Playing in the Team of Five Million: Conformity and Nonconformity to the New Zealand Covid-19 Pandemic Response

The New Zealand Covid-19 strategy received praise at home and abroad. However, despite the epidemiological success of the strategy, it amplified social inequalities and exclusion, highlighted existing frustration and mistrust of the government, and in turn produced reactionary forms of conformity and noncompliance as well as prosocial forms of resistance. This article focuses on three types of social responses to the pandemic in New Zealand between 2020 and 2022. It looks at hostile conformity exemplified in antipathy against Pacific Island communities dealing with Covid-19 outbreaks, reactionary noncompliance seen in the anti-mandate protests and parliament occupation, and prosocial resistance to the state’s neglect of Indigenous public health seen in the Māori organized effort to protect communities left out of the pandemic preparedness plans. The article presents a critical understanding of the limits of New Zealand’s Covid-19 strategy and the resulting social responses of conformity and nonconformity.


Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic arrived in New Zealand in February 2020, with community transmission all but confirmed in March 2020 (Radio New Zealand 2021a). Facing a threatening disease comparable to the Flu Pandemic of 1918, the New Zealand government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, took preventative measures such as closing the border to non-residents and citizens, as well as implementing lockdowns and social distancing measures (New Zealand Government 2022b). New Zealanders generally followed the rules. As New Zealand began to loosen restrictions in June 2020, boasting a 1 3 return to normalcy, the Prime Minister won accolades abroad and at home as governments elsewhere struggled to contain the virus and faced noncompliance (Fifield 2020).
Yet, New Zealand is a neoliberal agricultural state that is dependent on trading partners. As such, New Zealand is constrained by capital and labor market concerns at the expense of public health concerns. In fact, in 2022, less than three years since the pandemic began, the government moved from closed borders and public lockdowns to "turning the page." It did away with mask mandates, and even discouraged rapid antigen Covid-19 testing for some cases so as not to strain the labor force (Daalder 2022). Furthermore, the pandemic strategy produced social responses which ranged from compliance with restrictions to destructive noncompliance. Indeed, the projected image of New Zealand as a model society in the fight against Covid-19 conceals troubling social tendencies in the country. The pandemic response revealed the limits of neoliberal settler state care as pandemic relief programs primarily catered to white middle-class families. It also revealed the hostility that underpins social conformity in New Zealand society, where brown and Indigenous peoples are structurally excluded from the imagined community of New Zealanders. Thus, despite the epidemiological success of the pandemic response, it amplified social inequalities and exclusion, highlighted existing frustration and mistrust of the government, and in turn produced reactionary forms of conformity, noncompliance as well as prosocial forms of resistance.
In this article, I analyze the three types of social responses to the pandemic in New Zealand. Specifically, I examine: -hostile conformity exemplified in antipathy against Pacific Island communities dealing with Covid-19 outbreaks in 2020 and 2021. -reactionary noncompliance seen in the anti-mandate protests and parliament occupation in 2021 and 2022. -prosocial resistance to the state's neglect of Indigenous public health seen in the Māori organized effort to protect communities left out of the pandemic preparedness plans in 2020 and 2021.
I do so not to diminish the country's success; rather, I present a critical understanding of the limits of New Zealand's Covid-19 strategy and the resulting social responses of conformity and nonconformity.
To do so, I first offer an overview of social inclusion and exclusion in New Zealand in order to better contextualize its Covid-19 pandemic strategy and social responses. Second, I offer an overview of the public health strategic narrative that framed the government's response to the pandemic as a team-effort taken up by all New Zealanders. Understanding the discursive framing of the Covid-19 strategy is not simply about studying how a policy gains support through rhetorical devices. Rather, studying the discursive framing allows us to understand the connections between the strategic narrative of fighting Covid-19, structural exclusion, and forms of social compliance and resistance. Third, I turn to three case studies to show the social impact of the pandemic-management strategies. I discuss zealous conformity to pandemic restrictions which took the form of hostile othering and dehumanization of communities of color. To illustrate, I look at the social response to the Covid-19 outbreaks in South Auckland in 2020 and 2021. I focus on South Auckland because it is home to Pacific Island communities, which are often subject to tropes of deficit and pathology in political and social discourses. I then draw attention to reactionary nonconformity with pandemic mandates, exemplified by the anti-mandate protests that occurred in 2021 and 2022, to show the destructive impact of neoliberal structural exclusion and neglect. In the final case study, I examine prosocial resistance, seen specifically in the organized Māori effort to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in remote towns. Based on these three examples, I argue that while the Covid-19 response represented a success in mitigating deaths, it revealed oppressive conformist tendencies and called forth social reactions, both reactionary and prosocial, which resist structural exclusion in late modern New Zealand society.
