Has the great age of protest passed?

BY ANTHONY HUBBARD

PROTESTS COME, protests go. Some look like tsunamis and turn into tiddlers. The big demonstrations against homosexual law reform in the mid-1980s were black omens to liberals. Anti-gay activists strutted on the forecourt of parliament, shouting and waving flags, and handed over a massive petition to the government. Law reform only just squeaked through in the House.

This was a cause that provoked fury and hatred – "Go back into the sewers where you come from", roared anti-gay National MP Norman Jones – yet the anti-gay movement has since disappeared. National MPs who voted against decriminalisation supported a bill outlawing discrimination against gays in the early 90s. The big anti-gay demonstrations turned out to be the high tide of a lost cause.

On the other hand, some protest movements start as tiddlers and turn into tsunamis. Veteran political activist Kevin Hackwell recalls the tiny anti-tour marches in early 1981. "We tend to have this rose-tinted view of the big marches," he told the Sunday Star-Times, "but I can remember the very first rallies that year where we all lined up in Cuba St and marched around. We might have had 200 or 300." But then, when the Springboks arrived, "we had thousands and thousands".

With any protest, it is difficult to know which is which. Were the small protests against the government's labour relations proposals just a tiddler that will grow? What, on the other hand, do we make of the enormous Queen St demonstration against mining? The 40,000 crowd that marched that day is one of the biggest protests in New Zealand history. So are we seeing a return to the golden age of protest – or was that just a one-off?

Certainly the Queen St demo proves that activism is not dead, despite what some say. If the cause is right, New Zealanders will still protest. In this case, the government's proposal to mine in the conservation estate collided with a green movement that had been widening and deepening for 40 years.

It started in 1970, when a proposal to raise Lake Manapouri by eight metres provoked a petition of more than 260,000 – "the largest in New Zealand history up till that point", as Wellington historian Jock Phillips points out. The great age of protest, says Phillips, lasted from the 1970s to the mid-1990s.

This was the period "when New Zealand went through a fundamental reordering of its value system, a challenge to all its values", he says. "Part of that, obviously, was a generational thing. Some of it was the new identity politics about Maori, women and concern about the environment and so on.

"Some of it was a fundamental challenge to assumptions about the state and the welfare state and the way the economy organised itself. Virtually all of the values over which there was a general consensus in the 1950s and early 1960s came under challenge."

BUT SINCE the late 1990s, says Phillips, New Zealand has "established a new consensus". There is no longer a fundamental split in the political spectrum. The arguments from the 1970s to the mid-1990s were profound disagreements about the kind of society New Zealand should be, he says.

"In the 1950s they used to say there was National and there was `Nash-and-all' [a pun on Labour leader Walter Nash] – and in a sense I feel we're a little bit back in those days." The gap between the present National-led government, and the previous Labour-led government, was not large.

It's possible to see National's mining campaign as an assault on that consensus, and the Queen St march as a conservative reaction in its defence. There was a long-standing agreement, says Green co-leader Russel Norman, not to mine the conservation estate. "I think they [National] were trying to overturn an existing set of values and they produced that response – and then they backed down."

Norman notes that another huge protest in the last decade was also about a green issue. The anti-GE march in 2001, when more than 10,000 marched to Aotea Square in Auckland, was a protest against a Royal Commission report recommending GE experiments in New Zealand. "I hope Helen Clark gets the message," protester Sara Bosley said at that time. In fact, Clark didn't. Her government allowed GE experiments. Even large protests don't necessarily change a government's mind.

A "broad consensus" does not mean an end to argument. Maori causes have won a much greater acceptance from Pakeha voters and politicians in the past 30 years. But "clearly from both sides there's pushing going on", as Norman says. Labour's foreshore and seabed legislation sparked a large protest hikoi among Maori. Again, Clark did not back down on this issue, arguing that if she had not taken such action, there would have been even greater street protests – by Pakeha.

