March for ‘Democracy’…an utter failure

It has to be said that four to five thousand people marching through Queen Street in central Auckland is not a number to be sniffed at…unless you have stated you want to try to achieve a march of 50,000 as Colin Craig, march sugar daddy, stated in many interviews leading up to the event.

The organizers of the march threw numbers around before the event, like 87% of the population wanted the anti smacking law changed, 1.4 million people voted against the anti smacking law…more than voted in John Key…so it would only be fair to demonstrate back to Mr. Craig, through the medium of statistics (and maybe the odd opinion) how this was not only NOT "the biggest march in New Zealand's history", but an utter failure if we are indeed a country on the brink of losing our Democracy.

We could get pedantic and show how many people 5,000 is against the population, or even the number of people who voted ‘No’ in the recent referendum…but not all those people had access to the march due to their location. We could measure the 5,000 against the population of Auckland…but Aucklanders are latte sipping liberals, who won’t even turn up to see the best provincial rugby team in the world…well in the 80’s that is. So let’s measure it against the expectations of Mr. Craig himself, the benchmark he set for success, and the initial reaction of the organising team for this march.

It was reported on Newstalk ZB, on the 3pm news, that the initial reaction to the number of people by the march organisers was ‘disappointing’, but by the time the speeches rolled around it was described as a huge success, never let the reality of the actual turn-out get in the way of a good pre-prepared speech ah? But for anyone to say that one tenth the number of what was the target is successful….is either lying…or a lunatic…maybe both.

Let’s measure that.

If you were a cricket player, and aimed to score 1000 runs over a season…and only scored 100, the season would be a failure. If you wanted to sell your house for $400,000 at a no-reserve auction, and only made $40,000, that would also be a failure. Achieving 10% of your stated intention or aim is a failure.

I can take from this one of three things, either Democracy is alive, safe and well in NZ, Kiwis are just too apathetic to care that their democracy is being eroded away, or most probable, the masses stayed away from this march as it had nothing to do with Democracy, or referendum, it was a protest by people angry that Section 59 or the crimes act has been amended.