If the government had opened dialogue on day one – as governments have done with every other protest on the grounds of parliament, we wouldn’t be in this position to begin with. The reason they didn’t is because, for the first time in living memory, every politician from the Prime Minister down signed a pact not to engage with a lawfully democratic protest on parliament grounds.

This protest needs to end. The violence needs to end. The disruption needs to end. It should have ended weeks ago.

My presence at the protest yesterday was for one reason and one reason only – to show that if any politician has the guts to go and engage they can. It was not to endorse the protest or protesters, nor of course to signal any sort of support for the minority who continue to exhibit violent behaviour. It is plain to see that if dialogue is not established soon things will just continue to get much worse.

The protest should never have been allowed to grow to become so entrenched and able to fester to the boiling point of violence that we are now witnessing. Small anti-establishment and disruptive groups have been given an open door to clash with law enforcement at every opportunity and have been inexcusably painted by media as the face and nature of the entire protest. Those groups need to be dealt with swiftly and without sympathy, but equally we cannot allow those select few to be viewed as being typical of the thousands of other peaceful, law-abiding protesters who just want to be heard.

Those soundbites and pictures of violence broadcast by media might help paint the narrative for the government – but are far from the truth. The vast majority are ordinary kiwis who are just fed-up. What the government fails to grasp is that this isn’t about the protesters at parliament – there are hundreds of thousands of kiwis who have had enough and the government ignores those kiwis at their peril.

The protest has now grown so complex and at times unruly that neither the police nor the politicians know when or how this will end. Make no mistake, the government has created the environment for this violence to take hold, and the Speaker of the House has inexplicably continued to throw fuel on the fire with his juvenile power-drunk behaviour.

This is not a policing problem, this is a political problem. If the government continues to ignore and gas-light the protesters it will make the Springbok Tour protest look like a Mickey Mouse concert.

What is clear is that the government is giving every indication they will continue with this stupidly relentless position. To the point where they have openly discussed considering bringing the defence force in. This is how far down the rabbit hole every politician in parliament has been dragged by this arrogant government.

This isn’t the New Zealand we grew up in.

This is a situation that only dialogue will solve and if the politicians can’t see that then we are all witnessing a most avoidable disaster unfolding right in front of us.

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