On Coster's Covid Convoy Strategy

Over the weekend, I tapped out the following:

"In what's going to be my most controversial take this month ... I actually think that Police Commissioner Andrew Coster's apparent strategy of "this'll go down easier if we just let the whole thing implode of its own accord rather than go in swinging" might be entirely (if painfully - for Wellington) correct."

At the time, it seemed a statement against the grain. Hashtags demanding Coster's resignation were trending on Twitter. Wellingtonians (even the ones not on Twitter) seemed almost as aggrieved at the police for a lack of action against the protest as they were against the protest itself. The sentiments advanced by some of the commentariat in the Sunday (and Saturday) papers seemed to suggest they weren't alone in this - except, of course, for the curious fact that various of those media mouthpieces seemed to be sotto-voce cheering on the protest specifically because it was causing optics difficulty for the Government and our Covid-19 public health response. 

However, I had cautious cause for optimism on Coster's behalf. Saturday had seen a rather dramatic occurrence - the revelation that some ... unthinking protester had chosen to turn the nation's Cenotaph into an impromptu ablution block for the protest campsite. This was received in pretty much all quarters about as well as one might expect - as if there is one thing pretty much every New Zealander not of some sort of Anarchist proclivity tends to agree upon, it's the sacrosanct status of the ANZAC legacy. 

I sensed, therefore, that this was likely a bit of a turning point in terms of the 'momentum' (in)surging into the mainstream of the protest narrative. 

And also noted that it seemed plausible Coster's strategy had been drawn from that of Napoleon - who famously remarked one should "never interrupt your opponent when he's in the middle of making a mistake." 

Subsequent developments seem to have confirmed this - with news stories out about the same time discussing how a citizen-media team who'd gone to visit and film the protest in order to show them to be non-violent ... had been assaulted and "beaten to a pulp"; whilst the next day brought an extended press release from the groups at the center of the Convoy effectively stating that they had little actual control over the protest (to the point that they couldn't even ensure access for trucks to service the portaloos at the site), and that movements toward 'negotiation' were a "deflection". 

Monday continued this trend, with the 'moral high ground' almost certainly not being held by the side throwing its own excrement about the place. 

However, while it's certainly one thing to observe the 'momentum' of the movement seemingly fizzle in the harsh glare of public scrutiny of what they're actually about and like (at least, on the 'fringes') - this isn't quite the same thing as doing something meaningful about the escalating sprawl of tents, cars, and placards which have been steadily encircling further and further around both Parliament and Wellington's key central city governmental locations. Particularly in light of the shuffling around of cars and other potential obstacles which had been taking place toward the end of last week by the protesters in order to entrench themselves further against anticipated towing action.

That, instead, was provided via the rollout of a series of concrete barricades pre-Dawn on Monday Morning. 

Which we may surmise to be a rather interesting development for the 'Non-Violent Enforcement' approach. One of simply giving the protesters what they want.

"We've barricaded ourselves in!"

"Yes. You're barricaded in."

"HEY! YOU CAN'T JUST BARRICADE US IN LIKE THAT!"

"You barricaded yourselves in - we're just agreeing with you."

As it happens, this concords rather well with something I'd been thinking about a few days earlier - namely, what one does when one finds one's self having to raise a siege in more conventional conflict terms. 

I'll spare you the extended military history discursions that conjured in my mind about this point and just skip straight to the answer I'd arrived at - you place the siege, itself, under siege. 

Now at this point, we are going to sidestep for a moment into discussing just how this whole 'Protest' ethos appears to have come into being. Via a handy metaphor provisioned for us through the realms of physics. Which, yes, also helps to explain what's going to happen next and why Coster's strategy is likely to work. 

My general typology for what's been going on both politically and physically is ... a gas. Now, gas differs from liquids and solids, insofar as it can be compressed into a smaller area - which raises pressure as the molecules go pinging bouncing off the walls faster.

The situation we've witnessed in NZ politics over the past year and a half - has seen the 'space' various people or political forces feel they occupy .. reduced quite markedly. Because Labour and Labour-support(ish) has expanded so massively - along with a seriously impressive degree of support for the accompanying Covid-19 public health measures they've presided over. 

While some have adapted to this by effectively 'splitting the difference' and attempting to co-occupy (er..poor choice of words) space Labour is perceived to hold - others have adapted to a self-perceived shrinking habitat by going gas - and pinging off walls with escalating speed. 

A good example of this is probably to be found by looking at the National Party from time to time. After a number of 'false starts', they realized that attempting to carve meaningful votes off Labour by pushing for 'business as usual' to resume as swiftly as possible, or for that matter, by heading into conspiratorial territory ... was not really a good starter. And so they instead shifted to a general attack strategy (as exemplified by Chris Bishop) of taking something the Government was going to do eventually, and complaining that it hadn't been done faster or better in some fashion. 

