The anti-trans rally that wasn’t

Posie Parker said she wanted to ‘speak up for women’. Hundreds of protesters spoke up for trans rights instead.

Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Monday, March 27, by Catherine McGregor. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.

In today’s edition: Cook Strait ferry crisis continues; what Shortland Street does for New Zealand; the comms mess that led to confusion over Auckland school closures during the floods. But first, a weekend of fiery protest for human rights.

The counter-protest at Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday. (Photo: Anna Rawhiti-Connell)

A day of anger and joy

At 11am on Saturday morning the anti-trans activist Posie Parker (real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) was scheduled to speak at the rotunda in Auckland’s Albert Park. By 11.30am she’d been bundled out, having abandoned her plans in the face of a counter-protest led by the city’s rainbow community. As the NZ Herald reported, a barrier erected to try to keep the two factions apart was pushed down, skirmishes broke out between the counter-protest group and Parker’s smaller entourage, and one counter-protester rushed towards Parker and poured a bottle of tomato juice over her head. The events of Saturday morning were tumultuous – but that’s not all they were, wrote Anna Rawhiti-Connell. “To leave people with the impression that the protest was only ugly, angry and chaotic is to assist Parker in feeding the narrative that trans people are people to be feared.” In fact, she wrote, the protest was a “symphony of fearlessness” and a joyful celebration of equality and aroha. 

‘The worst place for women I’ve ever visited’

Parker’s own response was vehement. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told Stuff. “What a shameful day for New Zealand.” Later, having abandoned her scheduled Wellington event, she flew out of Auckland and back to the UK. Claiming that police had told her she was lucky to be alive, she tweeted: “I get to leave the worst place for women I’ve ever visited.”

‘I don’t want to give her a platform’

Asked about the weekend’s events on TVNZ’s Q&A, deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni said that while she would not have attended the protest, that didn’t mean she wasn’t strongly opposed to Parker and her beliefs. “In my mind, that woman and her views are abhorrent and actually, in some ways, quite ridiculous,” she told host Jack Tame. “I don’t want to give her a platform, because I think we’re much more progressive and we’ve moved beyond those views mostly in this country.” National’s Erica Stanford said the best way to respond to Parker’s presence would have been to ignore her, and blamed the Green Party for publicising her events. "If she’d come in under the radar, a few people would have turned up, nobody would have known she was here, and she would have gone, and we’d have carried on our tolerant normal ways as we do in New Zealand,” she said. 

A proud history of protest in Aotearoa 

Saturday morning’s events may have left some people feeling shaken, but it’s worth remembering that’s what an effective protest is designed to do. In a Twitter thread, historian Scott Hamilton drew a direct line between the Springbok tour protests of 1981 and this week’s trans-rights protesters who “felt the morality of their cause” and believed that “the effects of their protest were more important than one person's freedom to speak in Albert Park. They made the same calculation as the protesters in '81.” Stuff’s Caroline Williams brought some levity to the matter with her review of the weird things that have been thrown at people during protests in New Zealand, including horse poo (at John Banks), a novelty sex toy (at Steven Joyce) and a wet t-shirt (at the Queen). One outrageous omission: the chocolate and cream lamington thrown at Act’s John Boscawen in 2009, as reported by the NZ Herald with the brilliantly succinct headline ‘Candidate creamed in sponge cake attack’.

A message from Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman

Last Thursday, I wrote to Bulletin readers to mark The Bulletin’s fifth birthday and ask for your support. You're reading this because you value the news that The Bulletin delivers you each weekday morning. As we head further into an already eventful 2023, we have a big job ahead of us. Covering the news is no small job. We’re a fiercely independent media company in Aotearoa but that also means we’re small and I think sometimes people forget how small our team is. I'm asking Bulletin readers to consider deepening your commitment to The Spinoff and the work we do by becoming a Spinoff Member. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support.

