This week, we have two new MPs-to-be in Michael Laws and Paul Henry. Both will be brilliant at creating controversy. Will they be safe and feel safe in their new roles as they work to push issues publicly they feel strongly about, or at the very least think that voters will?
In my latter years in Parliament everyone in our over-stretched village knew (and a fair few didn’t much like) me. I received no protection and, as a result, I didn’t feel safe.
As leader of the Opposition, I received death threats for what now look like pretty passe observations about the then Government’s Covid response. In the one where a guy was charged for threatening to feed myself and my family to the pigs, the chap got community service.
I distinctly recall at this time being concerned about going out in public. I worried, reasonably or not, someone might come for me, given my uncompromising positions on anything and everything. I was pushing hard on a range of issues, including gangs and law and order which the then Police Commissioner and his senior colleagues mustn’t have appreciated. I clashed with Commissioners Bush and Coster in select committees and mobsters campaigned against me online. It was a febrile, possibly feral, time.
I remember to this day being in a regional airport by myself after some MP duties, when a guy in gang colours began staring intensely. I don’t think it was because he was a big fan of mine. I got very worried and made myself inconspicuous.
At the many public meetings I did, my office and I on occasion made my concerns clear to police about gang presences and other ne’er-do-well who we thought would attend. The responses to my perception were not taken seriously enough.
Granted I’m alive and well to tell the tale. I’m conscious I might sound overly dramatic. But I reckon there were objective reasons for concern arising while I was in a top job, very high profile, and that in hindsight at the time I didn’t get the protection I should have.
Trevor Mallard would not make my top 10 Parliamentary Speakers. I couldn’t actually even name 10 of them. But credit where it’s due. He did take MP safety very seriously. Under his tenure, parliamentary office security and MPs’ personal security was dealt with better than it had been before him.
At my home, fences, cameras, and panic buttons were installed. I felt I needed these, albeit the only time the buttons were used was when my Pommie father-in-law, stuck with us during a lockdown, would press it looking for the lights for a pee in the middle of the night. In fairness, police did turn up very promptly.
It’s tricky stuff this, because we want our elected public servants accessible to the public, not cloistered away behind guards. Protection is special treatment, isn’t egalitarian, and therefore isn’t very Kiwi.
But surely we also want our politicians to be safe and to feel so, because if they aren’t, they can’t do their jobs right, won’t fearlessly go after what they believe is right as we elected them to. In short, if they aren’t safe it inhibits their freedom of speech.
I believe the official positioning today in NZ is that all this is taken more seriously now than it used to be. It needs to be.
I’m not arguing for police protection for every, or even most, politicians, or, even any of them most of the time. The resourcing would be out of control and there are many in local government and Parliament even I wouldn’t know of if they danced naked in front of me (Paul Henry might enjoy that going on his track record I’d suggest).
We live in ever more polarised times locally and internationally, with online algorithms driving stronger views and reckons by the day. Without being alarmist, there’s no reason Ann Widdecombe’s death couldn’t also be a reality here if we’re not vigilant.
Simon Bridges is the chief executive of the Auckland Business Chamber and was the leader of the National Party from 2018 to 2020. He has also served as the Minister for Transport, Economic Development and Communications. He has also worked as a senior Crown prosecutor in the Tauranga District and High Courts.
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