Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Disrupting people won't make us sympathetic to your cause

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

I've actually been surprised at the level of anger I've heard expressed today at that Treaty Principles Bill hīkoi crossing over the Harbour Bridge - and I don't think it's a good thing for this particular cause.

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, I got an email from a mum I know complaining about the impact it will l have on kids trying to get to their NCEA exams on time.

Today, I bumped into someone this morning furious about the timing because it was rush hour. And someone in my family is raging about it as well.

To be fair to these people, it's understandable anger and I can see why they're so cross.

Basically, it's because this protest feels like it was designed to create disruption. Either that or the organisers didn't think it through - which I doubt very much because they have proven to be quite deliberate in a bunch of the things they do.

What happened to facilitate the hīkoi today was that authorities had to close two lanes on the Harbour Bridge in our biggest city from 8 in the morning - at peak morning traffic time. That will have messed up the day for thousands of people coming in from the North Shore.

If these guys were decent to the people of Auckland just trying to do their jobs and get their kids to school, they would've shifted their walk time back by a couple of hours, when most people are in the office and won't be messed around.

It's not as if the hīkoi would lose attention because it caused less disruption.

They are all over the online news feeds, they’re being covered by radio shows like ours, they'll be all over the TV news later because the protest is big. And it's about a very contentious issue, that being the Treaty Principles Bill. These guys did not have to muck Aucklanders around to get the coverage they wanted.

Ultimately, I don't think it's a smart move from them. Just like I don't think it's too smart to have gang members join the hīkoi with their patches on display.

All it’s going to do is frustrate middle New Zealand and make middle New Zealand more sympathetic to the other side, because that’s how politics works nowadays - we pick sides. We don't like that side, we go to the other, that's how this works.

And that’s ultimately an own goal, because the only hope David Seymour has for this bill is that it becomes very popular and that it gets rescued because enough people want it.

And this hīkoi, I reckon, won’t have hurt his chances at all.

A lesson to people planning future protests - try not cause disruption on purpose, because that way we’re more likely to be sympathetic to your cause, not less.

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