When will protest and mandate end?

There is a saying from the Chinese Book of Songs, which dates back more than 2000 years to the Zhou kingdom, the mandate of heaven is not forever. It alludes to the transitory nature of power. Leaders come; leaders go. Even tyrants, it just takes a little longer for the mandate to be wrested away from them.

That proverb came to mind because of a different sort of mandate, the vaccine one, and a small minority of unvaccinated Kiwis who feel they have been stripped of freedoms, and want politicians to listen to their demands. It was more leaderless resistance than anything else but the protest has grown and is well dug in.

They may be a collection of sincere, misguided, mad and bad people, although now attracting wider support among the vaccinated, but it is a fair question: when will mandates end?

Given the need to rapidly increase vaccination rates vaccine mandates made sense. Knowing one was coming incentivised more people to get jabbedand contributed to New Zealand’s globally high vaccination rate.

And in that narrow sense, the mandates have served their purpose. The small minority who can’t or won’t get vaccinated is now set.

Omicron’s effects are different among the vaccinated and unvaccinated, to be sure, but, again, we have comparatively few unvaccinated, and they are or are about to suffer the consequences of their choice. Most will escape serious consequences. Some won’t.

Future public health benefits from continuing mandates must be waning. Yet the democratic injury of sustaining two classes of citizenship, three if you embrace all Kiwis overseas who have failed to pass through the MIQ funnel, persists.

Which is why I have mixed feelings about the protest in Wellington. The protesters are not easy to sympathise with, nor is the way they’ve gone about expressing their demands.

Some have behaved appallingly. It is distressing to see parliament’s grounds and lawns wrecked, statues abused, along with parliamentary staffers, MPs and journalists.

There is a dark side to the protest, to be sure, just as there is a stupid side. And the protest is definitely causing an oversize ripple at the wrong time for the government. Police look impotent as the protesters settle in. After early hiccups, the protesters’ supply chains are functioning better than for many of the departments whose work they are disrupting on Molesworth St.

One can accept the vaccine mandates as a temporary measure, given the nature of the public health crisis, but it should give pause that they continue without the same force of logic they once held.

One would like to think our government leaders wake up every day wanting to end them, as they are a historical aberration and a democratic injury, however justified it is in the short-term.

For those suffering that injury, those Kiwis excluded from the choices we vaccinated have, the longer it persists the less they will feel they have to lose. Then the more isolated they’ll become. What then?

I can’t understand why a rational person would choose not to get vaccinated. But there you go. It is what it is.

The questions I have are these. Given the incentive value of mandates has gone and given Omicron has lifted off, what’s the ongoing health benefit that outweighs ending the injury of reduced freedoms for the unvaccinated? Second, how long will their punishment persist?

The prime minister, when asked about when the mandates will end, said, ‘‘when they’re not needed?’’ This is unsatisfactory because based on what is happening in Europe, once the Omicron peak passes the logic for keeping mandates starts to dissolve rather rapidly.

It is difficult to understand why the prime minister can’t at least explain the conditions that are needed before mandates can be ended. I think people could all do with a bit of hope.

To explain better would be an exercise of public leadership. The PM was so good at this after March 15 and after the plague first struck, but in this instance is using stereotypes and scapegoats, providing limited information about the mandate’s future, and her rhetoric towards the protesters is dogmatic. The opposite of kind, however much it’s not reciprocated.

Whatever the government does with the mandate, and when, a close election scenario is beginning to look in play, and it will be voters, not heaven, who decides what to do with the Labour electoral mandate.

It is difficult to understand why the PM can’t explain the conditions needed before mandates can be ended. I think people could all do with a bit of hope.