That's that 'splitting the difference' and 'co-occupying space' approach. 

The other avenue, however, is exemplified by former National MP Matt King, who's effectively become a billboard for 'the path not taken' by going from overtly opposing in both social media post and deed, the personal distancing rules that were in place in 2020 while he was still a Member of Parliament ... through to quitting National in order to return to Parliament in a decidedly other capacity a few days ago as a would-be leader of the Convoy movement, following a rather piquant interview with the NZ Herald about some of his more curious beliefs in related areas. 

Phrased another way and more succinctly - a lot of these guys feel like they're increasingly marginalized, and so they're 'acting out' precisely because of it.

Now all of that's utterly uncontroversial in the political sense .. but it gets interesting in the physical sense.

Because at present, there's apparently 30+ groups involved in this thing, plus a lot of people who aren't part of one. I have no idea how many 'factions' there might be, but we do know various of these don't like each other & have confronted each other from time to time.

Provided the protest had significant space it could 'move into' and expand, that presented less of an issue. You could set up another semi-hub for your particular crew of people just by pitching a tent somewhere less congested or parking up down the road.

However, by significantly restricting the available area for this kind of activity to, effectively, that which has already been claimed ... it introduces a resourcing constraint (one of several if doughnut-trucks can't get in, figuratively speaking) for an already overpopulated habitat. 

What does overpopulation in a resource / territory constrained zone produce? Conflict.

What was there already? Conflict.

What has the revelation one protest-leader (former NewCons leader Leighton Baker) was aware of and engaged with by the police about the barricades going in ahead of time contributed to? Conflict.

What will likely cause protesters to feel 'it isn't fun' and pack up? Conflict.

Internal conflict. Replacing that joyous sense that you're all part of some big movement swimming in the same direction, with the sense that instead you've somehow found yourself in amidst three-to-three-dozen mistrustful camps that spend almost as much time sniping at each other as they do at the Government. 

So, to quote me some Sun Tzu - "Your opponent is Choleric - Irritate Him".

Or, with these guys "Your opponent is likely really keen on Conspiracy Theorizing. Give him a reason to distrust the hell out of his neighbour / establishing leadership".

The concrete barricades are also good for another purpose. 

The protest-groups' press-release on Sunday indicated they were already having notable difficulty ensuring that vehicles were able to come and go to carry out essential things like servicing the portaloos. The rather radical solution of physically disposing of the human waste in question by flinging it at Her Majesty's Constabulary evidently proving inadequate to the task of shoveling sufficient quotients for the hundreds of people on site. 

Vehicles looking to get in to the Convoy's occupation space are now no longer going to be able to come-and-go as convenient. The police control the access-points in. Those are their barricades. As an associate observed - that means they now have 'Leverage'. 

Up to the Weekend, Coster's strategy was what appeared to be a valiant (if flawed) effort at what I call the coke-bottle analogy. 

You know the one.

When confronted with a coke bottle that's been shaken up, there are two ways of handling the problem. 

You can twist off the lid completely - resulting in a sticky mess everywhere. All the pressure that's built up explodes outward all at once. Or - you twist off the cap a bit at a time - allowing pressure to come out gradually.

Coster had resiled from the level of force required to twist the cap off all at once, quite understandably, because apart from the possible question as to whether he had sufficient resources in place to actually forcibly evict the occupation once it got past the first day or two ... such a spectacle would almost certainly just have lead to a bigger problem elsewhere or elsewhen. The protesters themselves overtly pointed to the 120+ arrests on the Thursday (the 10th of February) as an effective 'galvanizer' of their own internal cohesion and a useful recruitment tool through footage of same going up online. 

In other words - their 'narrative' had found its ogre, its antagonist ... and continuing to play that role would be continuing to play into both their hands and that narrative position, strengthening same. 

His preference, it would seem, when it became clear how well the previous approach was going (i.e. insufficient force being deployed to clear the protest, very sufficient force being deployed to look antagonistic in so doing) - was to go for the latter option. The gentle and delayed release of pressure through smaller cap-twists. 

Except it ran into the obvious issue that pressure wasn't actually being decreased. People continued to arrive at the protest, and as mentioned above, it would seem that a semi-deliberate strategy of moving to encircle Parliament and various important sites in the area had gotten well underway. 

To return to our metaphor - it does little good to gently twist the cap of the coke-bottle part-way around if somebody is still shaking the coke bottle the whole time and somehow adding more coke into the mix as well. 

