Occupiers give Government a filthy PR boost as Labour and National agree on vaccine mandate strategy – Stuff.co.nz

ANALYSIS: As the anti-mandate crowd continued to mill around Parliament, leaving the national flag strewn on the forecourt, some scumbags threw human waste at the police who had earlier erected barricades limiting the spread of the protest-turned-occupation.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was inside the Beehive, chairing cabinet, before giving a timeline for the expected peak of Omicron and the relaxing of restrictions something the occupiers all claimed to want.

As with any protest, there are a mixture of passionate, basically ordinary people, there for a good time, and the extreme, deluded or unhinged. And the latter elements have given a PR gift to the Government. After spending two weeks trying to prove that they werent extremists or collection of ferals (to use the words of Speaker Trevor Mallard), some of them literally threw human waste at the cops.

Back in the Beehive Theatrette, there was a reprieve from the ever-present slightly manic and expectant energy outside. The Government expects that the peak of Omicron based on the other countries will be in the next three to six weeks, and after coming off the peak, restrictions including vaccine certificates, mandates and gathering limits will be eased.

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A police officer looks on at the Parliament occupation where many protesters have discarded their New Zealand flags at the picket line.

READ MORE:* National calls for a phasing out of vaccine requirements, as protests continue* Covid-19 NZ: Jacinda Ardern says mandates will wind down after Omicron peak* When will the Parliament protest, and mandates, end?

The real question that protesters want to know is when. The prime minister wouldn't answer that on the basis that it is still unclear how long it will be until case numbers really come down.

Ardern waited until well into her press conference on Monday to really hit upon the key point that this whole exercise the vaccine mandates, vaccine certificates, contact tracing has really all been to prepare New Zealand for this point.

In answering a question about whether Omicron was more serious than the flu, the prime minister pointed out that the problem is not the population-wide severity, it is people getting it all at once.

I think the issue is that Covid is in a pandemic state ... so that's where the real issue lies, making sure that you're able to properly manage that, because if you're overwhelmed, people who otherwise might be able to be cared for properly through treatment miss out on that because of the pressure in the system, she said.

ROBERT KITCHIN/Stuff

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson hold a post-cabinet press conference in the Beehive at Parliament.

Going back to the start of 2020 when Covid-19 first arrived in New Zealand, this was always the crux of the policy problem. How do you slow the spread so that hospitals aren't overwhelmed? Elimination stopped New Zealand from having to confront that problem for nearly two years.

About half an hour before the press conference, National Party leader Christopher Luxon gave his own speech in which he called for almost exactly the same thing the prime minister announced.

As with the Prime Minister, he declined to put an exact timeframe on when this should happen, but that it should be done progressively.

Abigail Dougherty/Stuff

National leader Chris Luxon tried to emphasis a division within New Zealand during his speech on Monday.

It was part of a speech trying to point to New Zealand as divided and sheeting that division home to Labour but over various issues.

Renters versus landlords. Business owners versus workers. Farmers versus cities. Kiwis at home versus those stuck abroad. The vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, Luxon said.

In essence, Luxon was trying to use the occupation as a way of mounting a broader critique. The problem is that on the issue du jour the protests he holds virtually the same public view that the Prime Minister does.

That is, National is a pro-vaccination Party, it also doesn't believe in engaging with lawbreaking protesters and thinks vaccine mandates should be scrapped after the Omicron peak.

The fact remains that a very healthy majority of the country opposes the protests, and in a political sense, polling is pretty much business-as-usual, with Labour ahead right now. There isnt much that points to a deeper and broader division beyond the usual left-right divide.

Up to, now it's all gone the protesters way: growth in numbers, some sympathy for the cause and building a little community. Now that the barricades have started to be erected, and the reality of maintaining the occupations momentum and numbers will set in.

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Occupiers give Government a filthy PR boost as Labour and National agree on vaccine mandate strategy - Stuff.co.nz