The article aims to contribute to the understanding of structural exclusion, conformity, and nonconformity during the height of pandemic restrictions in New Zealand using the critical criminological lens which connects late modern exclusion and individualization of social risk to socially destructive and constructive forms of resistance (e.g., Young 2007;Pratt 2020). My data come from Covid-19 announcements, webpages, and press releases from the New Zealand government from 2020 to 2022. I also use New Zealand media articles that covered the government's Covid-19 response, Covid-19 outbreaks in the country, and the social responses to the pandemic. These primarily come from major New Zealand news sources, The New Zealand Herald,Stuff,and Radio New Zealand, coverage was digitally available for free. These reports and media articles both provided factual information about the three case studies and served as the objects of discourse analysis of political and media Covid-19 discourse. Below I turn to settler and neoliberal social mores in New Zealand, which allow us to understand the social foundation of the discursive framing and response to Covid-19.

Mores of Inclusion and Exclusion in New Zealand
In his work on punitive populism in New Zealand, John Pratt (2006) examines the founding notion of New Zealand as a "Better Britain" to explain the peculiarly high rate of incarceration in the country. Pratt (2006) notes that popular notions of New Zealand as a friendly and egalitarian country, where class distinctions are muted in comparison to Britain, are connected to other characterizing features of New Zealand such as homogeneity and conformity. In the 19th Century, New Zealand was imagined as the place where people just "got on with it," regardless of ascribed barriers like family lineage. In this image of New Zealand, the harmonious collective is what distinguished colonials from their British counterparts. Yet the same imagined identity rendered difference undesirable (Pratt 2006). "Better Britain" had an underbelly of valorized conformity, ensured through informal and formal mechanisms of social control and hostile exclusion of those who do not fit the mold (Pratt 2006).
Perhaps nothing suggests egalitarianism better than the metaphor of the team, and indeed New Zealanders often imagine themselves as a team. The team metaphor calls on recognizable cultural signs of sport and specifically the All Blacks, New Zealand's national rugby team. The sport of rugby generates and sustains the myth of New Zealand as an egalitarian society, where class and race are put aside in favor of the shared love for the sport (Phillips 1987). The All Blacks signify the New Zealand spirit of collaborative teamwork and offer a metaphor of a society made of "mates" where differences are flattened in favor of a team of New Zealanders (Phillips 1987). Woven into the shared social imagination of the country are strong cultural beliefs in conformity and indistinction that have proved hostile toward difference. The "team" is built on racial social exclusion. The imagined identity of equal citizens cannot be disentangled from the exclusionary colonial foundation of New Zealand. In a state formed through colonial settlements and colonial wars against Māori, a Better Britain was secured by instituting 1 3 the colonial status quo and protecting the economic wellbeing of white settlers. Such policies continue today through measures like land confiscation, and as such embed colonial practice and policy into the fabric of the state (Bargh and Otter 2009). Equally significant in the making of New Zealand is that the state orchestrated a largely covert white immigration policy well into the 20 th century to ensure the racial and cultural homogeneity of New Zealand society along whiteness (Brawley 1993).
As New Zealand pivoted toward neoliberal governance in the 1980s, it was confronted with what Jock Young (2007) calls the chaos of late modernity. Neoliberal governance upended what had once underwritten conformity: Strong (if selective) social welfare was unsettled by the atomization of social life that emerged with the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and social welfare. The material foundation that lent legitimacy to conformity, seen in generous social welfare, receded with the deregulation and privatization of public goods and services. The rupture caused by the neoliberal turn is costly. It generates intense insecurity which, without a robust social response that recognizes people's material and existential vulnerabilities, grows into socially harmful expressions of discontent by those who are "left out/left behind" by the late modern turn (Young 2007, Salman 2014, 2023, and Pratt 2020. In addition, there were progressive cultural and political changes ushered in by Māori organized demands for Indigenous sovereignty and the liberalization of immigration in the late 20th Century, both of which challenged the colonial status quo and further unsettled conformist mores (Pratt 2006;Hill 2009). However, even as the country appears "multicultural" demographically, New Zealand is still largely monocultural. New Zealand society is at best ambivalent about difference. As Moana Jackson (1990) argues, the structures of power are derived from colonial governance, and the dominant cultural norms that underpin New Zealand society and its institutions are very much European. While New Zealand boasts of its tolerance, monoculturalism and structural racism constitute a stubborn force in New Zealand society. They appear in the public sphere in policies which systematically disadvantage Māori, in the hostility against non-European immigrants, and in the retort "we are all New Zealanders" that is often uttered to silence social protest (Jackson 2018).
For instance, in 2006, the government called on "All New Zealanders" to take care of the country's fresh water under the Sustainable Water Programme of Action. The call made use of a metaphor similar to the one used during the pandemic, "New Zealand: 4 Million Careful Owners." Maria Bargh (2008) argued that the government public relations strategy sought to legitimize the crown's commitment to confiscatory policies against Māori. Framing freshwater in terms of individual New Zealand owners decidedly denied Māori customary claims over water. It effectively rendered Māori demands a threat to the security of New Zealand and thus cemented the notion of Māori being a problem (Bargh 2008). Social others, typically non-white, are positioned as social problems, obstacles to national unity and wellbeing. As such, the state and its structures of welfare appear as a benevolent force for white (Pākehā) New Zealanders who make the ideal team members. By contrast, the state is punitive with social others like Māori (Pratt 2006;Bargh 2008).
