Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: These protesters are risking real goodwill to their cause

On these protesters who've been harassing Winston and his neighbours - even as recently as last night - they really have to call this nonsense off.

Turning up at someone's house in the evening, or as the Prime Minister said to Mike this morning, at 11 at night or 4 in the morning is not protesting. That's actually just intimidating.

Particularly, I think, in the case of Winston, who I know has been actually dealing with this for a number of months.

Now, I don't think he's actually gone public yet. Even when I asked him, I don't think he's gone public with the extent of the harassment that he's been dealing with - and it was probably because he didn't want to encourage it to continue.

But I have been aware for months that this has been going on outside his house.

What makes it worse is that like with many heritage suburbs in central Auckland, Winston's house is right on the roadside.

He doesn't have a yard out the front between him and the protesters. He doesn't have a long driveway between him and them.

If you stand outside his house, you're basically touching his porch and his front door is about 1.5 to 2 metres away. I think that makes the intimidation even greater.

And what these protesters need to understand is that they're not drawing attention to Gaza by harassing a senior politician - just like with the flotilla kids, right? Because they're not drawing attention to Gaza.

They are only drawing attention to themselves and getting us talking - not about Gaza, but about whether the thing that they are doing as their protest or their activism is appropriate. They're simply drawing attention to themselves.

Now, there is a planned law to stop this business about the protesting outside people's houses. It's in the submissions phase, so it hasn't passed yet and it's a while away from passing

Which means, of course, that in the meantime these protesters can pretty much do what they like by the looks of things.

But what they should understand is that it is inappropriate and most New Zealanders with families will look at this and think this is inappropriate, and so all they're doing is risking goodwill towards their cause.

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