Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Just shy of three years ago I was stopped on my way to work by a man who yelled at me that I had to stop what I was doing at the UN—before fracturing my eye socket with his fist. Now I know that there are many members of this House who have been assaulted at some point in their lives so I know that colleagues will know what I mean when I say that time seems to slow down in those moments. And you seem to be able to get a great many thoughts through your head in the time that it takes from standing up to lying down.And one of the thoughts that crossed my mind in that moment was what he might have meant. One possibility: that he was connecting my work as climate change Minister to the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory. Another was that he was worked up about the UN migration pact which had been the subject of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign over that summer—a campaign which was driven largely out of Russian internet troll farms and had managed to find its way into mainstream political discourse even here in Aotearoa. Either possibility has the same root cause.Twenty-nine hours later 51 people were killed and another 40 injured at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist in Christchurch. It's apparent that the terrorist spent a great deal of the time over the course of his life in the dark recesses of the internet where his grievance his entitlement and his hate metastasised into the evil fantasies that drove him to kill so many people. The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January last year was fuelled by the misinformation and disinformation campaigns of far-right and proto-fascist movements aimed at destabilising and fracturing society and causing and creating the conditions for authoritarians like Trump and Vladimir Putin.The doubts about vaccines mandates and other elements of the public health response were seeded by the same actors. Those doubts actually manifested as public policy in a number of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of more deaths than otherwise may have occurred. The protest on the Parliament lawn over the past few weeks was not an isolated event nor was it new and nor was it unique to us. But it did happen here and those were New Zealanders out the front. New Zealand has remarkable levels of social cohesion which has enabled us to get through the pandemic so far with one of the lowest mortality rates in the world. But there is another virus—another global pandemic—which we with our breezy She'll be right" attitude have almost no immunity to.Now there will undoubtedly be a range of inquiries into the protests over the coming months to see what could be done better when—or if—there is a next time. Could the police have intervened earlier or differently? Should Parliament have a wall around it? Is it ever OK to play Barry Manilow? But these questions are all about how we treat the symptoms. What I'm interested in is preventing the disease from overtaking us in the first place.I do want to acknowledge the people of Wellington my city for their patience and forbearance over the past three weeks. It hasn't been easy but we have stood together. I want to acknowledge the police in particular who put themselves into harm's way and had to put up with sustained abuse for three weeks and yet still worked to ensure a resolution with as little violence as was possible. I want to acknowledge the fire and emergency services Wellington Free Ambulance and Parliament security for their work on the front line. I note that the first person to run out with a fire hose yesterday sheltered by police under their riot shields in the 10 minutes before the fire trucks arrived was Mitch Knight the deputy chief executive of Corporate Services at the Parliamentary Service. Mitch wasn't the only member of staff who went well beyond the call of duty over the past few weeks—and well beyond his professional background as an accountant—but he does embody the service and the bravery of everybody who did.I also want to acknowledge the journalists the photographers and the camera operators who put themselves in harm's way to bring the story of the protest to the public. Like the police and others they suffered abuse physical threats and the virus itself. Way to go.Yesterday the grifters and the charlatans the political opportunists and the white supremacists who were behind the protest melted away like cowards and abandoned the field to the desperate people that they'd led astray. I can only hope that they will be held accountable for their part in all of this and that we can find a way as a country to immunise ourselves against their malign impact in the future. A friend sent me this this morning: "I walked across the snowy plain of the tiergarten—a smashed statue here a newly planted sapling there with its red flag flapping against the blue winter sky. And on the horizon the great ribs of a gutted railway station like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself: this can happen to any city to anyone to you.""