“Probably a third of those turned up to protest and two-thirds turned up to listen.”
Fisher says that Batchelor borrowed from his history as a preacher, delivering the information in an evangelical style.
In terms of content, Fisher says that co-governance actually only formed a small part of what was being discussed.
“The misinformation put forth in Batchelor’s meetings is enormous,” says Fisher.
“One of the things that Batchelor likes to say to his audience is that ‘you can see this true because I’ve footnoted it’. And when you look at the footnotes, they point to titles like The Travesty of Waitangi, which is a book that came out during the ‘90s and was panned at the time for being disingenuous and [a] misrepresentation of 40 to 50 years of solid judicial and Waitangi Tribunal findings.”
Fisher says that all this feeds into the fears some New Zealanders have that their place in the world is being threatened.
“It’s captured people’s - I want to say imagination, but it feels more like buried bigotry,” says Fisher.
“There’s a fear and an apprehensiveness. What am I going to lose? Is something going to be taken away from me? Are going to have fewer opportunities than we used to have because we’re not Māori? There are a lot of feelings around that.”
At the meeting attended by Fisher, the protesters were allowed in the hall while Batchelor’s presentation was being given.
“He had a really interesting way of dealing with [the protesters]. He talked about how much he enjoyed having them there because he really wanted people to have discussions …
“In terms of how you operate a crowd, that was really fascinating, because then when he got to something that caused an uproar at the back, he addressed the people at the front by saying: ‘Can you hear all those people down the back? Aren’t they invested? Let’s give them a hand.’ This was followed by patronising, almost mocking applause for the protesters. He’s very good at controlling a room.”
But this all fell apart by the time the roadshow got to Orewa, where things became far more volatile.
“There were a lot of police officers separating the two groups,” says Fisher.
“After that meeting, the police told Batchelor that he has to have his meetings in private so he can let the people who want to listen to his message in and keep the protesters outside. That seems to have created a bit of a separation that’s made things a bit calmer.”
With each stop on the roadshow, Batchelor is attracting more headlines and the controversy around his message continues to grow. He told Fisher that he intends to end this entire expedition with a protest in Auckland that he hopes will attract tens of thousands of people.
“It’s my view that Batchelor will go on all the way to Invercargill and he will have a rally of some sort at the end,” says Fisher.
“Whether he gets 100,000 people, I’m not sure, but he’ll certainly bring a reasonable sort of crowd. And I would almost guarantee that the crowd that turned up to protest against that would be much, much larger.”
Fisher points to the recent example of the Posie Parker protests in Auckland as an example of what could happen.
“It would be somewhat like the scenes we saw at Albert Park over the weekend, except on a much bigger scale.”
So, what should politicians do to ease these divisions? Why has co-governance made people so angry? And why is Batchelor pushing this one issue so hard?
Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear more from Fisher on this crusade against co-governance.
