Look I've got to agree with Winston Peters, I think Trevor Mallard has lost the plot.  

I cannot actually believe that he believes that it's ok to trespass Winston Peters from parliament for two years.  

It's not because it's Winston Peters – it's not because I have a soft spot for Winston Peters – and it's not even really about what we think about Winston Peters.  

It's about the fact that he's a former Deputy Prime Minister of this country for god's sake, and he's not allowed to go to Parliament for two years because Trevor decided.  

What did Winston do wrong?  

He turned up to the protest. He went to the protest as a politician, talked to the protesters for maybe an hour. He didn't pitch a tent, he didn't dig up cobblestones to throw at police, he didn't set tents on fire, so what are the reasons for trespassing him?  

And by the way, I feel much the same about the fact that a similar trespass notice might be coming for former ACT Party MP Stephen Franks. Who was told by Trevor Mallard to expect one when he ran into him at a restaurant.  

Again – his crime seems to have been popping in to have a geez at the protest.  

I can understand the logic behind trespassing some people, it seems to me logical to trespass someone from your property if you have reason to believe that they're going to continue causing trouble there.  

But does anyone actually believe that Winston Peters and Stephen Franks are going to continue causing trouble at the parliament grounds?  

Even if you believe they caused trouble in the first place – which they didn't – I think most of us can understand that that protest was probably one of a kind.  

It was a reflection of a really difficult set of circumstances and heightened anger during a once in a lifetime pandemic.  

I don't think many of us expect we'll see a protest like that ever again or at least in the near future. So, why the need to trespass the pair of them, what's the risk that they pose?  

Trevor needs to accept that people are allowed to protest even if it upsets his feelings – that's how democracy works.  

Now, of course, there were people in the crowd that should have been trespassed, and those are the people who were lighting the fires and throwing the bricks at the cops and whatnot. But they were not the people who were simply there to have a conversation or to show support in a peaceful way.  

Now question is, of course, what is Trevor going to do now? He's picked out the people he recognises. Is he going to scour all the CCTV to see if there is someone else's face he recognises?  

He is currently trying to spin this story that he's not actually responsible for these trespass notices, that it was parliamentary services who issued the notices. But even his mate Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister, says he can't delegate those powers to parliamentary security.  

There's good reason to doubt his story because as Stephen Franks says he got a warning in a restaurant by Mallard himself – that suggests to me that Trevor Mallard knows very well what was going on and was more involved than he says he was.  

These trespass notices are outrageous and they need to be withdrawn immediately.