Council Listens to Anti-Mandate Group
Update: Our poll closed and results below.
Letters to the Mayor and Deputy Mayor have been circulating for weeks from those opposed to vaccine mandates, and now the council has agreed to review its vaccination-only policy.
There has been ongoing confusion about whether young people (12-18) still need to be vaccinated to enter council-owned facilities such as Splash Palace and Stadium Southland, when the Education Minister has said they shouldn’t be excluded from sport.
Chris Hipkins has since publicly stated that more information would be soon available to make this decision more clear.
Everything came to a head on Wednesday when Nobby Clark was sent a text from a mother saying if council didn’t drop the vaccination-only status on March 1, then a small group opposed would be waiting outside with some letters to be collected.
(Note: our poll has closed) Results were:
The Deputy Mayor and Sir Tim Shadbolt agreed to meet with the group, comprising of 40 to 50 mothers, fathers and grandparents, and spent two hours discussing the issue – which at times he said became aggressive and heated.
“I don’t agree with them and what they are saying but we need some common ground.”
One mother said her competitive swimmer teenage son was unable to access the pool and felt discriminated.
Other Southland councils were still allowing unvaccinated people inside their venues, but Invercargill (and Queenstown Lakes + Central Otago) were not.
“As a mother, auntie, mentor to many teens and a business owner in Southland who speaks to the public about these issues every day, I am really concerned about the impact this division/exclusion is having on the mental health and physical health of our youth, as well as parents/grandparents of our community,” she said.
The group believes the current policy is now outdated due to the Omicron variant being endemic such as the flu.
Nobby said in recent weeks since the beginning of the Wellington protest and other smaller ones around the country, there has been a significant increase in offensive tagging on council buildings – relating to the mandates, and that was hugely concerning.
“One of them said ‘Mandates equal Hitler,’ and it’s just gone too far. If it gets to that level, you just lose sight of any clear message,” he said.
Although council has agreed to review its vaccination policy in early April, Nobby said at the end of the day, they followed advice from the Ministry of Health, not the Ministry of Education.
“We told them in December we’d review the decision in the New Year so we have to honour that. But I think we need to get past the spike, and our spike in Southland could happen a bit later than everywhere else.”