A woman and child at the protest at Parliament, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
ANALYSIS:
Dismissive arrogance towards the protesters at Parliament is making the situation worse.
That's not just Parliament's high-handed approach. Opinion pieces and public sentiment that mock and sneer at people's sincerely held beliefs serves to isolate those in our community who reckon the Government has got it wrong.
Those who do believe this are greater in number than vaccination figures would suggest. The corrosive impact of disinformation and misinformation has worked its way into wider society so even those who are vaccinated have been infected with a suspicion something - whatever it might be - is going on.
The public health approach couldn't be clearer. The Ministry of Health has consistently pushed out messaging explaining what needs to be done and why. As it has done so, dubious and simply false information contradicting that public health approach has permeated social media feeds.
That false online information is, largely, where today's protest has come from. Information seeded - often maliciously - that flowed across social media onto the phone and computer screens of an anxious population. It has been found there were offshore actors who were key factors in creating and disseminating dis/misinformation.
Those long periods of lockdown saw many of us searching for answers and information online. For some of us, for whatever reason, the consumption of that information began a pathway of self-radicalisation.
This is a term people have been accustomed attaching to religious extremism. Self- (or online) radicalisation was an effective tool for Islamic State. But it was also effective for the Christchurch shooter, and is key to the rise of the Incel (involuntary celibate) movement. It is the capture of those who became radical in outlook without the influence of an external group.
It's not suggesting those who are self-radicalised are inclined to violent action. Most adherents to religious, political and social views who have self-radicalised have never acted beyond consuming content online.
Here and abroad, Facebook was inept at controlling the spread of false information. Other platforms have been equally hopeless. For those against whom action was taken, it reinforced the feeling among those moved to believe the unbelievable that some invisible hand was pushing them away from "the truth".
The actions of Government and media, too, had this effect. In the case of both, neither could responsibly provide a platform to views that were contrary to public health advice. In the case of media, journalists across the world independently challenged and checked the positions of academic, government, medical and scientific communities.
Doing so found, largely, the greatest weight of evidence lay in a response to the virus that recognised its potentially fatal impact, and flow-on effects on economies, health and logistics across private and public sectors.
Some politicians here, and their backers, have long urged supporters not to believe the media. Some in the media have covered politics as if it were a bloodsport. Both have lost standing as a result. And that was before Donald Trump's all-out assault on the truth and anyone who would speak it.
These are just some of the chisels placed in cracks in our civil society. And then the pandemic came along, bringing anxiety, fear and uncertainty and smashed them like a sledgehammer. It caused industries to collapse, businesses and jobs to go, people's dreams and hopes to disappear. Across our society, there is tension and, among many, the vacuum of despair.
That's the hole dis/misinformation filled. That's how it became possible for some people to self-radicalise and how it led to the protest at Parliament.
Two years ago, those who argued against the public health approach were a curiosity. A year ago, they were considered fringe. Today, they are camped on Parliament's lawn with the support - according to a poll across a small sample - of 30 per cent of the public.
That's not to say that 30 per cent of people believe there is no pandemic. Or that they believe there's a global conspiracy to remove people's rights, or that the vaccine is causing deaths then hidden from the public, or any of the myriad of claims made by the most dogmatic protest voice.
But there are increasing numbers of people who do believe some of it, in part because the seeds for doing so were planted years ago, or believe abandoning the public health approach will have better outcomes than staying the course.
With such absolute surety on both sides, arguing over who is right and who is wrong is pointless. Rational argument and discussion has little place here. Those who have committed to their respective positions will not shift.
To dismiss those people - as the Prime Minister does by citing our 95 per cent vaccination rate - is wrong. To mock those people, as some in Parliament have done, is worse. Isolation is a classic part of the radicalisation process. The further and harder you push people away, the more fixed they become.
Opinions like those published in the Herald saying protesters were no longer part of New Zealand used isolating words that would have hardened the views of those protesters who read it. We are the ones who stayed, they would have thought, and it is you who have left.
For every person that did make the journey, there are many others who wished they were there. They are people who stayed home and expected when they came out it would be over, who got their jabs and then thought that would be it, who had children stuck overseas, who knew someone who couldn't go to their mother's funeral, who lost their house when they lost their job.
Across our country, there are decent, well-intentioned Kiwis who have packed the car, readied the campervan, bought plane tickets and travelled to Wellington.
They arrived as a formless mass, unclear as to what they wanted other than a general rallying cry to "end the mandates", a move that will come but most definitely will not under threat of protest and Omicron.
There are others there too. They are the people who hung nooses, who threaten journalists and politicians with death, who seethe with anger and rage and have found in this protest a potential outlet.
And there are those with decades of experience in motivating or organising anti-social actions, whether it be racist or political. Their experience threatens to open up channels some of the protest crowd will spill down. That is how the self-radicalised become recruited into a darker and potentially more dangerous mission. That must not happen.
The way out of the protest is not through the protest but with the protest. Rather than dismiss the protesters, recognise that the views they hold are genuine and hard-earned. Recognise they dedicated considerable thought to their views and adopted a stance that is honest and principled.
Having done so, recognise too that it is the one thing on which we disagree that is making it difficult to see what we like about each other. Finding a circuit-breaker to do that is hard but necessary.
Ultimately, most of those on Parliament's forecourt want the same thing as those inside Parliament's walls - for New Zealand to be a free and open democracy in which we are able to live our lives in the best way possible, subject to the freedoms enjoyed by each other.
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