I glanced about to see if the orange apparition from the White House was making a pronouncement from the upper Octagon, or if Putin, Netanyahu, or members from any known terrorist organisations were lurking nearby.
Nothing, although there were plenty of police (and a paddy wagon) and security staff milling about looking important.
I couldn’t make much sense of the placards outside the Regent Theatre, but I guessed their holders were still bitter about the previous government’s Covid-19 response.
Oh yes, believers. Everything is Jacinda Ardern’s fault.
We would all be gruntled right now if it were not for her prime ministership and her book and her featuring in a movie.
The weather would be great. Carbon emissions would be so low climate change would only be mentioned in conspiratorial whispers between consenting academics.
Food, electricity and housing would be cheap and plentiful. There would be no mad warmongers in positions of enormous power.
Petrol and diesel prices would be low but most of us wouldn’t care because we would be using renewable energy to get around.
The country would be so awash with renewable electricity, just going outside would make your hair stand on end.
Child abuse and child poverty would not exist. Violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, and any other nastiness would have disappeared.
Jobs would be plentiful. So many people would be lining up for roles in our health services we would have to turn them away. Pay equity would be proceeding apace.
The construction sector would be going gangbusters. The tax system would be fair and sufficient to ensure ratepayers were not forced to pay for services which could be better funded by central government.
Water everywhere would not only be swimmable but potable. The state of the environment would be so great, myriad native creatures and plants whose existence was previously threatened would be thriving.
More of us might be dead, of course, and beyond caring about any of this stuff.
I didn’t have too much time to think about it all as I approached the throng outside the theatre waiting for the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival event: Old Friends. One Stage. One Night — Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson in conversation with Stacey Morrison.
Forgive my small-mindedness, protesters, but I was more worried about whether the contents of my red clutch purse would pass muster than anything you were yelling about.
That purse had been pressed into service because my normal handbag was a tad larger than the A 4 size allowed for this event.
To avoid controversy at the bag check, I had discarded my pink extendable back scratcher, my hand sanitiser, my glasses cleaner, my eyedrops, my darning needle (even though once it had come in handy pinning inadequate curtains together during a school lockdown so I and my colleagues could not be observed from outside) and my blue pen with its inbuilt torch (in case someone confused it with a laser pointer).
In normal circumstances, I would have had my knitting on board. A birthday deadline was looming for a grandson’s jersey and I still had two sleeves to knit. I feared my balls of wool might be mistaken for disguised hand grenades, and who knows how much I could run amok with my mauve plastic-coated knitting needles?
But this event was not about me and my comfort or otherwise. I cannot imagine the theatre relished organising bag checks and security officers to sweep audience members with body wand metal detectors.
I would be surprised if Dame Jacinda is thrilled, three years after leaving Parliament, that her appearance in her home country still attracts that level of security.
These measures will not be undertaken on a whim. There must be ongoing threats to her safety which are considered serious enough to warrant them.
In response to Grant Robertson’s wish for her to return home, she assured us that would happen.
But, with a toxic level of online vitriol towards her still evident from the sad, the bad and the mad, and even a recent burning of her book at a pub up north, it is hard to see when she and her family will feel safe enough.
As she told us after the 2019 mosque shootings: "Safety means being free from the fear of violence. But it also means being free from the fear of those sentiments of racism and hate, which create a place where violence can flourish. And every single one of us has the power to change that."
As we hurtle towards the November election, that’s a message for our wannabe leaders and their supporters, but already I’m not confident they all get it.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
