I spend the afternoon in Wellington yesterday after playing golf in Upper Hutt in the morning. I wanted to see what’s was going on for myself and to assess various media and political claims about the nature and intentions of the mob currently surrounding Parliament. I felt able to do so freely because as a private citizen I don’t represent anybody but myself.

I’ve tweeted about it quite a bit but I think it would be helpful to give a more detailed account of it all in a medium that lends itself to more careful expression.

There are some important caveats to all this

I was there for several hours on a Saturday afternoon. I explored the whole protest area and I talked to dozens of people. But the precise mix of people and prevailing attitudes I encountered very much relate to a very narrow window in time. That’s important because a number of observations I made were very much at odds with much of what was said in the media, but that doesn’t mean that what had been said earlier was wrong.

Nor are my observations guaranteed to be true for all time.

There is no convincing the protestors

The protestors are absolutely convinced about three things:

• That that the stakes are very high and that the future of the country and its people are at stake; and;
• The media is not to be trusted and wants to make them look bad; and
• That they are absolutely correct in these things and there can be no doubting of their assessment.

This is always a dangerous combination. Political rhetoric increasingly lends itself to a sense of constant crisis and emergency as if this is the last chance to halt the downfall of our way of life. It very much puts me in mind of the anti-TPP movement which justified extreme rhetoric on the basis that if the trade deal was signed then democracy would be lost forever.

I was masked throughout and informed people that I was triple vaxxed. When they asked if I was media I gave them the complicated answer of not really but sometimes I do a bit of work in the media. I also told them I was not a supporter of this government and was a National voter. Some people told me I was still welcome and others bristled. But nearly all of them thought I was either a bit of a fool or a dupe for these things.

The protestors will not disperse just because they have been engaged with. If Jacinda Ardern were to call the leaders up to a meeting on the 9th floor and to listen to their demands in good faith then that would not be sufficient for the protestors to call it a day. They want the government to bend to its will and for the PM to resign.

Accordingly, it makes little sense for the government to engage with the protestors. It would be like negotiating with a brick wall. The matter is going to have to be resolved in a different manner.

It could really get out of hand

There probably was a window of time where firm police action could have nipped it in the bud. Those conditions no longer prevail. There simply are not enough cops to disperse the crowd in an orderly fashion that does not result in a riot. It’s just not the numbers of protestors, which is quite a bit less than the Foreshore and Seabed hikoi which I attended in 2005, but the very sprawling nature of the encampments also has to be taken into account.

It would be too large of a “front” for the police to move against in any kind of orderly way.

There is another factor to consider. Media reporting has often given the impression that most of the protestors are crusty pakeha farmer types. This is a false impression and members of the press continuing to rely on the trope are spreading misinformation. The two dominant strands of protestors were as follows:

• Old school green activists opposed to anything unnatural; and
• Members of Māori communities distrustful of the state pressuring them to take a shot they don’t trust.

This was far and away the most glaring difference between the protests as the Wellington-based media presents it and the immediately noticeable reality. And it’s not all that surprising when we consider the concerns voiced early on about the difficulties that the New Zealand state would have in persuading members of ethnic communities who have historically been abused by the state to trust the state. The people who voiced those concerns were very prescient and I wish we had paid them more heed because the government has failed here and the occupation is (partly) a result of that failure.

But consequently, police moving in with clubs would not be cracking the heads of farmers and other people that the media regard as villains. They would be swinging at the heads of members of marginalised communities, often draped in the United Chiefs flag, and validating all the misgivings about the state those people had. It’s a real no-win situation for the cops.

It will probably fizzle away in time

There is a rudimentary organisation in place but this is a very decentralised crowd. While the media has sometimes portrayed the mob as a motley assortment of people with an incoherent messages they are in fact quite coherent in their unified opposition to mandates (and vaccinations generally, albeit to a lesser extent).

They take a lot of energy from the people who defied the rain and the childish antics of Trevor Mallard before reinforcements could arrive. These people who “held the line” are celebrated as heroes of the movement. I think that reinforces how short-sighted the antagonistic but weak and often juvenile tactics of the speaker proved to be.

Yet nearly everybody I talked to confirmed that they could not stay there indefinitely. They are not being paid a living wage to protest, are separated from their families and not likely to force the government to change tack anytime soon. There were a lot of children present who are, of course, missing school. There was talk of people rotating back and forth but not enough organisation or leadership for that to really be viable - at least not now.

All of which means that, it really does seem like the crowd will diminish over time if not provoked further. Tiredness and frustration will set in and there’s only such much anger can be sustained when it is not producing results. At a certain point, the crowd will become more manageable. It may then be that a whiff of grapeshot can disperse those who remain or the police can impose a restoration of law and order in some other way.

Wellingtonians are right to complain

Nearly all the protestors are from out of town. Those Wellingtonians in the central city are quite frustrated by it all and it’s not hard to see why. I talked to one small business owner, a food stall owner, whose business was going down the tubes because his staff didn’t want to come to work and endure abuse for mask wearing. His stall was constantly being vandalised and he was just sick of it.

I talked to the lady who gave me my bus ticket and the bus driver. Neither of them seemed that happy about things but stressed that they were just going to do their job without engaging with the protestors. I was impressed with their professionalism.

A demonstration that includes a march and a rally is disruptive for a day. An ongoing occupation in defiance of the law creates an atmosphere of chaos in which business cannot succeed. You really had to feel for this guy whose hard work was being undone through no fault of his own. Beyond any public health risks, there is a real cost to this low-level anarchy.

We can’t assume there is a conspiracy to keep it going

I keep hearing about how this whole thing is almost certainly being funded by shadowy forces. It is certainly true that somebody has paid for a whole lot of food, water and infrastructure like portaloos. However, there wasn’t the kind of slick organisation that points to some kind of professional conspiracy like the one so many progressives on Twitter assume to be true.

Is it all from crowdfunding? It seems kind of doubtful. However, it also just may be that one or two reactionary benefactors have splashed out a few hundred thousand dollars out of general sympathy. There are people in New Zealand who could and would be willing to do that and it is a far simpler explanation than an international conspiracy.

Overall thoughts

As I caught the bus back to Petone station I had to decide, with some reluctance, that I need to be a little bit less trusting of mainstream media when it comes to things like this. If this was ever about dog-whistling to white supremacists or local Nazis, it certainly wasn’t the case by yesterday. And yet it seems like a lot of reporters and commentators have been too invested in wanting this to be true to acknowledge that it really isn’t.

People insisting that there is some kind of preponderance of alt-rightists at the occupation remind me of Stalinists attributing all dissent in the Soviet Union to the pervasive evil of Trotsky and his followers. It’s a convenient way to dismiss what’s going on without having to reflect on their own support for lawless protest in the past. And I am disappointed that so many people in the media that I like and admire have shied away from confronting this.

At the same time, I do not resile from my view that the protest crossed the line a long time ago. We held an open and fair election not two years ago. Jacinda Ardern won a strong mandate to govern the country in her best judgment for three years. And while it is one thing to demand her resignation through protest action, it is quite another to flaunt the law in the expectation she bend to a mob. That’s not how our system works.

This is not the first occupation our country has endured. However, it is still a bad precedent. It doesn’t take a lot of people to gum up the centre of a city and should the protestors be seen to prevail in any way then the template will be set for the next group of people who are able to motivate a few thousand people to take a stand. And that’s not a good recipe for the preservation of our liberal democracy.