Why are New Zealanders turning on their politicians?
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
Two attacks in a year are a symptom. The disease is a political class that no longer feels within reach.
Yesterday, a 24-year-old man was charged with arson after a fire was lit at the rear of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s electorate office in Botany.
Eight months earlier, another man took a crowbar to a window of Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ Auckland home, showering the family dog in broken glass and leaving a note that read, simply, “welcome to the real world.”
Both attacks were condemned from every side of the House, and rightly so.
But condemnation is the easy part.
The harder question is what these attacks are telling us, and whether the people we elect are willing to hear it.
Political violence is never justified. It is also never random.
It tends to surface when the gap between the governing and the governed grows too wide to be bridged by a press release — and New Zealand has stood in this place before.
Contents
A history written in confrontation
We like to picture ourselves as a placid democracy, but our past says otherwise — and the worst of the violence has usually come from the state, not the street.
At Parihaka in 1881, some 1,600 armed constabulary marched on a settlement built entirely on passive resistance, arresting its leaders, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, and holding them without trial for sixteen months.
In 1978, Robert Muldoon’s government cleared the peaceful 506-day occupation of Bastion Point — in the eastern-Auckland suburbs of his own Tamaki electorate — with hundreds of police and soldiers, in what was the largest internal mobilisation the country had seen. The man who would later inherit that seat, Clem Simich, was himself a career police detective.
Three years on, the same government was determined the 1981 Springbok tour would proceed, and answered the protests with the most extensive police operation in the country’s history — including the first police baton charge in thirty years, in Wellington’s Molesworth Street.
Time and again, ordinary people stood against a government certain it knew best, and time and again the official answer was force.
When the state oversteps
The pattern holds within living memory.
When the Covid mandates and lockdowns pushed many New Zealanders past the point they were prepared to accept, the result was a three-week occupation of Parliament grounds that ended on 2 March 2022 with protesters setting tents alight and hurling objects at riot police — a level of violence, as Te Ara notes, rarely seen at our protests.
Even the 1984 Queen Street riot, which erupted after police shut down a concert in Aotea Square, showed how quickly a heavy hand can turn an ordinary crowd.
Overreach breeds disorder. It is among the most reliable rules in our politics, and it is one this Government would do well to remember.
Thrown objects, absorbed with humour
For all that, we have been fortunate. Our political violence has mostly been theatre.
A protester flung a sex toy at Steven Joyce at Waitangi in 2016, and he shrugged it off as “pretty funny.”
Mud was thrown in Don Brash’s face at the same place in 2004; he called back “Good shot” and kept talking.
John Boscawen carried on with a chocolate lamington dripping down his face during a 2009 by-election debate — the image that now defines him more than any policy he ever championed.
No one was harmed. The message, not the man, was the target.
The politicians who feed it
Some politicians have learned to feed on the friction.
When a masked group robbed a jewellery store at Westfield Albany in 2022, then-opposition MP Mark Mitchell — a former Armed Offenders Squad officer — arrived to collect a frightened relative and used the moment to press National’s law-and-order message to waiting cameras.
During the 2022 occupation, Speaker Trevor Mallard turned the lawn sprinklers on the protesters overnight, then blasted Barry Manilow and the Macarena at them on a fifteen-minute loop.
Provocation, it turns out, can be a strategy as readily as a hazard.
One rule for the powerful
The deeper grievance is older than any one government: a sense that the rules bend for those who make them.
During the 1999 APEC summit, police shielded the visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin from Free Tibet demonstrators, parking buses to block them from view — conduct a select committee later found had trampled the right to protest. Prime Minister Jenny Shipley said she had spoken to police but not instructed them; a hotel manager said she had pressed for the protesters to be moved so a delayed state dinner could begin.
ACT’s former president Tim Jago, meanwhile, was convicted of indecently assaulting two teenage boys in the 1990s and jailed, having kept his identity hidden under a suppression order he fought to retain until he was finally named in 2025.
Different decades, same lesson: the scrutiny that falls on everyone else reaches the well-connected last, if at all.
The danger is not that New Zealanders are angry at their politicians. It is that some have begun to believe their politicians are beyond consequence.
A warning, not a wish
None of this excuses an arson or a crowbar through a window. But it should trouble the political class more than it appears to.
When three activists deflated a dome at the Waihopai spy base in 2008, a jury acquitted them on a claim-of-right defence — they had broken in genuinely believing they were preventing a greater wrong. Juries, and the public standing behind them, extend remarkable sympathy to people who believe they are acting against injustice.
Let enough New Zealanders conclude that their leaders are beyond consequence, and that sympathy will drift toward whoever is willing to impose one.
We should not condone the violence. We should not condone the conduct that breeds it either.
