The Demonstration Effect.

She’ll Be Back! A fortnight out from the General Election, with early voting already underway, it is difficult to think of any person the Labour Government would be less likely to welcome than Posie Parker. 

WHAT HAPPENED IN AUCKLAND on Saturday, 25 March 2023, revealed the power of officially-sanctioned protest. That power was demonstrated to even greater effect the following day in Wellington. New Zealanders are blessedly unfamiliar with this type of politics, which is more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. Nevertheless, the mass demonstrations against Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka “Posie Parker”) strongly backed by government ministers and the state-owned media, revealed just how potent a weapon the mass mobilisation of sympathetic citizens by official, or quasi-official, forces backed up by the news media, can be.

Since Keen-Minshull has announced her intention to visit New Zealand again in September of this year (perilously close to the election date!) it will be interesting to see whether the same politicians and media outlets who denounced her attitudes towards the trans community back in March – “inflammatory, vile and incorrect” – are prepared to offer the electorate a repeat performance six months later. Were they to do so, there can be little doubt that the result would be the same. New Zealanders sympathetic to the transgender cause would rally against Keen-Minshull in their thousands.

The response of those who share Keen-Minshull’s views about the impact transgender ideology is having on the rights of women and children will, however, be very different the second time around. Should Keen-Minshull return to these shores in September, she is certain to arouse a powerfully demonstrative response from those who support her cause. The March spectacle of 2,000 transgender activists and their supporters drowning-out and then physically attacking Keen-Minshull and her fewer than 100 supporters is unlikely to be repeated.

Citizens hailing from both the left and the right of the political spectrum will not be backward in coming forward to Keen-Minshull’s defence. Moreover, since the trans community set the rules of political engagement so violently in March, Keen-Minshull’s defenders in September are unlikely to pull their punches.

Given, that Keen-Minshull is calling for New Zealand women to speak up for their rights outside the Auckland courtroom in which the person who showered her with tomato juice back in March is set to stand trial, the egregiously “hands-off” policing on display on 25 March (now the subject of an internal Police investigation) will not be an option. Indeed, if two vast crowds of mutually hostile demonstrators seem determined to confront one another outside His Majesty’s courthouse, then Police Commissioner Andrew Coster will have no option but to prepare a very “hands-on” response. Hundreds of police officers will be required to maintain public order.

Scarcely a fortnight out from the General Election, with early voting already underway, it is difficult to conceive of anything the Labour Government would welcome less than dramatic evidence of the deep political animosities dividing New Zealand society. The very real possibility that some deluded individual, inflamed by the white-hot passions besetting the transgender issue, might turn protest into tragedy, will only heighten the Government’s trepidation. Political violence on the streets is the last thing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins needs as he goes head-to-head with the Opposition leader, Christopher Luxon.

Which is why Immigration Minister Andrew Little will be under enormous pressure to deny Keen-Minshull entry to New Zealand under Section 16:1(iii) of the Immigration Act – the sub-clause which authorises the Minister to deny entry to any non-New Zealand citizen who “is, or is likely to be, a threat or risk to public order”. This was the clause cited by the trans community back in March as they attempted to keep Keen-Minshull out of the country. The courts ruled against them then, but they may not to do so a second time. It would not be difficult for Little to make the case that Keen-Minshull’s arrival in March did, as predicted, contribute to a breakdown of public order, and that given the intensity of feeling aroused by her ideas, and by other people’s reaction to those ideas, it risks doing so again if she is granted permission to enter New Zealand.

What Little almost certainly would not mention is that, back in March, Keen-Minshull’s opponents were arguing that public order would be threatened by attacks on the trans community perpetrated by Keen-Minshull and her supporters. If a second attempt is made to keep her out, Keen-Minshull’s defenders will, quite justifiably, respond that on 25 March it was the supporters of the trans community who broke through crowd barriers to harry, harass, and inflict serious physical and emotional harm upon the few dozen people, many of them elderly, who had assembled in Albert Park to join Keen-Minshull in speaking up for women’s rights.

If Little does decide to bar Keen-Minshull’s entry, then the story is most unlikely to end there. The Free Speech Union (of which the author of this opinion-piece is a member) is practically certain to launch a bid to rescue Keen-Minshull from the so-called “Thug’s Veto”. It will argue that those presenting disorder as the most likely outcome of Keen-Minshull’s visit and, hence, the best reason for banning it, are the very people most likely to cause it. Equivalent to Ku Klux Klansmen warning a civil rights worker that if she insists upon addressing the local Black Baptist congregation, then there’s just no telling what might happen to their little church.

