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Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why I have sympathy for Hone Harawira

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Thu, 28 Jan 2021, 5:53pm

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why I have sympathy for Hone Harawira

Author
Heather du Plessis-Allan,
Publish Date
Thu, 28 Jan 2021, 5:53pm

In the end, Hone Harawira did set up his checkpoints up North and it led to police, after some hours, turning up and shutting the thing down. 

Now, I want to be clear.  I don’t endorse checkpoints where anyone stops a vehicle against the law, and I think police have made a massive rod for their own backs by tolerating these checkpoints at the start.  

But, if you heard this show last night, you might well have a bit of sympathy for why Hone Harawira wants to set these checkpoints up and why he might not feel the authorities are being completely straight up. 

At five o’clock when he told us on the show that there were two positive cases in Auckland he’d already known, he said, for three or four hours. 

We called the Ministry of Health and you know what they told us?  They told us something along the lines of ‘we’re sticking with our one o’clock statement from Ashley Bloomfield’. 

I mean that is a cut and dry case of the Health Ministry actively withholding information from us and probably wanting to save it for another 20 hours until the next o’clock Pulpit of Truth briefing.  And when that kind of stuff is happening, it’s hard to tell Hone to trust the authorities. 

And let me remind you why these checkpoints sprung up in the first place.  The very first interview that we ever had on this show about those checkpoints was with Hone Harawira who had set them up because we were in level 4 lockdown or going into it.

The government had told Aucklanders to stay in place and not go the bach, and Auckalnders got in their cars and went to the bach and the cops did nothing to stop it. 

So Hone tried to stop it. 

So while I don’t condone these checkpoints, I understand that Hone Harawira is only setting them up to do the work he thinks the authorities should be doing. 

So instead of having a go at him right now for trying to do this, perhaps we should be asking the Ministry of Health and the police and everyone else in charge why they don’t just do their jobs properly instead of giving him reasons to want to it for them. 

 

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