Remember when politicians used to kiss babies and do walkabouts?

Tracy Watkins is Sunday Star-Times editor.

OPINION: Remember when election campaigns used to happen on street corners and shopping mall walkabouts? When politicians used to front for meet-the-candidate meetings and kiss babies for the cameras?

We’ve always taken it for granted that our politicians are accessible to the person on the street.

I remember trailing former Labour leader David Cunliffe around a shopping mall in Christchurch. He attracted so little attention from shoppers that in desperation he thrust his hand out to an elderly woman who had been taking a breather on a bench.

Cunliffe needed something to show the trail of media and cameras that he was connecting with voters. I can still see the look of panic on the woman’s face.

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But I also remember the thousands who turned out to see John Key at a Lower Hutt shopping mall. They hung off balustrades and Key barely made it more than a few metres inside the door because of the crush of bodies.

He was late that day because he diverted to Parliament to announce Judith Collins had resigned over a Dirty Politics scandal. But it didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind to call the shopping mall visit off.

Looking back, that seems naively trusting.

Even in 2017, the last campaign I covered as a political journalist, shopping malls and candidate meetings were the norm.

This year’s campaign will be fought in a very different country.

A public meeting in Hamilton last week is a peek into the madness that awaits. Hundreds of conspiracists took over the meeting, claiming citizens’ arrests of Hamilton’s deputy mayor and other councillors. Elected representatives were booed off the stage and shouted down as cowards by a 400-strong mob that had earlier chanted that Jacinda Ardern was a witch, then took to the stage to deliver rambling conspiracy theories about urban planning. Yes, that’s correct – urban planning.

After succumbing to bizarre theories about lizard people, 5G and Covid-19 vaccines, followers of misinformation outlets like Counterspin Media – which was one of the groups at the Hamilton protest – are now fearmongering over so-called 15-minute (or 20-minute) cities.

The urban design concept is supposed to promote sustainable and healthy living by encouraging the growth of neighbourhoods where residents can access everything they need – shops, schools, parks, health care etc – within a 15- or 20-minute radius by foot or bike.

But protests have been springing up around the globe against what some see as a plot to take away cars and exert control over populations.

Some of the more bizarre claims are that the cities are a plot to divide up towns and cities and people will be required to apply for a permit to leave their zone. Others liken them to open-air prisons.

The problem is not what the conspiracists believe – it’s not a crime to believe kooky claims – but that they are determined to promote their beliefs at the expense of the right of others to hear from and meet their elected representatives.

In so doing, they pose a danger not just to the politicians they seek to disrupt, but also the genuinely interested who might turn up. (Though scenes like those at Hamilton are likely to deter those with genuine reasons from making the effort.)

The danger is we end up with a canned election campaign, where most of the action will take place on your TV or laptop screens, or in carefully-managed photo ops and stunts with minimal spontaneous public appearances.

Let’s hope that’s not the case. But it’s hard to see how to avoid it; the alternative is a lot of ugliness on the campaign trail including, potentially, physical confrontation, during an election which is already looking likely to further divide us.

It has become increasingly difficult to hold a rational debate on sensitive or emotive issues, not just online, but in the free-for-all of a public meeting.

Witness the rabid scenes at meetings up and down the country over Māori place names. How did we get to the point as a country where people feel so violently about an issue like this?

Let’s add it to the list of things we’ve lost.