Recognising Labour’s discomfort, National and Act would be most unlikely to refuse the political gains of presenting themselves as the staunch defenders of Free Speech. Nor would they likely forgo the opportunity to castigate the Labour Government for lining-up with extremists who cannot give a straight answer to the question: “What is a woman?” They would pillory Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori for lacking the guts to defend the core principles of a democratic society. The Right’s message to the country would be unequivocal: Those who threaten the right of freedom of expression must not be appeased, they must be fought!

The parties of the Right might even feel emboldened to take a leaf out of Labour’s own playbook by throwing their weight behind a mass demonstration in support of New Zealanders’ right to speak freely and without fear of being shouted down or attacked. Were they to help organise such an event, they could be absolutely certain that elements of the Left would not be able to resist organising a counter-demonstration. Like Keen-Minshull, herself, they could rely upon the intolerance and aggression of their political opponents to clinch the argument.

What the Labour Government should do, of course, is what any democratic government should do in such circumstances: uphold the right of both sides to make their case. Let Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and her supporters have their say. Let the trans community register its disagreement and disgust. And make damn sure that hundreds of cops, in full riot-gear, are standing between them. Holding the ring, as the state is bound to do, and keeping the peace.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 28 July 2023.

Absence Of Consequences.

Excitement And Pride: The reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

WHEN THE SETTLERS from Har-Bracha approached the security checkpoint the Israeli Defence Force soldiers waved them through. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Not when the West Bank of the Jordan was a bubbling cauldron of hate and violence. The idea of allowing Israelis from the Jewish settlements to enter Palestinian territory should have been as unthinkable as allowing Palestinians to pass in the opposite direction. But, the soldiers – like everybody else in Israel – knew that, only the day before, two brothers from Har-Bracha had been killed by a Palestinian gunman. It was payback time. Ignoring their orders, knowing full well what was likely to happen, the soldiers opened the gates and let the settlers pass. Within the hour, the nearby Palestinian village of Zaatara was ablaze.

The forces of law and order do not exist in a social vacuum. They are members of their communities, citizens of their nation, and just as likely to get caught up in the ebb and flow of public emotion as everybody else. They’re not supposed to. In theory, they are expected to remain aloof from the tidal tug of popular passions: impartial upholders of the law; keepers of the peace.

In theory.

When the white police officers and/or sheriff’s deputies whose presence in the rigorously segregated black communities of the Jim Crow South suddenly disappeared from the streets, everybody knew that trouble was on the way. The unheralded withdrawal of these racially charged armies of occupation could only mean one thing. That, for the next few hours, law and order would take a terrifying leave of absence.

The photographic images that have come down to us from this America of a century ago are hard to look at. Not only on account of the “strange fruit” hanging from the poplar trees on the outskirts of town. More difficult to stomach, or even to comprehend, than the charred bodies are the lynch-mobs that gathered to witness and celebrate the victims’ agonising demise.

Men and women, resplendent in their boater hats and summer frocks, look directly at the camera, their faces alive with a chilling mixture of excitement and pride. There is no shame here, no guilt. Would they have brought their children with them to observe the spectacle if they believed they were doing wrong? They wanted their kids to understand that this was something that simply had to be done every once and a while – to keep the community safe.

The local newspapers would recount these lynchings in enthusiastic prose. The dastardly deeds that sparked the community’s righteous anger. The apprehension of the perpetrator by the aroused populace, and his inevitable demise. The grim warning left hanging where those most in need of its terrifying message could not fail to receive it.

Such blatant abrogations of the rule of law – be they in the Deep South of a century ago, last month on the West Bank of the River Jordan, or last weekend in Auckland’s Albert Park – are able to occur for one reason, and one reason only, because those participating in them do so in the confident belief that they are doing “the right thing”. Because the government, the news media, and even the forces of law and order have all conspired – wittingly or unwittingly – to convey the impression that the extra-legal enforcement of “the right thing” will incur no penalty.

Eye witness accounts of the attack upon Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in Albert Park describe how the frenzy of the protesters suddenly increased when they realised that the Police were not going to interfere in their righteous punishment of the “Nazi-adjacent”, “anti-trans activist”.

And that’s the reason why normally kind and respectful people are capable of such appalling violence, the single factor that explains every pogrom, every lynching, in history: the absence of consequences. The knowledge that if you do these terrible things, then nothing will happen to you. The realisation that those in authority do not care if you do them. Hell, they want you to do them!

Considering that when the mob came, proudly bearing their threatening banners and placards, and the Police stood by and did nothing – not even when elderly people were being punched, kicked, thrown to the ground and begging the Police to assist them – it is a small miracle that “Posie Parker” escaped with her life.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2023.