Between a camp and a hard place

Ask anyone how the occupation of Parliament grounds might end, and no one knows the answer. Negotiation? But with whom? And what would be the trigger? If the Government starts negotiating with every group that takes over Parliament grounds, flouts the law, blocks the streets, makes violent threats, assaults media, and abuses passers-by, wouldn’t that set a terrible precedent? Lawlessness would seem to be the new order.

Wait them out? What would be the trigger point for the protesters leaving? Winter? Some might leave but a hardcore would almost certainly remain. The vaccine mandates? The Government says mandates have a limited shelf life, but it has also failed to spell out the threshold for abandoning them. So that is more likely to be months away than weeks. The protest has ground the Parliament end of town to a halt, terrifying residents, disrupting the courts, and forcing students off campus. Months more of that would be unacceptable.

But also it’s not clear that lifting vaccine mandates is the end game for all of those who are protesting, even if a majority claim to be there for that reason. And even if the Government did agree a timeline, the level of distrust in authority and the Government is such it’s not clear that the protesters would believe them.

When you see people you once believed to be perfectly rational suddenly announce on Facebook that the protest has been filled with Government plants to make them look bad, you know that there is no version of reality they will believe any more except their own.

So use of force then – wading in with batons. Except everyone would agree that option is unacceptable.

Back full circle to negotiation, then. The protesters have already been told what they need to do to get politicians to come down to Parliament’s forecourt and hear them out.

Those conditions include: Moving illegally parked vehicles, removing unauthorised structures and ending the intimidation of Wellingtonians. They are not, on the face of it, onerous conditions, yet so far there has been no sign that any of it will happen.

More than two weeks down the track, it seems some sort of leadership is emerging within the camp. Certainly, they have managed to establish a functional society of some sort, with first-aid tents and creches. But the same energies have not so far been applied to meeting any of the conditions for dialogue.

It will eventually end, however, even if the process is not yet clear.

And in its wake there will almost certainly be a raft of inquiries into whether police were too slow to act, whether Speaker Trevor Mallard’s attempts to drive the protesters off with bad music and sprinklers merely backfired, and also whether Parliament’s security is too lax. The answer to all those questions is probably.

But the Government should also look to itself and question whether a lack of clarity around the end of mandates was the catalyst. The events playing out at Parliament suggest too many of those people whose lives were upturned by the mandates have been unable to see a way back.

It will eventually end, however, even if the process is not yet clear.