Therefore, the structures of exclusion in the neoliberal settler state's welfare and criminal justice policies reflect and amplify social hostilities toward non-white New Zealanders. Racial differences found structural exclusion in New Zealand because of the colonial notion of population purity and the neoliberal erosion of social rights. As the late modern turn increasingly collapses the opportunity structure, those already socially excluded confront dire economic exclusion and come to constitute social groups that exemplify social problems, and as such face hostile conformity.

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The social impact of the neoliberal retreat from welfare cannot be overstated. The social mores of conformity still exist but are often in competition with the material and existential uncertainty of the late modern turn. As such, conformity retains a punitive racializing character against social others like Indigenous and immigrant New Zealanders whose vulnerability to racial hostility is exacerbated by structural exclusion. Thus, the value of conformity persists even in the face of late modern shakeup. In times of crisis, conformity takes on a zealous character as the country witnessed numerous backlashes against Indigenous and immigrant communities during the pandemic. I will return to this point below. First, I examine the Covid-19 strategic narrative and policy response of the New Zealand government.

In it Together: A Team of Five Million Fights Covid-19
In February 2020, New Zealand reported its first Covid-19 cases (Radio New Zealand 2021a). The government grew concerned about the pandemic overwhelming the healthcare system, and in March 2020, as most cases were identified at the border, the Prime Minister declared that border closure is extraordinary but necessary to slow down the transmission of the disease. The border closure was supported by most New Zealanders (Neilson 2020; Radio New Zealand 2020a). Furthermore, the Government introduced a four-level Covid-19 Alert Level System, which ranged from Level 1 to Level 4. The Alert Level System was part of the elimination strategy adopted by New Zealand in 2020 and 2021. Each level is based on the risk of community transmission and has corresponding measures of public health mandates and restrictions. At Level 1, the virus is contained, and restrictions are relaxed, while at Level 4, the virus is not contained, and strict measures are in place (New Zealand Government 2022b). On March 25, 2020, the country entered the highest alert level, Level 4, as the government declared a State of National Emergency. New Zealanders were required to shelter in place and work remotely, with the exception of essential services. New Zealand stayed at Alert Level 4 until April 27, before gradually descending to Level 1 by June 2020 (New Zealand Government 2022b). The Alert Level system was terminated in December 2021 as the Covid-19 Traffic Light Protection Framework was instituted. The framework included restrictions on gatherings and vaccination mandates. The framework signaled a policy shift toward mitigation of the pandemic, as New Zealand could no longer pursue the elimination strategy in the face of the Delta and Omicron variants (Frost 2021a). The government assured New Zealanders that it would continue to fight against Covid-19 while also stabilizing the economy against pandemic disruptions (New Zealand Government 2022c). The New Zealand border remained closed to non-citizens and non-residents with some exceptions before reopening in July 2022. The Protection Framework was subsequently terminated in September 2022, as the country sought to "safely turn the page" on Covid-19 (New Zealand Government 2022a).
The sweeping measures raised concerns among the New Zealand public about the government's intrusion on civil liberties in New Zealand (Gillespie 2020). However, assuring New Zealanders, Prime Minister Ardern noted that while for most Covid-19 symptoms would be mild, it was nevertheless important for the country to take public health measures to slow down the transmission to protect those who may experience severe symptoms (Radio New Zealand 2020b). The government's pandemic response was by and large supported by New Zealanders, who generally favored and complied with measures of lockdown (Molyneux 2021). The New Zealand government succeeded in implementing strict measures of pandemic control by establishing an effective narrative about the pandemic that generated social investment in preventing Covid-19. The Prime Minister adopted the role of the public unifier almost every day during the 1 pm daily briefings on the nation's public TV and other government forms of communication alongside the Minister of Health and pandemic response officials. During the first 2020 lockdown, she also livestreamed from her Facebook. Across these platforms, the Prime Minister reassured New Zealanders that they would win the fight against the pandemic, emphasizing the significance of collective compliance with pandemic policies not only for one's own good but for the good of each other (Spary 2020). The Prime Minister's regular appearance in various media generated personal connections and increased overall public trust and compliance (McGuire et al. 2020).
Indeed, while public trust in political leadership was declining globally, the opposite was true in New Zealand. A poll from April 2020 showed that 88% of New Zealand respondents "trust the government to make the right decisions on Covid-19," in contrast to 59% of respondents from G7 countries taking the same poll (Manhire 2020). The government's communication strategy was rhetorically grounded in the ethical duty to protect each other, and the vulnerable in society (Jamieson 2020;Bui et al. 2022). The discourse adopted by the New Zealand Government emphasized the shared risk of Covid-19: We are all in it together. Prime Minister Ardern described New Zealanders as a Team of Five Million that needed to Go Hard, Go Early in the fight against Covid-19, summoning an imagined community of Kiwis who may not know each other personally but who nonetheless have a shared identity and a shared destiny (Anderson 1983). As members of this team, New Zealanders complied with measures of lockdown and social restrictions, while the government instituted various forms of safety net measures to cushion the impact of the pandemic (Moir 2020).
