One year on, a small group gathers to remember the Parliament occupation

Protestors converged on Parliament to celebrate one year since the occupation began. Photo / Thomas Coughlan

A year on from the Parliament occupation, a small group of people converged on lawn outside Parliament to mark the anniversary.

Tempers were still hot, though not as hot as a year ago. Many wore the apparel of the Voices for Freedom Group, which opposes vaccination and policies to broaden vaccination coverage.

The protesters, numbering less than a hundred (far fewer than a year ago), still cling stridently to their beliefs, including a fear of vaccination and a view that the New Zealand Government is part of a malevolent world government.

Fiona Buchet said she was with the occupation on its first day and wanted to come back to commemorate the anniversary.

She said the occupation was mainly peaceful at its inception, although she acknowledged that at times the temperature changed to something more violent.

Buchet believed this was a result of “people with political things to say” who infiltrated the occupation. She conceded that at times the number of alleged infiltrators made up a large proportion of the total occupiers.

“There were some unkind things said about the political class and the media of course,” she said.

Despite this, she said, the protest deserved commemoration. She said the group had decided to mark the beginning of the protest rather than the end, which was more violent.

“We had protestors and police standing and staring at each other for six hours … it was a very emotional day and an important and significant day and we wanted to commemorate that rather than what happened at the end, because by that stage, we had all sorts of other elements,” Buchet said.

She said the protest was never infiltrated by “fascist” or “misogynistic” white men, despite photographic evidence from the time showing at least some people in the occupation bearing signs with a fascist or misogynist leaning.

“It would be dishonest to say that ugly things didn’t happen - but ugly things happened on all sides.”

Buchet said the public and the media tended to focus on the “ugliness” of some of the protesters rather than the occasionally heavy-handed tactics of the police and Parliament, which included turning the Parliament sprinklers on and blasting the protest with music - tactics that have not been used on other protests that MPs were more likely to agree with (although these protests never attempted to occupy Parliament grounds).

She said things had calmed down in the past year.

“On the Covid pandemic front things have settled down - there are no longer daily updates of people who have died with Covid … so the general public are not being constantly reminded of it,” Buchet said.

Another protester, who described himself only as Tūhoe Te Urewera, was still angry one year on and believed scores of people had died because of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

He said 12 members of his family had died from the vaccine in just two weeks.

This is at odds with Medsafe’s reporting, which has recorded two deaths as a result of myocarditis after the first dose of the vaccine, with one death likely to be due to the vaccine and a further death where a link could not be excluded.

Those figures followed nearly 12 million doses of the vaccine being administered in New Zealand.

The end of the occupation was violent. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Tūhoe Te Urewera believed there was a link between the historic oppression of Māori and the now-lifted Government vaccine mandates (health and disability sector employers may still require their staff to be vaccinated).

“They’re trying to bully us into doing things we don’t want to do. We’re losing our sovereignty-ism [sic],” he said.

“God gave us sovereignty-ism [sic]. It’s been going on for years,” he said.

Francis Kuo, who spoke at the picnic, compared the Covid response to the repression of Communist China, where she was born.

She acknowledged the protest had at times been violent.

“There are always people who will take advantage of this. There are some very small groups,” Kuo said.

“We joined them - that doesn’t mean we are part of them.”

She said bodily autonomy was a “basic human right” that she believed had been compromised by the vaccine mandates.

One year on from the protest, Kuo feels vindicated by events, which she said have shown the vaccine to have been unsafe despite the record showing almost no deaths from the vaccine and vanishingly few harmful side effects.

When asked whether tempers had cooled one year on, Kuo said she did not feel “angry”.

“I feel very sad.”

Kuo said she was continuing to argue with people about the vaccine. In some cases, this had caused a rift with friends.

“Two weeks ago, I had an argument with my friend’s husband,” Kuo said.

“We didn’t want to talk about it, but my friend asked questions so I said something and he got angry. He called me a conspiracy theorist spreading conspiracies,” she said.

Kuo said she did not feel shut out of society, but was growing tired of friends encouraging her to get vaccinated.

“I wouldn’t say they shut me out. They want to convince me to take [the vaccine]. But I can’t take it - I don’t want to,” Kuo said.

She said she has stopped talking to these friends, but this did not bother her too much.

“We make some new friends - similar, like-minded friends,” she said.