Pick up a phone, Prime Minister

Jacinda Ardern needs to put an end to the ‘‘talk to the hand’’ approach she’s taken each time Groundswell organisers Bryce McKenzie and Laurie Paterson have sought a meeting.

After two nationwide protests Groundswell has demonstrated that it has sufficient representational credentials to deserve some actual dialogue.

The protestors’ frequent ‘‘are you listening?’’ messages weren’t a taunt. Theirs was a question that only gains legitimacy with each rebuff.

Ardern seems to be taking the approach that it’s a waste of time talking with them because their views are too entrenched and closed-minded.

But it’s her Government that seems to be the side with its fingers in its ears.

None moreso than Economic and Regional Development Minister Stuart Nash.

In Parliament, he professed to be unclear about what Groundswell really stood for, based on what he’d read on its website – ‘‘a mixture of racism, anti-vax, et cetera’’.

Granted, some more diligent moderating of Groundswell’s online sites wouldn’t have gone amiss, though these people do have one or two other chores to be seeing to during the course of a day.

The ranks of the protesters have, to a degree, been unhelpfully augmented by unrelated anti-vax protest.

And also some nauseating ultraright QAnon-style bandwaggoners.

Some of those signs that were waved around during the most recent protests were abusive, and others flat-out racist.

Some of the offenders were confronted and asked to leave, though appeals from the organisers to ‘‘resist provocations’’ may have restrained many of the majority from being quite as forthright as they might otherwise have been.

But was Nash truly confused? Let’s assume that he wasn’t just mischievously muddying the waters by deliberately inflating the significance of a minority of clingons around the edges of what is a heartland mobilisation.

In which case he must be he must be content to remain bewildered. He hasn’t lifted a finger to clarify things.

On Wednesday Groundswell delivered a weighty stack of more than 8000 letters to Parliament. Nash received an invitation, but to no avail. His office later said he was unavailable ‘‘due to diary pressures’’.

All right. When is the next gap in his diary?

The way he represented Groundswell’s makeup – relegating all but anti-vaxers and racists to ‘‘et cetera’’ status – led to calls for an apology which has not been forthcoming. And the PM has declined to prompt him to do so.

All those letters, by the way, were generated by Groundswell’s Enough is Enough website and addressed to the PM, Climate Change Minister James Shaw and Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor, whose office said his team would read and process them ‘‘in the same way all correspondence to a minister is processed’’.

Given the emphatically dismissive treatment that the Government has shown at every turn to the Groundswell movement, the implication that other correspondence will be handled with the same reception that awaits those letters is not, necessarily, reassuring to the wider community seeking to raise other issues.

Look, if Ardern and some Groundswell representatives were to meet, it’s not particularly on the cards that ne side or the other will wind up slapping themselves on the forehead and saying ‘‘Oh, now I get it, yes, you’re quite right . . .’’

But that doesn’t render it a pointless exercise. Even if neither side budges there might be a little bit of enhanced understanding. A few plain questions, plainly answered.

At very, very least, one thing that we could reasonably expect is that a meeting would put an end to a sense of gratuitous rudeness that has arisen.