Mike Williams: Anti-vaxxer movement was the big loser in by-election

Mike Williams. Photo / NZME

OPINION: With fewer than one in three of the enrolled voters bothering to cast a vote, the outcome of last week’s Hamilton West by-election was almost meaningless.

I am unable to find any New Zealand parliamentary election at any time with a lower level of participation.

It was hardly a triumph for National’s candidate, Tama Potaka, who won an electorate which was held by National’s Tim Macindoe with a majority of 7731 votes in the last normal pre-Covid-19 election of 2017.

What can be said about the result is that both major parties have a lot of work to do. There is obviously no great enthusiasm for Christopher Luxon and National, and equally, there was only soggy support for the Labour Government, though voters would know that whatever the outcome, the Jacinda Ardern Labour Government was not at risk.

There was, however, one very big loser.

This was the anti-vaxxer movement which has a political party of sorts known as The New Zealand Outdoors and Freedom Party.

Amongst a range of nonsense this party promotes on its website are views that guzzling vitamin C wards off Covid-19, that masks and lockdowns don’t work, that the Pfizer vaccine doesn’t work, and it has “undisclosed risks”.

None of this hogwash has the slightest basis in truth as is demonstrated by the undisputable facts that New Zealand has very high levels of vaccination and one of the very lowest rates of fatality from the Covid-19 pandemic of anywhere in the world.

Our country’s death rate during the pandemic was below normal.

This party put up its co-leader, Donna Pokere-Phillips, as its candidate in the Hamilton West by-election.

Most will not have heard of Ms Pokere-Phillips, but many will be familiar with Sue Grey, who is the other co-leader of the NZ Outdoors and Freedom Party.

Throughout the lead-up to the by-election, Sue Grey, a Nelson-based lawyer, was acting for the parents who were denying their critically ill baby son the heart operation he so desperately needed in an attempt to force Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) to use only “unvaccinated” blood should a transfusion be required.

There has never been a better time for the anti-vaxxer movement to demonstrate its level of public support with every media channel covering this drama blow-by-blow as it was acted out in the High Court of Auckland and the street of that city.

Every day we heard the arguments of Ms Grey and another hard-core anti-vaxxer, the former television newsreader Liz Gunn.

Ms Gunn quit her job on TV1′s Breakfast Show on air in 2001, but in the interim has honed her self-promotion skills and she re-emerged in 2021 in a video opposing Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

Liz Gunn appears to have got herself appointed as an “advocate” for the couple resisting blood transfusions for their severely ill baby son from donors who had been vaccinated against Covid19.

One “advocate” for the parents, most likely Liz Gunn, stated that deaths were already occurring amongst infants having transfusions at the Starship Children’s Hospital.

Whoever invented and then floated this with anxious parents deserves scorn.

Infant blood transfusion was pioneered by the New Zealand medical establishment which has richly deserved international respect.

It was our own Professor Sir William Liley at National Women’s Hospital who in 1963 made history with the first ever successful intrauterine blood transfusion.

Such life-saving transfusions for unborn babies now occur around the world thanks to Sir William Liley’s genius and tenacity.

Amongst their wilder fantasies, Liz Gunn and Sue Grey believe that their beliefs are widely shared.

Gunn, in an interview on Infowars – an American far-right conspiracy theory website – greeted the news that Justice Gault had ruled in favour of Health New Zealand, with an announcement that “many, many Kiwis – thousands, I’d say, millions, are waking up in horror”.

If indeed “thousands and millions” of Kiwis were of the same opinion as Ms Gunn, then some had the opportunity in the Hamilton West by-election to express their support by voting for Donna Pokere-Phillips.

This, of course, didn’t materialise for the reason that only a vanishingly small (but vocal) minority have any truck with that preached by these anti-vaxxers.

In the by-election the New Zealand Outdoors and Freedom Party candidate won eight-tenths of 1 per cent (.8) of the vote.

* Mike Williams grew up in Hawke’s Bay and is a NZ Howard League director, and former Labour Party president.