A textbook example of third-term arrogance

Halley’s Comet visits more often than I agree with Sue Bradford, but she’s right to object to the indecent haste with which the TPPA is being pushed through Parliament.

Given the controversy over the trade agreement and the lack of public disclosure when it was being negotiated, I thought the limited time allowed for people to make submissions was bad enough.

After all, this is a document that runs to 6000 pages and was seven years in the making. Even if you accept arguments about the need for secrecy while it was under negotiation, people deserved time to digest its complex contents once the wraps were off. That they were expected to prepare their submissions even while the government’s explanatory road show was still touring the country just didn’t seem fair.

Now National has abbreviated the process further by giving Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade select committee only five days – reduced from one month – in which to produce a report from the hundreds of submissions made. The National-dominated committee will be writing its report even as submissions are still being heard.

Appearances are important, and this just looks completely wrong. It makes a mockery of due process and will only confirm, in the minds of opponents, that the TPPA doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny.

More to the point, it will have the effect of making people who are neutral on the issue – and there are plenty of them – begin to suspect that the government really is being dodgy and evasive.

On Morning Report this morning, Steve Hoadley of Auckland University, while criticising the haste, suggested people’s minds were probably pretty well made up already over the TPPA. I disagree. I think a lot of New Zealanders remain undecided on the benefits of the agreement and were counting on open and honest parliamentary scrutiny and debate before coming to any firm conclusion. They are entitled to expect that much.

If National wanted to give the impression it really wasn’t interested in giving the public a proper say on the TPPA, it couldn’t have done a better job. It seems to be saying, “We’ll push this through because we can. We have the numbers. Nyah nyah nyah.” This is the type of third-term arrogance that gets governments tipped out of office.

'Did anyone get that on camera?' Yes they did, and we could all see who was at fault

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 1.)

Protesters, eh? I’ve been one myself, so I’m not entirely hostile to the idea of marching in the street and waving banners. But sometimes protesters push their luck.

Consider what happened last week in Wanganui, where a car driven by National MP Chester Borrows allegedly drove over the foot of a woman protesting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

The car, in which cabinet minister Paula Bennett was a passenger, was leaving a breakfast business meeting. Video footage showed several protesters blocking its exit.

While it’s true that Borrows appeared to make no attempt to stop, his car was moving so slowly that the placard-wavers had plenty of time to get out of the way. It looked to me as if they were either intent on provoking some sort of confrontation, or at the very least trying to force him to stop. 

Who’s at fault here? Certainly Borrows could have pulled up. The protesters could then have surrounded the car and harangued him and his VIP passenger at close range.

But equally, the protesters had time to move and chose not to. If one of them was hurt as a result, then the injury was surely self-inflicted.

I noticed too that the moment the car came into contact with the protest group, a woman called out: “Did anyone get that on camera?” It was almost as if they were willing it to happen so they could then accuse Borrows of being a callous Tory thug.

Well, someone did get it on camera, and most people who saw it on the TV news would have had no difficulty deciding who was in the wrong.

There’s a classic clash of rights here: the right to protest versus the right of people to go about their lawful business unobstructed (or to use the classic phrase, “without let or hindrance”).

Freedom of movement, like freedom of speech, is a fundamental part of our rights. No one has the right to impede it just to make a political point, no matter how righteous they feel about their cause.

Borrows was exercising his right and the protesters were trying to deprive him of it. The case rests.

The situation would have been different had the MP provocatively accelerated into the protest group, but Borrows is no hothead. He was barely driving at walking speed.

Now here’s the point. We live in one of the world’s freest and most open societies. People are entitled to shout and wave placards.

Protesters are indulged to the extent that authorities routinely allow them to conduct street marches that inconvenience other people.  In much of the world this would be unthinkable.

But protesters too often interpret this tolerance as a general licence to disrupt, which is where they get it wrong. Generally speaking, the right to protest ends at the point where it obstructs the rights of others.

When protesters become so pumped up with self-righteousness that they believe they’re entitled – indeed, have a moral duty – to interfere with the rights of others, public sympathy for their cause rapidly evaporates.

We’ve seen a lot of this lately. The day before the Wanganui incident, Greenpeace protesters blocked all the entrances to the SkyCity convention centre, where a petroleum industry conference was underway. People were unable to get in or out.

Police took a lenient line, as they almost invariably do, removing some protesters but apparently making no arrests. 

They were similarly indulgent with the anti-TPPA Waitangi Day protester who hit cabinet minister Steven Joyce with a flying dildo and inexplicably escaped prosecution for assault. Perhaps the police were too busy processing dangerous spinsters who’d been intercepted at checkpoints for having half a glass of sherry too many.

Then there were the protesters dressed as clowns who invaded a public meeting held in Auckland to explain the free trade agreement.

