Mike's Minute: Has protest lost it's impact?

Our default to futility worries me.

It's the same sort of thing as the "No Kings" march over the weekend in America.

What actually is the point of waving placards, or in the "burn the bill" case, lighting fires on beaches?

The bill they want to burn is the Marine and Coastal Area Amendment bill.

The amendment part is the bit where it is being returned to what it was a few years back.

It got messed with in court, given the courts are increasingly interventionist, and all that is happening is the law is being returned to what it was.

And what it was is, have you had ongoing access to the bit of water or coastline since the 1800's? If you haven't, you might not have an argument.

It is of course all angsty because it's race-based. David Seymour calls the lighting of fires on the beach "unenlightened" and "anti-intellectual". He is a mixture of right and, I suspect, slightly antagonistic.

But here is my question - to what point? To what end?

I get that there are those who are exercised and don’t like it, fair enough. But guess what? Lighting a fire at a beach isn't going to change it.

The petition, because they had one of those too, had 20,000 signatures. That’s not even a big petition.

76,000 signed one to stop me hosting the election debates on TV in 2017. If 76,000 doesn’t stop a TV host then 20,000 doesn’t stop a law.

Trump won the election in America easily. He is doing nothing he said he wouldn’t do. It's as mad and unhinged as his biggest critic feared, but he is doing it because he has the support of enough people to do it.

The same way this Government is amending a law because they said they would and they won the election.

We must always retain the right to protest, unless its over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. But that’s about geographics, not rights.

But protest loses, and has lost, a lot of its impact because it's become a habit. It’s a default. It’s the pastime of the bored and obsessed.

It's become a cottage industry. If we put the same energy into productive outcomes then this country could be amazing.

So you lit a fire on a beach last night - how did that work out for you?

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