Protests

Do you know what they were protesting for?
Just curious.

brian tamaki flexing his muscles wasn't it?

showing that he can be a kiwi trump if we want one

If you don't know what they are protesting for, why do you want to run them over and (I assume) kill them? Surely you'd want to know what there issue is before exterminating them? You might even agree with them. Who knows.

It is not normal to have coordinated protests up and down the country, and for those protests to bring to a halt our only major transport system (the motorway), so something is clearly going on.

I know from the Welly protests, there is a lot of pent up anger about being ignored and marginalised. Blocking the motorway certainly is a fairly effective way of getting peoples attention. As it got yours.

Have we ever had protests like this before? Every other protest I can think of have been single issue stuff. Springbok tour, Maori hikoi's, land occupations.

Were there any big protests when Muldoon screwed everything? What about when Rogernomics kicked off?

Random and unrelated question, how did the Arab Spring kick off?
My read of the room is there are a lot of people deeply angry with the current government. And more so, even more people seeing no viable alternative (reference GO30's thread on being an idiot to support National). If the whole political system is broken, what happens? Mass civil unrest, like blocking motorways?

Think about it. Step back from the narrative the media have painted of Brian Tamaki, and have a think about what is actually going on. How do you get 1,000 people angry enough to go and block a motorway?

Something is going on.

The fringe groups and people have always existed.

What has changed is their ability to (a) find others via social media content matching algorithms; and (b) efficiently communicate and organise with one another via free services.

It used to be that there were small phamlets distributed by keen people pushing their views through paid advertising.  And people would join those groups and receive and distribute more phamlets.  But the groups has a common interest. 

Now disinformation via social media is pulling together people with all kinds of different extreme/edge views to undertake extreme activity against society. You just need to look at the telegram feeds to see how diverse and disconnected from one another these people are. There's everything from contrails to 5g to aliens to tax to cost of living to housing to healthcare. 

The organisers don't care what you're there for, they just want people to show up and participate in an illegal activity that disrupts those of us going about our day-to-day business so they can continue to build there band of followers. 

So you don't get the people angry.

1. You find 1000 people who are already angry and grumpy with something, anything, it doesn't matter what, but they need to want to vent their frustration in a extreme way
2. You plagerise the name of a famous historical protest to jog peoples memory of that success
3. You tell them that your intention to cause major public interruption and disruption and will likely cause motorway mayhem in Auckland, and chaos in major cities

Sure. Every government in history has. But at least they were voted in by a majority to do it.  And while I certainly don't agree with every choice any government has ever made I accept that they are the ones with the authority to make that decision.  And when I don't like what they are doing I vote for another.

These Protestors don't have the support of the majority to block Aucklands motorways.

"the authority to make the decision"....WTF!...

It should be - The authority to follow thru on what the people voted on. ... is all we need.

Ardern never had the authority initially!

Then she got authority the second time based on deception, half truths, and hiding the real agenda.

She is guilty of acting on policy that we did NOT vote for.

@aquahollic good to hear you weren't out there blocking the motorway.

I am happy with NZ. I generally feel that all countries I have lived in are rooted as well and it is always pros and cons.

I have lived in the UK (4yrs), Australia (7yrs), Hong Kong (2yrs), France (1yr), Japan (1.5yrs).

I toured Europe and Scandinavia for 12 months and toured the US and Canada for another 12 months - but I would not call it living in those countries, you're kind of outside the day-to-day system when you're touring.

I came back to NZ in 2006 cause I like it here.  I am not sure where else I would choose. Fortunately I have triple citizenship (UK/nz/au) so I can work in many countries. Although I have not kept track of what's happened to my rights since brexit. 

I have definitely looked around at other opportunities, there are plenty, but I don't really think that NZ is either heading or is already in a worse place. 

As for what do I have to lose, I don't believe I will lose anything...

Where are you off too?  Why have you determined it's better than NZ?

PS congrats in your nearly unconditional sale