Chris Lange, FISM News
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Hundreds of New Zealanders inspired by Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” trucker protest against restrictive Covid-19 mandates blocked streets outside parliament in Wellington Tuesday with trucks and campers while maskless demonstrators held up “freedom” signs and demanded an end to one of the strictest pandemic policies the world has seen.
Protesters from all four corners of the island country gathered outside a cluster of government buildings known as the “Beehive” ahead of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s first speech of the year. Borrowing straight from the playbook of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Adern refused to meet with the demonstrators and said they don’t represent the majority view.
“I think it would be wrong to in any way characterize what we’ve seen outside as a representation of the majority,” Ardern said at a Tuesday news conference, as reported by Reuters. “The majority of New Zealanders have done everything they can to keep one another safe.”
Ardern’s Covid-19 mandates have been decried as a “model of medical tyranny” angering New Zealanders locked in endless home isolation orders and tens of thousands of expatriates who remain cut off from families back home since a nationwide lockdown was imposed in March of 2020. The measures have also been catastrophic for businesses that rely on income generated from international tourism. A recent 1News Kantar Public poll shows Ardern’s favorability among Kiwis has plunged to a 35% approval rating, with respondents citing heavy restrictions and vaccine delays as among their chief complaints. Meanwhile, New Zealanders will have to wait until mid-fall before the government begins reopening the country in phases.
A group announced last week that they have raised over $180,000 in legal costs to sue the government for preventing expatriates and citizens abroad from returning home.
“We are alleging the way they have operated the system amounts to a breach of the bill of rights,” said the group’s founder and lawyer Alexandra Birt, according to reporting by New Zealand’s Rebel News.
During her parliamentary speech, Ardern told lawmakers that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t end with the Omicron variant and cautioned that New Zealand must prepare for more variants of the virus to come.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, New Zealand has reported 18,000 confirmed Covid cases so far and 53 deaths among the country’s 5 million residents.
The movement that sparked the Kiwi protests, meanwhile, shows no signs of stopping in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is imploring truckers and other Freedom Convoy demonstrators remaining in the capital city of Ottawa to leave, saying the demonstration, which began Jan. 29, is disrupting the country’s economy and the lives of Canadian citizens.
“Canadians have the right to protest, to disagree with their government, and to make their voices heard. We’ll always protect that right,” the Prime Minister tweeted on Tuesday. “But let’s be clear: They don’t have the right to blockade our economy, or our democracy, or our fellow citizens’ daily lives. It has to stop.”
The tweet followed Trudeau’s announcement that “hundreds” of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers “have been mobilized to support the Ottawa Police Services” at the capital. GoFundMe recently came under fire for freezing nearly $10 million the group raised from supporters, announcing that the money would be redistributed to unspecified charities. The fundraising site later said the money would be refunded to donors if requests were made within a two-week period.