Cook Strait ferry woes worsen

Bluebridge’s Connemara ferry was back in service yesterday after a mechanical issue caused a string of cancellations on Saturday. It was the third time Connemara had broken down in less than two months of service, according to the NZ Herald. “We understand this is very disruptive to our customers' travel plans and we are sorry,” Bluebridge said on its website, adding that passengers would be refunded only if there was no available vehicle space on its ferries over the coming weeks. “Meanwhile, rival operator Interislander has advised its customers that all passenger bookings on Kaitaki are now cancelled until the end of this month because work to repair its gearbox is taking longer than expected,” the Herald reported.

What Shortland Street does for New Zealand

A major new report into the cultural and economic benefits of TVNZ’s Shortland Street demonstrates its power – but, as Duncan Greive exclusively reports, it also shows that trouble is on the horizon. “The very fact of this report’s existence implies that not all is well in Ferndale, the fictional Auckland suburb where Shortland Street is located,” he writes. “These reports don’t come cheap, and have a clear function: to ask that the reader think broadly about all that this institution delivers. And, ultimately, to make a case for a return to some kind of financial support.” In his piece on The Spinoff this morning, Greive looks at some of the report’s key findings, and what they might mean for the veteran powerhouse of the NZ screen industry.

You start your day with The Bulletin – The Spinoff Daily is a great way to end it. Our daily email is a digest of everything that’s been on The Spinoff that day, giving you a quick way to stay across all our work. Sign up and get The Spinoff Daily delivered to your inbox every work day at 5pm.

Behind the comms mess over Auckland school closures

The confusion over whether schools could stay open during the Auckland floods was largely caused by a Ministry of Education comms botch-up, reports Stuff. Documents received through the Official Information Act show how the original advice that principals could decide whether to close was reversed later that day, but “a technical glitch meant only some principals got this information before it was reported by the media”, Gabrielle McCulloch reports. Those early mistakes were compounded by communication issues throughout the week, leading to widespread confusion among both principals and parents. Education secretary Iona Holsted said the ministry's initial communication about school closures “was not as good as we expected of ourselves”.

Click and collect

• Healthcare is getting harder to get in New Zealand, a Stuff data analysis shows.

• Police have spoken to a Hamilton businessman after he suggested three female councillors should have the “living s... beaten out of them”.

• Changes to the fringe benefit tax laws are set to make it easier for employers to provide their staff with e-bikes and scooters as company perks.

• The Australian Labor Party has claimed power in New South Wales. The entire mainland is now governed by Labor at the state level, with Tasmania the only Liberal Party outlier.

• AUT’s plan to shut NZ’s only radio observatory sparked fears at Nasa and in government, documents show.

• The Therapeutic Products Bill currently before parliament is putting more than $1 billion of exports at risk, an industry body says (paywalled).

Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news? Get in touch with me at thebulletin@thespinoff.co.nz.

If you liked what you read today, share The Bulletin with friends, family and colleagues.

Right now on The Spinoff

Chris Schulz shares advice on how to charge your EV without being a dick. Duncan Greive takes an in-depth look at Simplicity Living’s radical plan to change renting forever. Brair Pomana argues that wāhine Māori are the Warriors’ truest fans. Blair Kemp writes about how her “weight loss and toning journey” descended into disordered eating. The troubled Skyworld complex on Queen St is up for sale, reports Chris Schulz.

Sporting snippets

• The Warriors’ resurgence continued with a gutsy 16-14 win over the Bulldogs at Mt Smart Stadium on Sunday.

• Jamie Wall on the lessons to be learned from the second season of Super Rugby Aupiki.

• The All Whites scored a 2-1 victory over China at Wellington's Sky Stadium last night.

‘I knew we had a huge hit – but how do you turn it into an international hit?’

First Aotearoa fell in love with ‘How Bizarre’, and then, in 1996, it was the world’s turn. The secret of the single’s success? An addictive, undeniable tune; a “Polynesian Elvis” singer with effortless charisma; and a whole host of behind-the-scenes players who helped bring the song to life and then made it a global smash. In The Guardian, Caroline Barron has collated a fascinating oral history of ‘How Bizarre’, one of this country’s greatest-ever singles. Twenty-seven years on, it remains, as Huh! Records owner Simon Grigg points out, “still the biggest hit to come out of New Zealand on a New Zealand-owned record label”.