The barricades - those of the Police rather than those of the protesters - are, therefore, a welcome 'breathing room'.

They are not, in and of themselves, a full-scale solution. However they do facilitate a gradual de-escalation by hopefully helping to constrain the mean level of 'new coke' flowing in; whilst also creating internal conditions that will potentially encourage some people inside to start flowing back out at their own pace. 

And whilst it's very easy to cast a baton-equipped police officer as an 'antagonist' in one's own preferred flavouring of post-modern morality play ... it's a lot harder to vent the same kind of animus toward an inanimate cement block. 

At every stage of this pandemic, New Zealand has somehow managed to come out the 'least-worst' (indeed, in various cases, actually rather well - our life expectancy going up, for one example; unemployment hitting an absolute historic low, another) of much of the world with what we've attempted and accomplished. 

It hasn't been through luck (although yes, most certainly, that's helped in places and in parts), but rather through the people making decisions making decent and well-informed ones. Eventually, in some cases, but eventually nonetheless. 

Andrew Coster came to national prominence not for being appointed Police Commissioner - but rather, for being attacked by the Opposition as some sort of 'Wokester' and adhering to a doctrine (apparently known in the Anglosphere and practiced in various forms since the 1800s, not that you'd know it) known as 'policing by consent'. 

For the longest time, it had seemed that he was a man whose prevailing principles had seemed prospectively ill-fitting for the circumstances he had found himself in. Or maybe that's just what the media-political spin sought to suggest. 

Yet Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man - it may just be that he and his approach might prove the unexpected exact right instrument for handling this current Covid Convoy quagmire. 

He would appear to have already headed off the kinds of escalation which some overseas countries have experienced with their own local 'Convoy' occurrences (or other anti-Governmental pseudo-uprisings) - and for that, I think we should be grateful. 

Will he be the man to preside over what brings about the Convoy's further withering into wittering obscurity and eventual disapparation? 

Well, we'll just have to wait and see what tomorrow (and the next day) brings.

On The Impending Media Push To Present Parliamentary Protesters As Ordinary

The excerpt in the image below comes from part of the lead story in the weekend's Sunday Star Times.

It paints a picture of the protesters currently occupying Parliament's lawn in decidedly more nuanced terms than the protestors often seem to believe the media interested in doing. 




Now, the reason that I find this interesting is because of the context of this presentation. Both in terms of where it was in that day's newspaper, but also how it represents a bit of a 'crystalization' of a trend for media portrayal of the protest. 

What do I mean by this? 

Well, we'll start with the second point first. Over the past few days there's been a definite emphasis on the part of some commentators to push the line that the protesters, while they might appear to be a rambunctious rabble of general conspiracy-theory toting ne'er-do-wells ... "actually have a point". 

Just what that "point" is may vary somewhat from mouthpiece to mouthpiece, but effectively seems to boil down to "the Government's done the wrong thing", with a specific flavouring of "vaccine mandates, Traffic Light Settings, and other Omicron-era control measures are too restrictive / actively harmful", and a side-order of "time to start Learning To Live With The Virus". 

Except, of course, not 'learning to live with the virus' in the way that we'd been intending to, nor in the way that Singapore et co are attempting to manage it. You get the idea. 

Now how much of said 'flavouring' depends quite strongly upon the individual columnist or commentator. Some basically just want to go for the 'lightly seasoned' option of presenting it as being a Government comms issue that's 'legitimate' to voice opposition to - others want to go rather further.

This brings us to my second point - the first one I'd mentioned, around where this charming excerpt was to be found within the context of Sunday's Star Times. 

Elsewhere on the page was a story about how, surprise surprise, the Government's Covid-control measures had allegedly 'gone too far' and were now actively 'counterproductive'. 

The 'meat' of this piece was provided via perspectives from two people representing rather different groups: somebody from the hospitality sector, lamenting the manner in which 'fear' was contributing to people not patronizing restaurants and the like; and a doctor, talking about how understandable caution from people about going out into the community with Omicron circulating had lead to a rather significant reduction in the number of people making appointments to see their GP. 

Predictably, the front page highlight talking about the article lead with the picture and soundbite from the doctor - a public health perspective, and a not unwarranted one. And then spent only a smaller portion toward the end of the actual article itself on what he had to say - instead giving over its mainstay to the unrelated commentary around the retail sector suffering due to people not wanting to go out and socialize in the midst of a pandemic. A classic bait-and-switch - and attempt to conflate a commercial issue with a public health one (because yes, people not engaging with primary healthcare providers can contribute to rather more important problems than a bar being underpatronized). 

Now, we've been down these styles of cycleway many, many times before over the course of the pandemic. 

