Convoy, part 2

There's a new convoy driving through the country at the moment, and this time it's heading not for parliament, but to Marsden Point. Yep, a bunch of cars (and, from what I can tell, no actual trucks) are heading to Marsden Point for Operation Gaslight. The last report in their Facebook group stated that they've amassed 16 cars, two horse floats and a motorbike.

The cars grouped at Silverdale Park in Auckland yesterday morning, and are making their way up to Marsden to try to stop the shutdown of the oil refinery. From what I understand of the site, it's unlikely they'll be allowed on site in the first place to cause trouble, and the company running the site has said that they are “working with police to ensure any activity around the site did not disrupt operations or affect staff safety”.

It seems that the idea that our refining capability needs to be preserved is a new focus of the same protesters that spent a long time at parliament, now that many of the mandates they were protesting against have been removed. And there are several recognisable names pushing people into this protest, including Brad Flutey.

I suppose that, although a couple of dozen vehicles isn't much, it's more than the NZ Unite team have managed for their two weeks of protests. They've been averaging maybe a dozen or so protesters each day, which has to pretty demoralising. Here's a picture Bronwyn took on Friday of their Civic Square protest, which seemed to get as far as Unity Books and just stop: