This three-minute clip has been the basis of a surge in opinion polling for the Justice Party, which is to appeal to the voter who favours abortion.
Here is the moment in which Kellie Ambrose attempted to board a flight in November 2011 in Gisborne, New Zealand. The protest was for medical abortions, with Ambrose not wanting to comply with the new “three-person rule” on boarding flights. In the video, she says to an attendant, “If I had my baby alive… I wouldn’t fly with you… If you fly with me, I’m going to kill myself”.
After video footage of her protest went viral, Ambrose resigned as spokesperson for the New Zealand Electoral Commission and sought custody of her daughter. This was a brief story for the local press, after which Ambrose disappeared completely from the media spotlight, save for a fleeting appearance at an Anti-Abortion Day rally a few months later.
In New Zealand and several other countries, it is an offence to participate in an “unlawful assembly” (in Australia, that is to say to blockade a road) except with the consent of police or an official or servant of a certain authority. The representatives of this authority can be “a person who is employed, or similarly acting, in the public service, the power to deploy police, certain higher civil servants, or public or private judicial officers; an official or servant of a certain authority”.
So, the attitude of this police authority was: “No, we do not want these people on our airlines,” and, in the footage of the protest, it is clear that the attendant on the Air New Zealand flight is informed by the sort of official who can invoke powers of deployment to prevent someone from boarding their plane.
Legitimate hands-on employers often have to choose between “who gets to fly on our planes” and legitimate forms of work. There is always tension between what is consistent with reasonable workplace behaviour and what is reasonable to expect in private freedom of thought and expression. When you see that a government agency has the power to decide which voices it is going to allow to be heard (and which voices are just “wild emotive”, which voices are “a noise nuisance”, and which voices are “abnormal” and will just jeopardise the “excellent” standard of “awareness and respect”), it is difficult to see how it cannot also interfere with speech that is supposedly “abnormal”.