John MacDonald: Posie Parker: Did it really have to get so ugly?

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Next time I spill tomato juice down the front of my shirt, I’ll know what it was like for Posie Parker on Saturday.

Posie is the gender activist that most of us had never heard of until she arrived in Australia on her so-called “speaking tour” and had a bunch of far-right clowns turn up and do the Nazi salute.

It was all over the news which meant that, as soon as word got out that she was heading our way too, there was a lot of noise and demands for her to be kept out of the country.

The Immigration Minister Michael Wood made it clear he didn’t want her coming here but she wasn’t enough of a risk for his immigration officials to tell her she couldn’t come.

And so, on Saturday morning in central Auckland, her speaking tour took her to Albert Park. But she didn’t get very far because all the noise last week meant she was outnumbered big time. They reckon there could have been a couple of thousand people there on Saturday.

And they were there banging pots and chanting and playing music. In a way, the pro-transgender crew took a leaf out of Trevor Mallard’s book. He played Barry Manilow during the protest at Parliament last year. On Saturday, the protesters went for Whitney Houston.

But it all got too much when the tomato juice started flying - although there have been conflicting reports as to what it actually was. Initially, it was paint. Another report said it was soup and egg. By today, we’re being told it was tomato juice. So let’s assume for now it was tomato juice - until the forensics report comes through and we know for sure.

So Posie cops a bit of tomato juice and she pulls the plug. Then, once she’s out of there, she has a chat with her “security people” and, apparently, they tell her that they can’t guarantee her safety if she goes ahead with the “speaking event” she had planned for Wellington yesterday.

And, by Saturday night, Posie is at Auckland airport, presumably heading home to the UK.

When I saw that I wondered what she would say to the person next to her on the plane about what she’d done in New Zealand. If she said "not much”, she wouldn’t have been lying.

The problem was though, there were truckloads of people who had planned to protest at the Wellington event yesterday - which was cancelled. And a whole lot of people had planned to do the same thing in Christchurch.

So what do you do when the person you’re protesting against is a no-show? Simple. You have a rally instead of a protest. And that’s exactly what happened in Wellington and Christchurch yesterday. And why wouldn’t you?

The thing is though, did it really have to get so ugly on Saturday?

You might recall a few weeks back when there was a bit of a to-do about Turanga central library in Christchurch having a storytelling event for kids with drag queens. It started with a few far-right clowns getting excited online but they weren’t the only ones who turned up and protested outside the library that Sunday morning.

And, from the reports I read, that got ugly too with some people being abused as they left the building and staff being abused inside, as well.

I had no problem at all with that storytelling event. And I thought it was appalling that some people thought it was perfectly fine to stand outside a library and force the kids to walk through a sea of intolerance and hate.

But, even though I was fully supportive of the drag queen storytelling at the library –and completely opposed to the protest outside– that doesn’t mean that I think that what happened on Saturday at the Posie Parker event was justified.

And this is where the pro-transgender crew got it all completely wrong at the weekend. Did they really think that one person’s toxic view of the world was going to bring their world crashing down?

Posie Parker is not a dictator in charge of a country that denies people their human rights. Posie Parker is not Vladimir Putin. Posie Parker is not South Africa in 1982.

The event in Auckland on Saturday was not the Springbok Tour. It wasn’t French nuclear testing in the Pacific. All it was was someone from Britain on a bit of a glorified holiday. That's all it was.

But it didn’t stop several thousand people turning up and, quite frankly, doing a complete disservice to the cause they are so committed to.

Posie Parker did not warrant the complete over-reaction we saw at the weekend. Simply because Posie Parker is a nobody. A nobody who is probably back home in Britain now, doing a few loads of washing and trying to decide whether she should try and stay awake or give in to the jetlag.

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