Get a Jab!

5,000 people protested outside New Zealand’s parliament last week. If you took a photo of them and blurred the image of Wellington’s iconic Beehive building in the background, you could imagine you were in Washington DC on January 6^th, or Paris when the maillot jaunes were in town. Or pretty much any place in the Western World where Covid restrictions are in place.

There are nutcases all over the planet. Protesting about lockdowns, vaccination mandates and simultaneously arguing that Covid is a hoax but also a conspiracy to wipe out white people as part of the great replacement project.

I’d usually find this stuff amusing. I laughed at the antics of Trump supporters and the brexiteers getting themselves in knots when trying to find a positive argument for the destruction they brought upon their country.

I even found it funny when I’d pass two guys draped in Union Jacks on my way to work on Monday mornings. They were protesting Tommy Robinson’s continued imprisonment in the UK. Most Kiwis wouldn’t know Tommy Robinson from a bar of soap, but it didn’t deter these two brave souls from bringing a little bit of Barnsley to Auckland’s main street.  

I stopped one day and pointed out the irony of supporting an anti-immigration racist while being an immigrant themselves. Needless to say, I didn’t convince them. Although funnily enough, I haven’t seen them since the Christchurch shootings. So, maybe they finally examined their conscience and found to their great surprise that they had one.

I’m not laughing today. We’ve been in lockdown for 14 weeks and let’s just say, it’s starting to get a bit boring. We’ve been promised that things will change when the country hits 90% vaccination rates. The only problem is that it has to be 90% in every health board district. Auckland is a cosmopolitan city and we’ve already hit those heady highs. But let’s just say that there are parts of the country where the Guardian Online is rarely accessed but banjo playing is at a high standard.

There is a theory that the Europeans who came here and settled in the back of beyond, did it for a good reason and not just because the land had been stolen from the locals and could be sold cheaply to white immigrants. They did it because they had a strong sense of independence and a dislike of the controlling government they were escaping. The South Island of New Zealand in particular was settled by Scottish Presbyterians, descended from people who weren’t going to be told what to do by the Pope or an English Anglican Archbishop. There is a strong culture of questioning authority among them.

This has been bolstered by recent immigrants from America and Northern Europe, who see New Zealand as the last great outpost of libertinism. It makes for an interesting mix, with the local Maori and Pacifica and the decedents of English and Irish, who came here in Victorian times and still harbour some of those conservative Victorian values.

Needless to say, I keep a close eye on Irish and New Zealand media when it comes to Covid. The countries have similar populations, are ex-British colonies and perhaps most importantly, have decades of under-investment in their health services.

There is one obvious difference though. New Zealand went hard and early in fighting Covid, whereas Ireland fell into the same ‘will we or won’t we’ trap that beset Europe. As a result, approximately 5,000 people in Ireland have died from Covid, versus 33 in New Zealand.

Both countries, however, are trying to vaccinate their population as quickly as possible. Ireland is ahead in this area, mainly because those 5,000 deaths have somewhat focussed the mind. New Zealand is catching up but it will be another few weeks before I’m allowed back into the pub.

While almost 90% of the population here have taken the jab, you tend to only hear about the ones that haven’t. They are noisy and well-funded and have tapped into other concerns that some kiwis have. This includes the 5G rollout and the demand from the Government that farmers stop pumping shit into the nation’s rivers.

The evangelical churches play a large role in these protests. This of course brings up a lot of my inbuilt bias when it comes to the behavior of Catholics and Protestants. Catholics are communal and tend to do what they are told. Vaccination depends on a whole community acting in unison and Catholicism fits easily into this process. I haven’t checked but I’m sure Catholic communities have a higher take-up of the vaccine than the other Christian faiths.

But of course, it’s not that simple.  There is something darker at the heart of New Zealand’s anti-vaxxers. Like in the US, evangelical churches here are split by race. Maori and Pacifica belong to one set, while middle-class white people attend other, more grandiose churches. The well-fed and well-paid pastors in these places fill their congregations with tales of bygone days and how it has all been stolen from them.

These people have spent their life in ascendency. They have rarely faced unemployment or homelessness. That happens to other, less virtuous people who deserve what they get as a punishment for their immoral lives.

And then a pandemic comes along and they are asked to restrict their lives in the same way as all the poor brown people. This doesn’t compute in their tiny entitled brains. They have never had to suffer in the same way as others. For the first time in their lives, they have been told that they are just the same as everyone else.

This is the same thing that happened under Trumpism. They looked at a country that had elected Barack Obama and realised that black people were now considered to be equal to everyone. That is a scarier prospect than Covid itself. A world of angry white evangelicals. And most of them have guns.