Never were protesters more appropriately disguised. They were far more clownish than they realised, noisily disrupting an event that was held to do exactly what the anti-TPPA camp had been demanding: namely, to reveal more about details of the agreement.

Plainly, these buffoons weren’t remotely interested in information or disclosure. They were getting off on the adrenalin buzz of protesting.

But the gold standard of protester arrogance remains the actions of the three men who sabotaged the Waihopai electronic listening post in 2008, causing damage that taxpayers had to pay for. The official estimate was $1.2 million.

The sanctimonious saboteurs claimed to have Jesus Christ’s backing, although how they could be so sure of that was never explained.

 

The arrogance of the self-righteous

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, February 10.)

A letter in Wellington’s Dominion Post last week said that if you wanted a good reason to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, you only needed to look at the people supporting it.

Funny, here was me thinking exactly the opposite. You could turn that statement around 180 degrees and be right on the nail.

The protest rallies that coincided with the signing of the TPPA in Auckland brought out a ragtag, bad-tempered mob eager to seize any excuse to legitimise their anger at the world at large.

And they didn’t stop at merely protesting. With all the customary arrogance of the self-righteous, they decided their cause entitled them to disrupt other people’s lives by blocking streets and paralysing traffic.

A few marchers signalled their criminal intent by concealing themselves behind masks. It’s easy to be bold when you’re anonymous.

Some hothead went so far as to firebomb a cabinet minister’s electorate office. When idealism morphs into acts of violence, protesters relinquish any right to be heard.

It’s sometimes argued that it takes extreme action to be noticed, but I don’t buy it. This is where I parted company with many of my fellow demonstrators during the 1981 Springbok tour. The right to protest stops when it interferes with the rights of other citizens.

The TPPA also gave fresh oxygen to Waitangi Day activists, who justified their latest ritual display of rage on the novel premise that as Maori (however that word might be defined), they were entitled to special consultation.  

At Waitangi, Steven Joyce was hit in the face with a rubber sex toy. That the thrower, Josie Butler, escaped prosecution (as did those who mischievously blocked Auckland intersections the previous day) left the police looking lame and ineffectual.  

“No charges laid woohoo!” Butler tweeted triumphantly. No doubt she will have become an overnight hero of the Left, who are too absorbed in their own sanctimonious bubble to realise that offensive protest gestures ultimately boost support for the National government and play into the hands of the law-and-order lobby.   

If it wasn’t the TPPA, the protesters would doubtless have found some other issue to feel inflamed about. But the multi-country trade agreement has become a lightning rod for a great deal of unfocused rage about a whole lot of things – a one-size-fits-all cause for the chronically disaffected.

It has served as a convenient rallying point for everyone nursing a grudge about the government, John Key, globalisation, the Treaty, capitalism, inequality; in short, every real or imagined assault on the downtrodden and disadvantaged.

Much of the rage has been informed by emotion rather than facts. A lot of the participants in the protests were young and apparently unencumbered by knowledge.

That’s the prerogative of youth, I suppose. It’s a time of life when idealism hasn’t yet been tempered by real-life experience.

I still haven’t entirely made up my mind about the TTPA. The secrecy surrounding the negotiations was bound to arouse suspicion, but that’s the nature of trade deals.

It certainly didn’t help that the government chose Sky City – a symbol of global capitalism in its most vulgar form – as the venue for the signing. How clumsily provocative was that?

But we’ll be in a better position to judge the agreement once it’s tabled and debated in Parliament. In the meantime, we need to remember that no country is forced to ratify it, and even those that do may choose later to withdraw if they feel disadvantaged by its terms. The rabid opponents don’t mention this.

Until we know more, I’m prepared to put my faith in respected, neutral commentators such as the Wellington business writer Patrick Smellie.

In an article last week, Smellie applied a reality check to much of the overheated rhetoric surrounding the TPPA.

He pointed out, for example, that while New Zealand opponents claim the agreement serves American corporate interests, American politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties are arguing that it shouldn’t be ratified because it’s tilted against the US. They can’t all be right.

Smellie also made the point that American drug companies, supposedly the sinister manipulators behind the scenes of the TPPA talks, had been defeated when they sought 12-year patent protection for their products. These facts are strikingly at odds with the claims of the hysterical anti-globalists.

As with any such deal, there were tradeoffs – a win here, a concession there. But until any disadvantage to New Zealand is proved, we should reserve judgment.

After all, if the TPPA turns out not to be in our best interests, we can toss out the people responsible. That’s the most potent check on any politician who might be tempted to betray us.

In any case, what are the alternatives? We live in a global world whose steadily rising prosperity depends on the exchange of goods and services.

Presumably the protesters would prefer us to raise the drawbridge and retreat into some dreamy socialist Utopian fortress where we could pretend the rest of the planet doesn’t exist.

North Korea has tried that. It doesn’t seem to work.