Rodney Hide
bassettbrashandhide.com
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011
Hi David
I note the following from a RNZ report:
ACT leader David Seymour was similarly derisive of the approach.
“It’s possible to have a peaceful protest but I think what they’re doing is far too intense. I think what they need to do is respect the law, respect people’s basic property rights and not believe that because they disagree they have the right to trample over a whole lot of other people.
“I mean, they’re trespassed, they’re breaking the law … but look, I just think it’s rude to set up your tents on someone’s lawn – not everyone in New Zealand can do it, what makes them different?”
I support the protest 100 percent.
I know several who have travelled up from Arrowtown including a young mother with her toddler. Good people who work their business and have been destroyed by policies you have supported.
I don’t agree with you that my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are extinguished by a government declaring a pandemic. To me those rights are absolute.
With the ACT party in support, we have been locked up and are now excluded from society. We have been shut out of our local swimming pool because literally we don’t take the government’s recommended medicine and refuse to present the government’s ID.
That small indignity after all the misery inflicted upon us as a family was the proverbial straw that broke my back.
If anything, I would wish the protest be more intense given the damage Parliament has inflicted on the people I love and the community of which I am a part.
I have no doubt that in standing up to this tyranny we are a minority, but the smallest minority of them all is the individual, and individuals have rights and their rights have been trampled and destroyed and the people have not been listened to or understood. Our political leaders including you have belittled us and disparaged us.
Somehow I am anti-science and anti-vax. You know me to be neither. But I oppose lockdowns and I oppose mandates. I oppose them for the best reason of them all: I believe in human freedom above all else. I do not want the human spirit squashed and it has been, and it continues to be.
The protest is a little spark of human spirit.
We might be wrong about the madness of staying locked up or whether this or that medicine is ill-advised or not but in a free society we all are allowed to be wrong. Indeed, it is through different approaches, and the many mistakes, that we learn and develop. What we are seeing now is only mistakes from government and no learning.
You publicly complain of trespass by which I assume you mean tents on Parliament’s lawn and of disruption to traffic. That’s nothing to the damage that I have personally witnessed by the policies of lockdown and mandate. And I am only a little corner of just a small part of the country. Your comments suggest you don’t understand the suffering being caused when I am sure you do understand.
I don’t expect you will change course and I don’t need a response. I just wanted to have my say.
I don’t write as a former anything. Just as a concerned once citizen now subject.
And to ask you to consider this: what do you expect people to do when their rights are trampled and their lives destroyed while politicians not only refuse to meet with them but belittle them when they protest?
My answer is to fight.
Sincerely
Rodney Hide
