Inequalities harder to ignore

It didn’t come across as a debating point of order. A Sydney anti-lockdown protester sporting a shirt that read ‘‘Free Speech more important than your feelings’’ was photographed exercising his left arm rather more than his rights, in circumstances that have him facing charges of striking a police horse.

News that he was later bitten by the same horse generated sufficiently widespread satisfaction to indicate where public sentiment lies when it comes to simian-equine conflict. The image will achieve memorable fame, readily to be seen as indicative of the mentality of those protesting against lockdown and vaccination rules.

There was a great deal to dislike in the Sydney demonstration. It was a potential superspreader event that invited dismay and anger on those grounds alone, hazarding the health of protesters’ own families, communities and country.

Ours too, potentially. From a New Zealand perspective it was a thoroughly disheartening spectacle, inviting a mounting sense of pessimism about when we might be able to reopen the transTasman bubble.

But it would be unwise, probably unfair, to attribute this horrid spectacle solely to the petulance of the like-minded small-minded who are in need of nothing other than stern correction

Criminal behaviour must be penalised, misinformation confronted, thick-eared stupidity called out, and public safety protected as emphatically as possible. But behind the lamentable and unreasonable behaviour, and signs of stagnant old prejudices and selfishness, more astute commentators are detecting resentments founded on inequalities that aren’t so readily to be dismissed.

Like the claims of lockdowns being policed more severely in southwest Sydney. And the daily struggles of people trying to get by on severely reduced incomes. Such issues may explain more than they excuse, but the explanations are hardly irrelevant. The sources of some of this overspilling anger need honest attention.

Australia is hardly alone in such ructions. In France we’ve seen some 160,000 people protesting over an amalgam of grievances, including the extension of the government’s ‘‘health pass’’, already required for entry to museums, movies, and tourist sites, to include restaurants and bars.

We can dust off our cliched view of French culture to make light of such concerns, but alongside the likes of the Yellow Vest movement, which has been protesting against green taxes and seeking an increased minimum wage, far-right activists are potentially advancing their own agendas.

And of all the unedifying protests of recent days, a big anti-vax rally in London, while not illegal, also featured string-’em-up rhetoric reminiscent of the threats of those who stormed the US Capitol in January. One speaker menacingly referenced the hanging of doctors and nurses at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials. That is an appallingly unjust comparison. Seven were, indeed, executed – for participating in the Nazi programme to euthanise people with severe disabilities, or conducting horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

The struck-off nurse who issued the warning would no doubt say her right to free speech mattered more than anyone’s feelings. The fact remains that for UK medics, stressed, exhausted and fearful of the future, to have to trudge off for another long, corrosive working day with that impotent but rancid threat hitting the headlines was a shameful thing.

The sources of some of this overspilling anger need honest attention.