Dunedin meeting shut down after Scouts ‘misled’

Scouts NZ chief executive Chris Hooper said the volunteers who run the Victoria Rd centre in St Kilda took the booking in good faith and were none the wiser it had been made by Stop Co-Governance.

“Members of the public made us aware over social media, just before it kicked off, the true intent of the booking,” he said.

“Some of our volunteers went down there, cancelled the booking with immediate effect, and asked them to leave because it doesn’t align with their values, and the values of the organisation,” he said.

Hooper said the volunteers are devastated and wouldn’t have made the booking if they had known what it was aligned with.

“The three volunteers acted quickly and shut it down,” he said.

In a blog on the Stop Co-Governance website, the group’s founder and director Julian Batchelor said the scout hall was almost at capacity when the meeting started at 4pm – “the vibe was there…and we all thought we were in for a great time”.

Just before the meeting, he wrote, about 30 protesters gathered at the entrance with loud hailers, and after the door was closed one or two got inside and were soon ejected.

Batchelor said 20 minutes into his presentation, the local scout association burst into the hall announcing in a loud voice the meeting was over.

He criticised the actions of the scouts and the police, who, he said allowed people to enter a private meeting.

One of the counter-protesters said members of the community came out against the anti-co-governance tour “organised by Julian Batchelor to promote racist misinformation which frames Māori culture as an enemy of the public”.

The person said the event was advertised publicly, going so far as to drop notices in people’s letter boxes.

“We were disappointed to see the police take a stance of enabling the hate speech to continue, and for Julian Batchelor and others to be free to make false claims about Māori people with no accountability,” the person said.

Batchelor said the venue for the meeting was booked by a lower South Island member of Stop Co-Governance, whom The New Zealand Herald has contacted for comment.

The meeting had initially been booked at another venue, in Hillside Rd, before the owner cancelled the booking.

The police had no comment today about their role at the meeting.