As the protestors gathered at Civic Square and proceeded towards Parliament on August 23, clogging the streets, Wellingtonians braced themselves for a repeat of the Parliament Occupation witnessed in March.
From Parliament, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern implored the protestors to be “peaceful and lawful.”
This time the anti-government protestors were led by Bishop Brian Tamaki of the Destiny Church.
In contrast to the mayhem that attended the 23-day siege of the Parliament precincts witnessed nearly six months ago, the Tamaki-led protest was orderly and peaceful.
But the authorities were taking no chances. Parliament was fenced off by bollards and road blocks in anticipation of trouble. Police maintained a heightened presence in the surrounding area. Buses were diverted.
The protestors, numbering around 1500 people according to police estimates, surged towards the Parliament grounds. Tamaki delivered an anti-government sermon before the crowd dispersed by around 2 pm.
Except for some verbal altercations between Tamaki’s followers and a crowd of counter protestors opposed to him, the event passed off without any incident.
It was clear that this protest was radically different from the earlier Parliament occupation. The original anti-vaccine mandate protest movement had been hijacked by Tamaki and transformed into a platform to serve his new-found political ends: Tamaki has formed a three-party political alliance called Freedoms NZ.
While Tamaki’s critics, drawn from the anti-mandate groups who spearheaded the earlier protest marches that resulted in the Parliament occupation, complained the movement had been diluted, others welcomed the fact that the protest led by Tamaki was eschewing violence and endorsing the democratic process.
Addressing the gathering outside Parliament, Tamaki called his new political coalition the “umbrella of hope”, and said MP for Hamilton West, Gaurav Sharma, who was expelled from Labour, “should get in touch.”
In April, the original protestors had regrouped and sought to stage a comeback. The protestors, who had borne the brunt of the police crackdown that ended their three-week siege of Parliament in March, resurfaced with a different strategy. Rather than amassing at a single point, the protestors had gathered at various locations throughout the CBD as part of a two-week campaign to draw public attention to what they described as the government’s misleading messaging and faulty policies around Covid-19. That was then.
Now, Tamaki’s protest movement has politics at its core, rather than Covid-19.
“The government is lying to the people,” a Tamaki-led protestor told the Indian Weekender. “They are leading us down a road that is detrimental to us and our freedoms.”
Freedom was the main theme of the Tamaki-led protestors who took to the streets in Wellington.