This is partially why we so frequently find heads of business associations, and prominent figures of the hospitality industry given such prominence in media pieces talking about the pandemic response. Because it's one of the areas where you can actually point to and say "see all this saving lives? It's got a Cost Attached." 

Various media have also been very keen to try and present the situation in more 'popular' terms - not as something between small and sectorally interested groups against the dominant public will, but rather as the general public being divided in amidst itself. 

You can see this in the reporting in the Herald from 2020, for example, discussing our then second lockdown. They'd declared Auckland to be seriously "divided" over the decision to extend the Level 3 phase. 

Except when you looked closer at it ..., and as I said about the time - 

"You might be forgiven for thinking that this meant somewhere around a fifty fifty split of opinion on the matter.

Here’s the actual split:

75% of Aucklanders thought that the extension of lockdown was “appropriate”. This was made up of 56% who were simply fine with the extension – and a further 19% who wanted the lockdown to go longer.

Meanwhile, that 25% of opponents was made up of 14% for a shorter lockdown, and 9% for the lockdown shouldn’t have been initiated at all.

That’s three-to-one support for the lockdown. And yet somehow this is a serious degree of “division”.

Meanwhile, New Zealanders overall supported the most recent Lockdown by a ratio of more than four to one – 62% in favour of the lockdown we had, 19% in favour of an even further extended lockdown, 10% for a shorter lockdown, and only 6% for no lockdown at all.

Technically a 3-1 majority for Lockdown means “divided” , sure – as does a 4-1 majority.

But it sure does sound rather different when you phrase it like that, frame it like that, rather than OVERWHELMING MAJORITY SUPPORTS THE GOVERNMENT’S COVID-19 MANAGEMENT”.

So how does all of that pertain to this description of the protestors on Parliament's front lawn?

Simple. 

At the moment, the protestors are a very vocal 'battering ram'. They won't, by themselves, force the Government to abandon sensible Covid-19 control measures. What they can be 'weaponized' to do is exactly the same thing that the Brian Tamaki MC'd 'freedom rally' shenanigans of a few months ago can be co-opted for - attempting to make very strident opposition to said "let's actually live like we're in a pandemic" measures seem like something that's an ordinary person perspective. Not one that's effectively relegated to a few hundred people on a patch of grass who are outnumbered by an order of magnitude every day by the number of Kiwis choosing to get a Booster. 

Why? 

Because, as the Sunday Star itself  told you on the very same page - New Zealanders continuing to take the virus seriously is imposing an economic cost on some business owners. 

It's also continuing to considerably buoy the Labour party's popularity - and keep National down in the low 30% range. People remember. 

So, if you want to 'circuit-break' Labour seeming a champion of ordinary New Zealanders, our health and welfare ... presenting some very ordinary New Zealanders in amidst the very-hard-to-ignore decidedly abnormal ones at the Parliament protest is an ideal way to do this.

The mind extrapolates on its own, and places things in their own kind of order - conveying a sense that there's some broad 'consensus' of both ordinary people and ordinary business-owners gradually coalescing in unity against the Ardern-led Government, mask requirements and vaccination mandates and a 'climate of fear' about going out for dinner etc.

It doesn't have to be true. It just has to look like it might be plausible. And then the hope is that events start taking on the characteristics plotted out for them all of their own accord. 

Because the previous approach, of media and media-platformed talking heads, basically shrilly scolding the general public for taking the pandemic too seriously and being too keen on Labour in significant consequence of that, has not worked. 

And in the absence of a genuine mass movement to overturn the Government or its Covid-control measures ... you make do with what you've got instead.

A few hundred people who've managed to 'Annoy Wellington', most definitely ... and suitably 'airbrushed' to highlight the less odious elements within the general protestor milieu. 

Will it work?

That remains to be seen. 

However, even though it is situated in amidst nearly half a dozen more 'actively empathizable' vox-pops, the guy claiming that Covid-19 was some sort of "worldwide scam directed by the United Nations" does somewhat undercut the notion that "we're not crazies", as another protestor tearfully sought to emphasize. 

But I would cautiously suspect that over the next few weeks, and one hopes that won't be how long the occupation of Parliament's lawn drags on for, we'll see an escalating tide of media and commentariat 'contributions' which seek to equivocate the other side of the protest (you know, the ones intimidating and even egging schoolgirls in masks and spitting at bus-drivers) in favour of claiming it's 'ordinary New Zealanders' just seeking to do entirely ordinary things. And who have a 'right to be heard'. 

A right to eat out at hospitality venues, too, one presumes. 

Or maybe that's going to become presented as more of a 'duty' - something mandatory for the rest of us, whether we feel particularly comfortable going out at this time or not.