Steven Joyce: Protest much bigger than the protesters

Opinion

OPINION:

There is a danger the inhabitants of the parliamentary precinct have spent the week missing the wood for the trees. In focusing on the protesters directly in front of them, they seem oblivious to a much bigger mood shift that's going on around the country.

What if what they are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg?

I'm not for a moment suggesting New Zealand has become a nation of anti-vaxxers or people who are against the vaccine mandate. I'm confident most Kiwis don't share the extreme views or support the threats issued by some of these current protesters.

There is, however, a large and growing group of New Zealanders who have had their lives severely disrupted by the Government's actions "for the greater good", who are sick of having their plight ignored.

And there is a big bunch more who have had a gutsful of the ever-changing rules and restrictions in the face of what they see as a very mild strain of Covid-19. It is these larger groups the Government should be most worried about.

The evidence of discontent and disagreement is growing all around us. The political polls are one data point, the drop-off in Covid QR scanning is another.

I've lost count of the people who have quietly told me they are no longer scanning on entry for fear of being told to self-isolate for a week or more for what they see as a risk of a mild dose of the flu. Most are double- or triple-vaccinated. Sure, they hold their phone up to the QR code, but ...

A third piece of evidence is the suggestion from a Horizon Poll that 30 per cent of New Zealanders have sympathy for the protesters camped on Parliament's lawn. I've always been cynical about Horizon's methodology but even if it's 25 per cent, that would surprise many people.

I am not surprised. The Covid response has created many losers. We've rightly talked a lot about the people caught on the wrong side of the border. But they are not the only ones.

Anyone who owns or works in a hospitality business or a small retail shop is another.

People working in tourism or international education have been in a world of woe.

Young people have had their education disrupted and their sporting dreams curtailed.

There are people living in pain because their elective surgery or cancer treatment has been postponed to the never-never. They have all been stopped from doing things which were previously part of normal life. Covid has whipped the rug out from under them.

It is perhaps not surprising when so many have had their lives turned upside down through no fault of their own, that a few will turn to conspiracy theories and the like.

When you are stopped from doing the career you love for fear of a medical procedure, how to make sense of it all?

The Government certainly didn't create the pandemic, but some of their actions have made it much worse than it needed to be. The vaccination delays, the inexplicable obstinacy against new forms of testing, the failure to increase hospital capacity, the layers upon layers of levels, traffic lights and stages which make people's heads spin.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Far beyond the anti-vaxxers, there's a growing anger at Government's Covid strategy, says Steven Joyce. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The Cabinet's excessive caution in moving back down lockdown levels has also been an issue. People only have so much tolerance for having their lives micro-managed and it appears the Government has used up that tolerance.

Then there are all the other tone-deaf announcements that heap insult on injury. What planet would you have to be on to think that whacking small businesses with a 6 per cent minimum wage increase and a new social insurance tax, plus the spectre of centralised wage negotiations, were good ideas now?

Why would you think that announcing a $15 billion light rail project for a privileged few in Auckland makes any sense when you are racking up debt all over the place that the next generation is going to be lumbered with? And at the same time as there is a real question mark over the future of commuting as we knew it?

And why would you be consulting on tighter immigration, visitor and student controls when your biggest problem after some pretty shoddy treatment amid two years of closed borders will be persuading enough people to come here?

The Government's dogmatic determination to continue with a policy programme made instantly out of date by the pandemic indicates the same lack of flexible thinking apparent in their Covid response. They expect everyone else to adjust and cope but they intend to sail on, determined to do things they thought of six or seven years ago irrespective of current circumstances.

And their blind loyalty to the Ministry of Health and its Director-General is a sight to behold. Dr Bloomfield has been politically dissembling at best about his organisation's confiscation of RAT test orders. In any other Government he would have been carpeted and there would be talk of resignation.

Things are likely to get worse. Next week the Reserve Bank brings out its latest Monetary Policy Statement, and whether it goes for a quarter or half per cent rise in interest rates, the direction of travel is clear. That means pain for recent house buyers and asset purchasers, who were only doing what they were encouraged to do when the bank and the Government were overcooking the Covid stimulus.

The country's mood is darkening, and in dismissing the protesters and their motivations, the Prime Minister and her MPs are giving the appearance that they are dismissing all the concerns people are raising, or even just quietly thinking about.

I can't tell the Government how to get the protesters to go home, although firing Trevor Mallard would probably help. I suspect in the meantime the numbers will only grow.

Ministers need to lift their sights and focus on the wider discontent among the public outside Wellington and outside the Bowen triangle.

If ministers showed a willingness to genuinely listen, adjust their policy response, and convince Kiwis they both care about and will mitigate the disruption in people's lives, then they can right the ship. At that point the protest will also probably peter out. If they don't, then a few hundred assorted protesters and conspiracy theorists camped on the lawn at Parliament will be the least of their problems.

- Steven Joyce is a former National MP and Minister of Finance.