Calling on New Zealanders as a team was part of the government's strategic narrative that intended to generate support for and compliance with the pandemic policies. Narratives are frameworks that imbue institutional actions with meaning. Strategic narratives maintain the status quo through giving political actions legitimacy and meaning; they shore up support (Miskimmon, 2013). Monod de Froideville (forthcoming) argues that the government's strategic narrative in 2020 was designed to evoke feelings of empathy in New Zealanders toward those vulnerable to the disease such as the elderly, concealing the dilapidated state of the national healthcare system. Monod de Froideville does not diminish the threat of the virus. On the contrary, she finds that New Zealand healthcare was at risk of being inundated with critically ill Covid-19 patients-an artificial crisis borne out of chronic underfunding of health care in the country-that in turn called forth a government response to mask successive political failure and deep social inequities while maintaining the political status quo (Monod de Froideville forthcoming).
But the strategic narrative additionally reveals those who are excluded from the metaphorical team. Government public health decisions often left communities out of the decision-making process altogether. The country's founding document, the Te Tiriti/Treaty of Waitangi 1848, mandates a partnership between the Crown and Māori, Crown active protection of Māori, and Māori self-determination (Jacobs 2021a(Jacobs , 2021b. However, the government breached the Treaty in the handling of the pandemic by not following Māori expert calls to ensure that Māori communities were sufficiently and appropriately resourced in the fight against Covid-19. Breaches include the move to the Traffic Light System from the Alert Level System, despite lagging vaccination rates in Māori communities as well prioritizing the vaccination of 65 + age group without age-adjusting for Māori, who are a younger population on average but are at greater risk of infection and death (Jacobs 2021a(Jacobs , 2021b. Furthermore, communities living in poverty were disadvantaged in the government roll out of stimulus packages which sought to soften the economic impact of the pandemic on New Zealanders. The government introduced the Covid-19 Income Relief Payment (CIRP), for those who lost their employment due to Covid-19. CIRP paid $490 a week for 12 weeks for an individual normally working full time. It was not reduced if the individual had a partner whose income is below $2,000 a week or if the individual had accumulated assets (Work and Income New Zealand 2023). CIRP was a generous support package in comparison with the standard Job Seeker Support Payment (the unemployment benefit). The Job Seeker Support Payment pays $250 a week for a single person over 25, a sum which is abated in relation to other sources of income a recipient may have (Tukuitonga et al., 2021). The pandemic policy did not follow expert recommendations on increasing welfare benefits. Instead, it created a two-tier welfare support system. The policy was designed primarily to service middle-class families, while maintaining the stigma of welfare "handouts" for the poor, who often bear the brunt of economic downturns (Tukuitonga et al., 2021). The government employed a discourse of care bereft of equitable and substantive social care and excluded certain groups from the realm of collective responsibility. It failed to rectify deep inequalities in social welfare. It is a failure which disproportionally impacts working-class communities and Māori and Pacific Island communities whose amplified risk of catching Covid-19 does not elicit social support or kindness but blame and scapegoating. Below, I offer an illustration of racist backlash against Pacific Island communities who were blamed and vilified for catching Covid-19 and triggering lockdown measures. 1

Social Reactions to Covid-19 Outbreaks: The Case of South Auckland
On August 11, 2020, a family of four in South Auckland became the first to fall ill without an immediate connection to the border, after a 102-day streak of zero community transmission of Covid-19. In response, the government placed Auckland at Alert Level 3 (New Zealand Government 2022b). The media described the cases as a plunge. New Zealand Herald called it the cluster that "changed everything" (Ward 2020). Stuff reported that the new cases in South Auckland brought the country's zero-Covid-19 momentum "to a grinding halt" (Williams and Guildford 2020). The dramatic coverage lacked the sympathetic language that characterized coverage of previous Covid-19 outbreaks. For example, Pākehā middle-class New Zealanders were among the first cases of Covid-19 in the country, causing the early 2020 outbreaks, including an outbreak at a wedding in the South Island. Media stories focused on the suffering of the families, featuring calls for empathy toward the ill (see Burrows 2020). By contrast, media coverage in this instance shamed the Pacific Island family for catching Covid-19, so much so that the family felt "a little embarrassed" to have fallen ill. They faced growing backlash and were advised to not look at social media commentary (Tapaleao 2020). The coverage of the cluster pathologized the Pacific Island community, burdening them with causing an outbreak and setting the country back into lockdown measures.
Yet media coverage amplified and reflected existing social hostility and racism. It played on the social markers of being from South Auckland and being from the Pacific Islands region. South Auckland spans over southern and south-eastern suburbs of Auckland. It has a significant Pacific Island community, as well as immigrant, Māori, and Pākehā communities. Despite the geographic span and cultural diversity, the term South Auckland is often used to invoke images of social problems like poor health outcomes and high crime rates, which generate racialized knowledge about Pacific Island communities (Brown-Pulu 2014). Systematic analyses of New Zealand media coverage of Pacific Island people conclude that the coverage is typically negative, often amplifying deviancy and disorder. Media discourse follows from and feeds into political and social discrimination against Pacific Island people, where structural problems like inequality are reconstructed as Pacific cultural deficits (Loto et al. 2006).
Identification of the South Auckland family and the August 2020 outbreak followed the same negative script and produced a racist backlash. One social media post that went viral stated falsely that the original Covid-19 case was the daughter in the household, a young single mother living with her parents, who became infected after visiting a deported criminal convict from Australia at a quarantine facility to have sex. The convict gave her large sums of money, which she used to vacation in the North Island. A Pākehā man spread the rumor, which was readily consumed and believed (Farrier and Reeve 2020;Pickering-Martin 2020). To be sure, there was no illicit visit to a quarantine facility. The adults in the family became sick at their places of employment. The family went on a vacation not knowing that they had been infected. The entire story was a lie that exhibited racist tropes. The eroticization of brown women whose sexuality appears out of control and the vilification of a family whose leisure is held in contempt despite earning a living reveal the pervasive othering of Pacific Island communities through constructs of deprivation and laziness (for example, see Suaalii 1997). The rumor persisted even as it was refuted repeatedly by the government (Radio New Zealand 2020c).
However, government officials bear responsibility for the backlash. The dominant characterization of South Auckland as a problem space appeared in the government's decision to ethnically identify the family in an exercise of paternalistic racism. It compromised the family's privacy under the guise of protecting them. Health officials noted that up to this point the Covid-19 risk was concentrated in Pākehā communities; however, the virus is now in Pacific Island communities, who on average are at higher risk of Covid-19 complications making it important to inform the community of shifting risk profile (Tukuitonga 2020). Prominent Pacific Island journalist Barbara Dreaver supported the government's decision because Pacific Island families have a "lifestyle" that increases their vulnerability to the virus, since "it is the Pacific community who are most at risk because of the way we live, interact, work on the frontline and have high rates of underlying health issues contributing to covid-19 deaths" (Dreaver 2020). There are two immediate issues that arise in this narrative. First, government and media reports seldom identify Pākehā communities in outbreaks, and often rely on existing public health support measures at raising community awareness (Meredith 2020). Second, the discourse that framed the outbreak reduced structural issues like occupational risk and underlying health issues to "lifestyle choices" of working in high contact settings and not following health advice. Consequently, the narrative represented the community as incapable of taking care of itself, a dehumanizing representation which inevitably calls forth hostile social reactions.
Despite the backlash, subsequent identification of Pacific Island South Auckland outbreaks continued. In another instance, a Pacific Island church had breached Covid-19 restrictions by holding gatherings. Government officials suggested that the churchgoers were "people who do not follow the science, do not accept that Covid-19 is real" despite the fact the church was organizing Covid-19 testing and Pacific Island communities were testing in large numbers (Giovannetti 2020, also see Pickering-Martin 2021). By contrast, in 2021, several affluent young people held a party in North Shore, a middle-class white suburb in Auckland. Their behavior was explained psychologically in terms of lockdown fatigue and classic human nature self-interest (Radio New Zealand 2021b). There was no mention of Pākehā cultural norms or whether the partygoers understand science. Arguably, the backlash against Pacific Island families reveals hostile conformity, exhibited in the othering tendencies in New Zealand society that render cultural differences transgressive. Accordingly, social problems are construed as being caused by racialized troublemakers who are unable to be part of the team and whose social vulnerability is the result of bad [cultural] choices. The next case illustrates yet another cost of late modern neoliberal social exclusion: Reactionary noncompliance with pandemic measures and mandates.

Anti-Mandate Protests and Convoys Arrive in New Zealand
In December 2021, the country moved from the Alert Level System to the Protection Framework of the Traffic Light System. The Protection Framework included vaccination mandates which afforded greater freedoms in everyday life for vaccinated adults and lesser ones for adults choosing not to vaccinate (New Zealand Government 2022c). As the vaccines were rolled out globally so did the anxieties, and rumors about their safety (Moore et al. 2021). In New Zealand, over 90% of people over the age of 12 have received the full vaccination, excluding booster shots (New Zealand Ministry of Health 2022), indicating remarkably high compliance even among vaccine-hesitant people.
But there was disaffection among a small but perhaps not insignificant number of New Zealanders. The extension of vaccine mandates coupled with continued restrictions on movements during the Delta outbreak in 2021 saw a rise in discontented reactions, some of which took the form of protests, where people demanded ending lockdowns and vaccination mandates, citing their personal liberties and freedom of choice (Frost 2021a(Frost , 2021b. A flow of disinformation about vaccines that preyed on and promoted distrust of the state and contempt for public health measures took hold as New Zealanders spent more time online and in isolation during the pandemic (Hannah et al. 2022). The resistance to vaccinations and lockdowns was diverse in nature. Some expressed concern about the safety of the vaccine but supported lockdown measures while others had followed a path of conspiratorial thinking that linked the vaccine to eugenics, for instance. Nonetheless, it is of interest to understand the underlying causes for mistrusting public health measures which then grew into socially destructive expressions of discontent. Reactionary protests began in earnest in November 2021, but culminated in an assemblage of individuals and groups traveling from towns in the North and the South Island to Wellington, the capitol city, to occupy parliament grounds on February 8, 2022. The police dismantled the occupation on March 2, after 23 days of disruption to the city and destruction of public property. Damages were estimated at over a million dollars (Lynch 2022).
The anti-mandate protests and subsequent occupation of parliament appeared novel and shocking to New Zealanders. Describing the first protests in November 2021, Prime Minister Ardern noted, "What we saw today was not representative of the vast bulk of New Zealanders" (Frost 2021a(Frost , 2021b. Media and political commentary and analyses emphasized the external character of the protests: These are destructive behaviors that appear imported from elsewhere like North America and spurred by hostile international interferences through disinformation campaigns (Gillespie and Breen 2022). The messages and signs circulating at the protests certainly explain the national shock. For instance, signs carried at the protests in 2021 strangely included American signs like Trump and MAGA flags, as well as hyper-local American political references like "Let's go Brandon" (Butler 2021). The occupation of the parliament in 2022 was inspired by the Ottawa Convoy and had seized and replicated the model of occupation and discourse of protest. There, hard to miss were signs and posters referencing the Trucker Convoy even though the parliament occupation in New Zealand was not organized around issues of trucking (Reeve 2022). Researchers examining the online spaces in which the parliament protest was organized noted that the protests in Canada were celebrated on social media, with calls of replicating it on Parliament grounds in Wellington (Hannah et al. 2022). The protests saw conspiracy theories old and new emerge, with some individuals wearing tinfoil hats and others waving signs warning against communism and vaccines, which had also been seen in North America and Europe (McKenzie 2022).
The connection to global protests compels and perhaps supports the immediate repudiation of it as a non-New-Zealand phenomenon, committed by a small number of individuals. Yet, dismissing the protests on this basis risks reifying an image of New Zealand society as innocent, where citizens are a team who work well together. Similar views flourished about the March 15 terrorist attack in 2019, perpetrated by Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant, where refrains like "this is not us" drowned critical voices calling attention to structural and interpersonal racism in the country (Bingham 2022). Indeed, despite the references to Trump and Ottawa, it was New Zealanders who coordinated and participated in these protests. Some participants, including Māori protestors, carried tino rangatiratanga flags, which signify autonomy, to express discontent at mandates they perceived as infringements on their right to self-determination. Other participants carried right-wing and white supremacy flags as well as Trump flags to protest social democratic and inclusive governance. While media images of the protests and occupation of parliament highlighted a puzzling mix of disgruntled people, a fractured assemblage made up of a coalition of losers in the late modern turn, the tendency to externalize threats risks missing an opportunity to understand the internal social factors that feed into socially destructive expressions of nonconformity.
Indeed, the vulnerability of everyday life, made acute by the pandemic, metastasized into a destructive wish for certainty. In the USA, Trump stood for rebellion against the socially restrictive public health measures, but he also rejected the uncertainty of the pandemic by diminishing its seriousness (Shear and Mervosh 2020).Trump's bombastic speech appealed to New Zealanders who have been left out of the neoliberal late modern turn and who do not trust the government to take care of them during the pandemic because it never has. Indeed, the protests cannot be reduced to a group of right-wing agitators. They revealed just how alienated some New Zealanders feel. Their experiences of alienation cannot be disentangled from the country's colonial and neoliberal foundation. The conforming pressures of New Zealand society render discontent deviant, such that the language of dissent may have to be borrowed from elsewhere, with disastrous results in this instance. It is jarring to see Māori flags alongside Trump flags, but such images only reflect the extent of social disaffection of the bearers from the team of five million. But such reactions to state neglect are not inevitable. Below, I turn to the last case study of the varied social responses to the Covid-19 strategy: An organized effort to protect vulnerable communities from Covid-19 that resisted the government's neglect by adopting prosocial measures of Covid-19 prevention.

Māori Organized Response to Covid-19
The government's pandemic response did not protect all New Zealanders equally. As I note earlier in the article, the government's pandemic responses systematically ignored Māori expert advice (Jacobs 2021a(Jacobs , 2021b. In the face of repeated government neglect of Māori concerns, Māori leaders took steps to protect their communities. Instead of waiting for lagging top-down health prevention measures, Māori communities engaged in grassroots community organizing to protect everyone in their communities, including non-Māori (Ngata 2020). Recognizing the disproportionate impacts of pandemics on Māori, communities exercised autonomy as guaranteed by Te Tiriti. The 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 5% of the Māori population, a rate that is more than eight times the rate of Pākehā deaths, served as a warning memory and called attention to the catastrophic effects of structural racism in public health policies (Ngata 2020). Community organizing was a mode of resistance that challenged the government's failure to implement Te Tiriti principles in the Covid-19 response.
Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Māori community organizers were concerned about the flow of disinformation about lockdown measures and the safety of the vaccine. Organizers actively fought the spread of Covid-19 disinformation by engaging with skeptical and anxious community members and promoting expert views of trustworthy Indigenous and non-Indigenous public health professionals (Ngata 2020). Community organizers also set up regional checkpoints to prevent travel from major cities to small towns during lockdowns and prevent the spread of Covid-19 in Māori communities (Ngata 2020(Ngata , 2021. The checkpoints were set up at various points in 2020 and 2021, during periods of lockdowns and high alert levels. The towns that opted for checkpoints differed in characteristics but had similar vulnerabilities in the face of the pandemic, including longterm inequitable access to healthcare. In towns like Wharekahika and Maketu, where there are elderly residents and residents with underlying health conditions who are more vulnerable to severe illnesses, the closest hospital is hours away (Fitzmaurice and Bargh, 2021).
Community volunteers set up checkpoints to restrict the movement of people during the periods of lockdown, particularly to guard against people traveling from Auckland and other major cities to escape lockdown measures and bringing the risk of infection with them. The checkpoints were contested at first, sparking hostile reactions and accusations of illegal restriction of citizens' movements and even vigilantism. One politician described the volunteers at the checkpoints as gang members, a false claim which was debunked by the government (Baker 2020). The checkpoints raised questions of legality but gained the government's support, including the support of the New Zealand Police, in part because the police could not sufficiently guard regional borders against lockdown breaches. It should be noted that the support for the checkpoints represented a rare instance of the government recognizing Māori's right to self-determination in accordance with Te Tiriti (Baker 2020;Stanley andBradley 2021, Fitzmaurice andBargh 2022).
However, I wish to draw attention to the prosocial response to state inability to provide adequate protection during the pandemic. Government support was not consistent, vacillating between endorsement and opposition in 2020 and 2021, and yet nonetheless, Māori communities continued to mobilize when it appeared that their safety and concerns about the pandemic were diminished while the country navigated periods of outbreaks (Piper 2021c;Radio New Zealand 2021c). For instance, in August 2021, as the Delta variant took hold in Auckland, the government put the country on heightened alert. Auckland was moved to level 4, with its borders closed to the rest of the country (which was moved to level 3). Incidents of breaching domestic travel restrictions became more frequent, and Māori communities outside of Auckland became vulnerable to the virus traveling from the city. Although the police set up some checkpoints at regional borders, they did not sufficiently cover at-risk borders, and in response, Māori communities in Northland set up checkpoints (Piper 2021a(Piper , 2021b. The checkpoints offer an illustration of a grassroot organized response to the pandemic that is positive. The response recognized the importance of pandemic measures like quarantine and vaccination. It is a collectivist prosocial response, geared at protecting not only Māori but non-Māori New Zealanders as well. More importantly, it is proactive in ways that resist the hegemonic and ultimately superficial narrative of the team of five million: Māori did not simply wait for lagging assistance. When it became apparent that there was no substantive consultation with Māori on the pandemic response, and especially as the pandemic reached the community transmission phase, Māori communities exercised autonomy, tino rangatiratanga, and bore responsibility to protect the vulnerable and keep the virus from spreading (Fitzmaurice and Bargh 2022).

Discussion
In this article I discussed a range of social responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in New Zealand to trouble the narrative of the united team of New Zealanders as well as the projected image of New Zealand as a model country. Doing so does not negate the success of the epidemiologically oriented approach to curb infection and prevent deaths. However, in this article I point to the limits of care in a neoliberal settler state like New Zealand and the impact of resulting structural exclusion on conformity and nonconformity with pandemic policies.
The South Auckland outbreak in 2020 offers an illustration of social conformity that is grounded in hostility toward others. In this instance, conformity was a social expression of membership in the team fighting Covid-19 which ultimately casts out those who do not seem to be team players by virtue of racialized differences. It is a pattern of conformity present in New Zealand society, resting on founding myths of egalitarianism and population purity that construct difference as a danger to the unity of the country. In August 2020, a family became sick at their place of employment and went on a vacation without knowing they had fallen ill. The media and social reactions were devastating for the family which came to bear the burden of "plunging" the country into a lockdown. They became subject to racist rumors and were shamed for falling ill. The rumors reflected existing racist beliefs about Pacific Island people, despite the government's attempt at dispelling them. It is curious that New Zealanders who largely conformed to pandemic measures diverged from the proscription of kindness to blame and shame the family. However, the discourse of blame is embedded in New Zealand society and indeed in the government's outbreak response itself.
At the outset, the risk profile of Covid-19 was individualized, resting on personal deficit rather than structural neglect. The neoliberal individualization of risk, and therefore social vulnerability to Covid-19, renders living in overcrowded housing or suffering from underlying health conditions lifestyle choices. As such, families in South Auckland who may be struggling with such issues are responsible for bringing calamities upon themselves and others by causing outbreaks. However, working in high contact environments during the pandemic is a structural problem in a capitalist regime where not everyone has the luxury of working from home. Poor health and housing conditions are structural problems produced by successive market-driven governments in New Zealand which neglect social rights like adequate healthcare and housing (Asafo 2020). The distortion of the Covid-19 risk made it a Pacific Island problem rather than a public health problem affecting the "team of five million." In this instance, the spread of Covid-19 was not a diffused shared risk, but an individualized problem.
Furthermore, the pandemic response which presented Covid-19 as an external threat to be managed by closing borders and staying home had the unintended consequence of scapegoating humans. Covid-19 is not an abstraction. It arrives in human populations because of human behavior. The external enemy is made alive by human movement. Covid-19 became the threat of humans carrying the virus. In New Zealand, the fact of the virus mapped onto the cultural tendency to see threats in social others who are "external" to New Zealand: "We" fight an "other." Rather than bringing the country together to support the South Auckland community, the outbreak called forth punitive reactions against the Pacific Island community who became the "other" in the fight against Covid-19. By contrast, the sympathy to white New Zealanders catching Covid-19 reflects the entrenched belief that the team of five million is ultimately a selective team founded on a shared notion of "us" that is grounded in whiteness. Social exclusion is costly for communities who are constantly expected to demonstrate their New Zealand identity, such as the Pacific Island community reckoning with vitriol during the pandemic. Social exclusion is also costly because of the destructive tendencies it calls forth as we witnessed in the occupation of parliament grounds in 2022.
The protests alarmed the country because they appeared to be dominated by reactionary right-wing groups. To be sure, there is a concerted effort by right-wing groups to seize the moment of Covid-19 anxiety and coopt the language of freedom to accelerate social chaos. For right-wing anti-government actors, as noted by Hannah et al. (2022), tactical messaging about government mandates is part of a larger long-term strategy to normalize anti-democratic right-wing dissent. As such, security measures are necessary to track and respond to right-wing extremism, but they are not sufficient at preventing its growth. The appeal of these movements lay in their ability to distort late modern experiences of loss, like the loss of economic and existential security (Young 2007), by accusing minority groups of usurping limited state resources from their rightful owners, hardworking [Pākehā] New Zealanders. More importantly, right-wing extremists deploy tropes that are grounded in mainstream New Zealand political and social discourses which already pathologize minorities and present them as burdens on the country, as noted in this article.
The uncertainty of Covid-19 is discombobulating for people trying to manage the health and economic risks of the pandemic alone, which in turn amplifies exposure to disinformation (Pratt 2020). In late 2021, as the pandemic wore on, pre-existing social inequities and social isolation were worsened by on and off lockdowns for those who do not occupy middle-class jobs. Low-income families whose jobs were not protected could not keep up with the rising cost of living and grappled with inadequate social safety net programs (Hickey 2021). For some who are economically imperiled in a state that seems to care little about them, the protest was a reflection of social alienation. For instance, some Māori protestors waved sovereignty flags, an oddity when seen alongside white supremacist flags. In this instance, frustration and mistrust of the government animated their protest. Māori protestors exhibited low trust in the government's pandemic response because of chronically poor access to healthcare and the general carelessness the government exhibits toward Māori. Māori protestors came from communities that exist in healthcare deserts, where the nearest hospital is distant and in disarray (Olley 2021).
Therefore, one must resist conflating committed right-wing extremists with other protestors whose experience of pre-Covid-19 government neglect may have weakened their trust in institutional public health measures. In a democratic society the government has a duty to counter extremist messaging by adopting a socially inclusive discourse that fosters mutual recognition, instead of scapegoating and social othering. Messaging around disasters like Covid-19 should not place the risk on individuals and should not present vulnerable citizens as burdens. But this is insufficient: The state also has a duty to protect citizens against economic peril in times of peace and times of disaster. To counter experiences of material loss brought by the ebbs and flows of capital, the government has a duty to institute welfare policies that promote economic and social dignity for everyone in New Zealand, not just the middle-class. These are necessary measures not only to prevent the growth of violent right-wing extremism, but also to regain the trust of communities that have long been left out of the gains of progress.
To be sure, the Māori response to the pandemic strategy was diverse, and this group represents one response among many. As pandemic measures remained exclusive of many communities, New Zealand saw communities coming together too. The spirit of mutual aid witnessed in the Māori organized response to Covid-19 shows an inclusive path forward as upheavals like pandemics become more frequent. Skeptical about the government's ability to provide for Māori communities, many leaders took a community-based approach of providing care and in that sense resisted hegemonic narratives of unity that are bereft of material and mutual recognition. The Māori organized response to Covid-19 offers a blueprint for community mutual aid that resists the neglect of the state through a politics of collectivity and abundance.

Conclusion
Despite the epidemiological success in combating Covid-19, New Zealand faced similar issues to other neoliberal settler countries beset by the pandemic. The New Zealand government's appeal for unity in the face of Covid-19 echoed neoliberal and settler notions of social inclusion, which often leave out Indigenous and brown communities and communities living in poverty. While it is commendable that most New Zealanders followed the government's public health measures, the high rate of conformity should not obscure the diverse range of responses to the pandemic. The New Zealand pandemic strategy could not prevent hostility and antipathy against social others, whose otherness was amplified by their vulnerability to Covid-19, as was shown in the social reactions to the Covid-19 outbreaks affecting Pacific Island communities.
Furthermore, the emphasis on the national unity of the team of five million fails to see the social divisions and social inequalities in our society. The result is an inability to understand just how alienated and aggrieved some New Zealanders feel in the friendly but ultimately neoliberal settler state. While right-wing extremist groups pose an immediate threat to the New Zealand way of life and as such their actions are egregious beyond repair, New Zealanders must reckon with the structural exclusion of citizens in late modern New Zealand whose deep alienation is coopted and transformed into reactionary resistance. Structural exclusion calls forth destructive resistance, which is likely although not inevitable. In response to a careless state, Māori leaders assumed the responsibility of protecting communities from Covid-19 in the absence of adequate government measures. Through community organizing, Māori communities offer an example for prosocial resistance to structural exclusion. Indeed, the organized Māori response offers a blueprint for resisting economic and symbolic exclusion through mutual aid.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.
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