It was touted as Karen Brewer Day, a day of silent protest outside government buildings.
Protesters assembled outside government offices at 9am in whatever time zone they were in – New Zealand, along the eastern seaboard of Australia and all the way across the Nullarbor in Western Australia two hours later. They were instructed to stand silently. As you’d expect there was quite a bit of shushing.
The silence didn’t last long. Abuse was hurled at police. In both NSW and Queensland, police sustained injuries in scuffles with protesters.
As Karen Brewer Day loomed last week, it looked like it was going to be an amusing fiasco, which it surely was in some places. Across the ditch it was a spectacular flop. But large crowds assembled in parts of Australia – at council buildings on the Gold Coast and on the Sunshine Coast. Protests gathered in significant numbers in Lismore, Murwillumbah and Mullumbimby.
In Brisbane, protesters appeared unfazed by the irony that their protests against lockdowns occurred in a state where there was no lockdown, except for the parliament which they had forced into lockdown.
Crowds assembled outside local government buildings in heavily locked down western Sydney – in Fairfield and Blacktown.
Who is Karen Brewer? She’s a human gargoyle who accuses just about everyone she disagrees with as a paedophile. She took aim at one of the crusaders of the Covid-19 scamdemic nonsense, Pete Evans, falsely labelling him a paedophile several weeks ago. She has called for mass lynchings of public officials, holding government employees to ransom, storming parliaments and governors’ residences.
It’s standard fare for Brewer. She remains liable for a $875,000 plus costs payout for falsely accusing a National Party MP of being part of a fictitious paedophile network. Brewer didn’t even bother to contest the case.
She was arrested on Tuesday in Kaikohe, a small town three hours’ drive north of Auckland and charged with NZ’s version of a breach of public orders. She was bailed in time to see the protests emerge on the east coast of Australia.
While the dual nation, multi-site protests were small beans overall, Brewer and other anti-lockdown activists would have been more than satisfied with the turnout. There are political consequences looming. The major political parties seem unaware of the threat these activists pose or if they are, they are almost helpless to do anything about them.
Yesterday’s protests speak of a looming group of disenfranchised people in certain parts of this country, perhaps as large as a ten per cent bloc of the overall electorate. How they might vote in the next federal election remains in the great unknown.
This week’s Newspoll shows the Coalition’s primary vote at a dangerously low 36 per cent. Labor’s primary vote is at an election winning 40 per cent. The rule of thumb is that Labor cannot get enough votes to win a federal election unless it’s primary vote nudges 40 per cent. Likewise, the Coalition vote needs to be in the low 40 percentile if they are to have a chance of returning to the Treasury benches.
Clearly there has been some shift from the Coalition to Labor. The Greens and PHON primary votes are more or less where they were at the last federal election. But in the “Other” category, primary voting intention has risen from five per cent at the last election to 11 per cent in the latest Newspoll.
I add the usual caveat about reading too much into the results of one poll. What we are looking at might be explained away as a poll protest against the Coalition. But it might just as well be an early marker of an accelerated volatility in the electorate based on anti-lockdown and anti-vax activism.
The protesters who took their cue from Brewer yesterday are often described as “far right” extremists, but this is not an especially helpful description. Placing anti-lockdown and anti-vax groups on some point on a linear expression of political affiliation is like nailing jelly to a wall.
This is a disparate, disorganised group who essentially share a profound sense of grievance, driven by a general mistrust of government. Many have suffered financially by state border closures and lockdowns. Many have carried their grievances around like luggage for years, based on what we might loosely call the sovereign citizen delusion, an abject rejection of the rule of the law.
Politicians need to avoid the Clintonian misstep of describing this bloc as deplorables or some similar pejorative.
At the same time, governments and oppositions must appreciate that what these people clamour for is not in the national interest. It’s not even in their own interests to shun vaccination for Covid-19. It is not in the interests of our communities that vaccination rates are lower than they should be.
Similarly, what we can predict is that as we do hit those 70 and 80 per cent vaccination thresholds and our state borders open as they must, these groups will feel their disenfranchisement more acutely as employment opportunities disappear, as employers across a range of industries insist on vaccination as a condition of employment. The vaccinated may happily cross borders, depart on overseas travel, even wander into the local pub for a cleansing ale while the unvaccinated may not.
Likewise, as the country does open up, there is bound to be more Covid-19 infection and that places the unvaccinated at acute risk of serious health problems and worse. There will be chaos, hospitals filled to overflowing, illness and death; community members turning on each other. It is precisely where a government does not want to be as an election looms.
The already angry will have their fury ratcheted up even further, all happily stoked by lunatics like Brewer. The ‘Other’ voting column won’t rise much beyond what this week’s Newspoll reflects but it is likely to become entrenched for years. Minor and single issue parties, not yet on the political radar, some not yet in existence will have a huge impact on who forms government next year.
The chaos and uproar will continue all the way to the next federal election where that loud minority is bound to make a significant contribution to the outcome.
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