The euphoria from yesterday’s hikoi may be transitory, but is no less valuable for that. It is pretty rare for the left to feel itself to be in the overwhelming majority, and speaking as the voice of the people. Lest that momentum be lost, the organisers will no doubt be mobilising the contacts they made yesterday, to carry the ongoing fight against this Bill to all parts of the country. (In business speak, the hikoi was a great networking opportunity.)
The subsequent nit-picking among the Bill’s fellow travellers was a good indication of just how rattled they were by the massive turnout. Teachers can be grinches, so it probably was appropriate that Education Minister Erica Stanford did her best to treat yesterday’s gigantic march on Parliament as merely some untoward rumpus at the back of the classroom. Amusingly, Stanford thought the hikoi had lacked an essential educational component:
Stanford said if schools were holding an “education-outside the classroom” activity, they needed to ensure it had a literacy and numeracy dimension.
Too right. On that point, some of her Cabinet colleagues clearly could do with some remedial tuition on their own “numeracy dimensions.” New Zealand First’s second- ranked MP Shane Jones counted heads on RNZ:
….It looked to him like “a hell of a lot more than 35,000 if you want my honest views”, and it was a generational moment.
Even the contrarian, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters thought it was all one big waste of time. All by himself, Peters had apparently been at the side of the road with a calculator as the march went by:
Peters…said he had seen far bigger protests, such as the Springbok Tour. He cast doubt on police’s attendance figures of 35,000, saying he put it closer to 22,000 maximum.
Not both of them can be right. “I prefer to believe Shane Jones” is not a phrase that many of us get to utter often, yet so be it. (The official count is 42,000 but it was like counting sand on the seashore. All we know for sure is that it was BIG.) Heading into even deeper grinch territory, Stanford also voiced her disapproval of the number of children participating in the hikoi:
“We need our kids in class in front of our amazing teachers,” she said. “Children need to be in class every opportunity they have so we can raise achievement rates.”
Hmm. So where was Erica Stanford’s voice of disapproval when the America’s Cup squad went on a nationwide tour earlier this year,“visiting 39 schools, yacht clubs, and Toyota vehicle dealerships along the way.”
That’s 39 schools where kids were being denied “every opportunity” to work on their achievement rates. Instead, they and their parents were taking selfies, getting their pictures taken with the Cup and signing the Emirates Team New Zealand supporters’ sail to wish them good luck. If only Emirates had sponsored the hikoi, maybe Stanford would have had fewer problems with it.
In reality of course, Stanford is smart enough to know that the hikoi was, among other things, a giant-sized civics lesson held in the nation’s streets, and taught by some truly amazing teachers.
National beats a retreat
Already, Parliament has gone back to business as usual. No doubt, David Seymour will be looking forward to six more months of the priceless publicity platform gifted to him by the National Party. The eventual voting down of the Bill will be an anti-climax. By then, Seymour will have banked massive amounts of public attention, and won a ton of gratitude from the kind of reactionaries who think Māori have had it too good for too long.
Yesterday, Seymour was claiming that the hikoi was “not representative” of public opinion. Hmm. How on earth would he know? Like Richard Nixon, Seymour is claiming to be able to hear what the Silent Majority are not saying. National, of course, was the big loser yesterday, and not simply because Christopher Luxon spent the whole afternoon cowering beneath the parliamentary parapet, afraid to show his face to the crowds below.
Luxon is supposed to be the designated driver of this coalition. All year though, it has been the ACT Party – drunk with power – that has been sending the government clown car careening all over the highway, while Luxon grins and puts on his “I’m in charge” face.
All I would say to National supporters is that the hikoi has been the culmination of a year of National getting carted along as the accomplice of an ACT Party that – lest we forget – won only 8.6% of the vote at the 2023 election. If anyone is not representative of New Zealand public opinion, it is David Seymour. What are National’s centrists – the mainstream conservatives who used to be the party’s voice – making of the sight of their beloved party being hollowed out by a bunch of far right extremists who enjoy minimal levels of public support?
Change Politics
Will the hikoi change anything? Yesterday is maybe best seen as the start of the battle, not as the end of the war. It is easy to be pessimistic about the point of mass demonstrations. The research, such as it is, says that mass demonstrations are most effective at bringing about change if they are peaceful, large, and take place in “a favourable socio-political context.” with that last point being a classic case of circular reasoning.
Sceptics would say that the huge worldwide demonstrations held in 2003 against the then-imminent Iraq invasion were all of the above, and yet obviously, they failed to stop the Americans from proceeding with an invasion that has been even more disastrous than the protesters had predicted. Peaceful mass protests against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon have also had no effect, either on Israel or on its US sponsors.
Some would also query the “peaceful” requirement. The North American protests against fracking succeeded – initially at least – because they deliberately immobilised the fracking machinery. The initial Black Lives Matter protests and the initial Arab Spring protests also succeeded to the extent they were willing to fight against the oppressors.
In all of those cases, note the word “initial.” Tyranny will never simply throw up its hands, admit its mistakes and change course of its own volition. History would suggest that successful revolutions are rarely peaceful.
Obviously, the value of a mass event like yesterday’s hikoi rally cannot be measured simply by its external effects on, say, the shape of official policy. Instead, the prime value seems to be internal, in re-assuring and inspiring people that other people – tens of thousands of them – think and feel roughly the same way about the state of things. (Those in power spend a lot of time and money to convince ordinary people that they are isolated, and impotent.)
The regular weekly protests held against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon – and against New Zealand joining AUKUS – serve much the same internal morale-boosting purpose, even if the course of events seems entirely pre-determined. Plus, as mentioned, such gatherings forge contacts useful for galvanising further action.
No doubt, mass demonstrations have lost some of their previous political force. Here and elsewhere, politicians have learned not to worry unduly about the people on the streets, unless and until the polls indicate that the people at home are starting to think along the same lines. In that respect, at least mass demonstrations make the alternative POV visible on the nation’s TV screens.
Still, it is easy to be pessimistic. That pessimism may even be realistic. For that reason, there’s one historical example to the contrary that may be worth keeping in mind. It dates back to a protest demonstration held in Wellington in 1967 during the Vietnam war era. At the time, then US Defence Minister Clark Clifford and Pentagon general Maxwell Taylor were touring the region, trying to drum up regional support for the American anti-communist crusade in Vietnam.
Clifford later wrote in his memoirs that the Wellington demonstration had made him realise…that if Vietnam’s democratic neighbours in the Asia Pacific were not all that worried about the region falling under communist control, what was America doing expending so much blood and treasure in this unwelcome/unappreciated cause?
Probably everyone who’d been at the Wellington demonstration outside Clifford’s hotel had gone home that night feeling their efforts had been in vain. Yet outcomes, and people, are unpredictable. One lives in hope because the alternative is even more depressing.
Song for the day
In relation to the hikoi, this may seen a bit on the nose, but it’s a great song, regardless: