Yesterday there was a small protest in Parliament. The protest was caused by months of inaction by the New Zealand state to Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza. It was greeted with seeming amusement by Speaker Gerry Brownlee, disrupted proceedings for a minute or two, and then Parliament moved on.
Today, Brownlee has responded by locking out the public for the rest of the year, preventing people from directly watching at the very moment the regime is ramming through its unpopular agenda - including climate arson, Shame Jones' corrupt fast-track bulldozer, and Paul Goldsmith's voter suppression law - under urgency. This is what National calls "democracy": legislating behind closed doors, using urgency to prevent even a pretence of "consultation", to ram their agenda through and stomp on our faces.
This has an obvious cost to the social licence and legitimacy of both parliament and the state. And if people are wondering why people are attacking electorate offices, maybe parliament should look in the mirror, at what it is doing and how it is doing it, before it complains too loudly.
