Foreign Minister Winston Peters pictured during an interview with Herald NOW in front of a boarded-up window in his Auckland home. Photo / Screengrab via Herald NOW
Foreign Minister Winston Peters pictured during an interview with Herald NOW in front of a boarded-up window in his Auckland home. Photo / Screengrab via Herald NOW
THE FACTS
Protests outside Winston Peters’ house have been ongoing for 18 months, escalating to vandalism.
The Government proposes a law to ban protests outside residential properties due to such incidents.
The law aims to balance protest rights with preventing harassment and intimidation at private homes.
The surprising thing about the protests outside Winston Peters’ house is how long they’ve been going on.
Eighteen months.
They first started as short, sharp flash-mob style events in May last year. Protesters descended on the Foreign Minister’s Auckland house in St Marys Bay. They stayed for fiveminutes. They shouted their demands about Gaza, waved placards and did some social media. Then they left – deliberately – before police arrived.
At first, police took a strong line. They visited the homes of the protesters and warned them. Time, place, circumstance, officers said. Breach of the peace.
But the protesters carried on. They stopped trying to avoid the police. They stayed for hours, sometimes until 10pm. They brought loudhailers and banged pots, neighbours say.
At some stage in the past 18 months, it’s alleged someone tipped red paint over the white paint of Peters’ porch. They apparently also stuck stickers on the house at night, to be found by its occupants the next morning. They shared Peters’ home address online to encourage others to come.
And then someone took it too far and threw a crowbar through one of the windows on Monday night.
A window at Winston Peter’s home has been shattered. Photo / Supplied
But really it had been taken too far a long time ago. It had already long ago crossed from protest into intimidation.
Protest is designed to sway opinion by drawing attention to an issue. That is not what was happening outside Peters’ house. The events weren’t getting media attention. There was hardly a media mention of what was happening. No one’s attention was being drawn to anything.
The only people witness to what was happening were neighbours whose kids were being kept awake by the noise and fellow activists tuning in on the social media live streams of the events.
Acacia O'Connor made an Instagram post filming herself outside Winston Peters’ house inviting people to protest. Photo / Instagram
And, of course, the occupants of the house, effectively being bullied in the hope of changing their minds on Gaza.
The fact that this has been going on for 18 months may explain the Government proposing a law change to ban protests outside residential properties.
Because it’s not only happened at Peters’ house but also at the Prime Minister’s, who claims he’s been targeted as late as 11pm and as early as 4am.
The proposed law is not perfect. The problems are myriad. The most obvious is that residential property sits right next to commercial, government or other property which may be fair to protest outside. The Kate Sheppard apartments opposite Parliament’s grounds are the Wellington residence of plenty of ministers. Banning protest outside those apartments may mean legally curbing protest outside Parliament.
But the case to introduce the law – as flawed as it is – has been made by the very people who will be banned through it.
It’s hard to imagine most fair-minded Kiwis excusing the protests outside Peters’ house (and the subsequent crowbar through the window) as part of the business of being a minister. Regardless, by the way, of how horrified they may be by the killing and starving of innocent Palestinians.
Peters may have chosen his career and the associated pros and cons, but his partner hasn’t. Nor have his neighbours. Nor have the (especially, the young) children of ministers – whether current, future or past.
The law absolutely would be a curb on the freedom to protest. But protest is not without limits. We already ban it from outside abortion clinics because we accept there are some places where protest is unreasonable, and probably only designed to intimidate and harass.
The same is true of private homes.
If activists can’t be relied on to distinguish between protest and harassment, the law will have to do it for them. And 18 months of shouting outside the Foreign Minister’s home suggests some can’t tell the difference.