Don Brash's 2004 Orewa speech was a challenge to the bi-partisan consensus over Maori issues, and tapped into deep Pakeha fears. It brought National back into serious contention for government, although it did not last as a cause. The new National leader, John Key, not only abandoned the Brash cause, his government even formed a partnership with the Maori Party.

Brash's threat to see the nuclear-ships ban "gone by lunchtime" was never a serious danger to the anti-nuclear cause. What had started as a minority protest in the mid-1970s had become mainstream. National's Robert Muldoon deliberately stoked the issue, even asking the Americans to send nuclear ships when they had no plans to do so. But the protesters changed the minds of the majority. In 1978, opposition to nuclear ship visits was 32%. By 1983 it had grown to 72%.

National did not overturn the Lange government's ban on nuclear ships when it returned to power in 1990. It knew it could not afford to do so.

Women's issues have become absolutely mainstream and even the abortion issue, the cause of angry demonstrations on both sides in the 1970s, has gone into limbo. The abortion legislation passed by the Muldoon government in 1978 – which sparked widespread protests – was intended to be restrictive. In practice, it has allowed very wide access to abortion, and so far no parliamentary party has dared to revive the debate.

In a sense, protests have become such an accepted part of the landscape that we hardly notice them. Norman points to the protests in Christchurch over water and the government's sacking of Environment Canterbury. John Key has now sent a letter to Canterbury voters seeking their views on the question – a sure sign, says Norman, that protests, and the government's own internal polling, have convinced it that the issue is serious.

Protests have become part of the repertoire of the right as well as the left. The protest movement began on the left, over Vietnam. "That was where we learned how to protest," says Phillips. It was a product of the television age – a protest on screen had a power that a black and white photo in the newspaper could never have, he says.

But the right cottoned on. In 1981, 22-year-old Tania Harris organised a huge anti-union march down Queen St. About 50,000 people joined in.

There were big protests against Green MP Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill, and truckies launched a noisy protest against the Clark government.

Hackwell says the cliche about the apolitical younger generation is wrong. "There's just as much energy and people want to do things. They are just as concerned about their future," he says. But they face constraints that a previous generation didn't.

Students in the 1960s had time to protest and did not need to worry about their job prospects. Nowadays, says Hackwell, students are on a treadmill of internal assessment.

And established movements do not reach out to the students as they once did, he says. Older people passed on their organisational protest skills to younger people in the past. Too often, he says, this no longer happens.

ORGANISED LABOUR HAS been a big loser in the great political upheaval of the last generation. National's Employment Contracts Act led to huge protests in the early 1990s. It also led to a big split within the unions over the question of a general strike. Union membership plummeted under the ECA.

Nor has it much revived since Labour repealed National's legislation. Only about one in five workers belongs to a union. So the question is: will National's industrial reforms – extending to all firms the "fire-at-will" clause for workers in their first 90 days of employment, and restricting union access to worksites – provoke a return to the big protests of the past?

Early signs are not encouraging for the unions. About 5000 people attended the four rallies last weekend in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. This is a far cry from the old days when union demonstrations could be enormous. During the 1979 general strike, 300,000 took to the streets.

EPMU leader Andrew Little says it's early days yet. The protest is building towards a day of action on October 20, and even union members were not yet aware of all the issues. For 20 years people had been told that workers' rights had to be sacrificed "for economic reasons", and this had gained a much greater acceptance than ever before.

"There is no question," he says, "that we are on the back foot."

Council of Trade Unions general secretary Peter Conway says changes in employment law made it much harder for people to stop work. In 1979, "if you went on strike, employers could apply to the high court to get a hearing in maybe six months to decide whether or not it should have been allowed". Nowadays, "you can be injuncted and be in court the day before the action is meant to happen".

He cites the big campaign in Australia against Prime Minister John Howard's version of the ECA. "Work rights became the number two voting issue in the 2007 election campaign. There is every reason to believe that work rights issues will be right up there as a major issue in New Zealand next year."

Mass rallies of unionists, street protests over industrial issues? Now that would be a blast back to the past.

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