards their self-interests, their particular movements. A fount of melancholia unsatisfactorily addressed by both protest influencers and the government, enabling unproductive, vindictive, and oxymoronic name calling to predominate public discourse.

And while there was a boot on the ground basis from which a more systemic critique could emerge—much like the 2018 Yellow Vest protests in France, that began in opposition to a gas tax hike and gradually transforming into a broader movement against the neoliberal reforms of French president Emmanuel Macron—it couldn’t move beyond a myopic and heterodox fixation on the New Zealand government’s response to the pandemic. The ideological concession required for the broader public to participate (potentially shifting the protest towards a systemic critique) was too high.

That’s not to say there isn’t some truth to the assertion that the vaccination mandate is onerous, indeed the World Health Organisation (hardly an ally of the anti-mandate movement) when addressing herd immunity draws a parallel between COVID-19 and the vaccination thresholds for polio (80%) and the measles (95%), observing that to “safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated.” Well, we’re there, at least regarding Aotearoa’s adult population, and it’s safe to assume we’ll also achieve the necessary level of paediatric vaccination as well.

So, if a sense of civic duty and/or self-preservation has proven to be enough to compel the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders, why mandate vaccination? It’s asinine to argue that since most of the public believe that everyone should be vaccinated, coercion towards this end is warranted. When the opposite is true: since the majority of the public believe vaccination is necessary, they went out and got vaccinated (three times in my case) thereby rendering the vaccine mandate redundant. Why needlessly impose something so divisive? Why feed into the conspiratorial mindset of a vocal, albeit heterogeneous, subset of New Zealanders?

Now, I understand the frustrations of the majority of New Zealanders who decry the irrationality and paranoia of the protesters. I understand the compulsion to blame, belittle and berate them for extending and exacerbating the pandemic. But, in succumbing to scapegoating we too fall prey to trivialities, misidentify the social forces responsible and, consequently, misdirect our aggression. Plainly, it’s not our unvaccinated that we should worry about, and vaccine hesitancy is obviously not the issue it’s made out to be. Increasingly transmissible and virulent variants will continue to emerge without global vaccination. And the reprehensible pace of global vaccination can be attributed to many of the existential, systemic crises mentioned earlier. Crises obfuscated by our insular COVID-19 myopia but felt nevertheless and, most importantly, worthy of protest. Worthy of the gnashing of teeth online or in person (since the Robertson stipulated that both are potential targets), of the shattering of glass and, if nothing beyond tokenistic half-measures continue to be done, I dare say worthy of an occupation of Parliament. The New Zealand government knows this, don’t cheer their efforts to cynically lay the groundwork for an immutable dystopian future.

*While Parliament and the surrounding area was covered in rubbish and, regarding the playground, the target of arson, it should be noted that “wash away the filth of the protest” enjoins a deeply dehumanising revulsion towards those who made the mess.

Additionally, the ceaseless rejoinder of anti-mandate supporters (decrying media representation of the protest as compromised due to its affixation with the actions of a violent few) is similarly detrimental to reconciliation: As it occludes consideration of the complexity of the media’s gaze. The media’s preoccupation with spectacles of violence and preference for simplistic, antagonistic, narratives, and the profoundly liminal/variable relation this preoccupation has regarding institutional ideological bias towards oppressive social, political, and economic norms (even if it is prejudiced towards a continuity of oppression most of the time it nevertheless airs some exceptions). Simply, there are cases of state violence exceptional enough to supersede institutionalised ideological bias but, the anti-mandate protests in New Zealand never rose to that exception (I am speaking of course in terms of scale and not discounting random acts of violence by some police towards some protesters or vice versa).

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