Diana Wichtel
Jacinda Ardern is fronting the Covid-19 fallout better than some world leaders.
Cancelled. After the events of March 15 last year, there was carping about “virtue signalling” when the Prime Minister and other women wore a hijab as a mark of solidarity. The television coverage rose above the static, deferring to a community dealing with unthinkable trauma with extraordinary grace. The result was some of the most deeply affecting television we’ve seen.
A year later and the memorial service for the mosque attacks was cancelled as the world shut up shop. By then, people with vulnerable family members or who see what’s happening in Italy or who understand the meaning of the word pandemic had grown weary of hearing that we are “hysterical” for “panicking” about Covid-19, which is “just the flu”.
You only have to power up a screen to see causes to, well, panic, even apart from National MP David Bennett’s “you should be out there panic buying” radio blurt. “I must level with you … Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Scary. A Harvard University epidemiologist slammed the even scarier plan he discerned in official announcements, which talked of building “herd immunity”. His colleagues in the US, he wrote in the Guardian, “assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed”.
A harsh call from one who has to contend with Donald Trump. See the US President take a press question about the disbanding on his watch of the White House pandemic office: “Well, I just think it’s a nasty question … When you say, me, I didn’t do it. I don’t know anything about it.” The dog has been devouring his homework again. Yet on a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump can be seen with CDC staff, chuntering modestly: “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
On March 15, Jacinda Ardern put on a better show, taking questions on the Government’s tough new travel restrictions. On Q + A, Jack Tame paddled hard to keep up. He asked about avoiding large-scale community spread. Ardern said that was the goal but there would be more cases. Tame: “The language has changed there.” Ardern: “No, it hasn’t.” Tame: “Yesterday, you said it’s not realistic for New Zealanders to have only a handful of cases.” Ardern: “Which is exactly what I said.”
It was a steely performance. The carpers have gone a bit quiet. Busy sanitising their hands, possibly. None, bar some usual Twitter suspects, have matched an excruciatingly misfired attempt to look on the bright side by a Telegraph columnist: “… from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependants”. Ye Gods.
To refresh your soul, watch locked-down Italians singing together, apart, on their balconies. Or the press conference in which media learnt the virus-repelling “East
Coast wave” from Ardern: “I just gave it with such subtlety you didn’t even notice.”
On Q+A, Tame asked Ardern about Christchurch. In the absence of the service, did she have a message? She’d been with the Muslim community, she said. Rather than give her own message, she passed on what the imams of the mosques had told her: “They want New Zealanders to remember through acts of kindness, through change, through doing something for others. Let that be the way we honour those who were lost.” This served as good advice in a time of pandemic: wash your hands, maintain social distance, wash your hands, take care of each other.
Q+A, TVNZ 1, Sunday 9.00am.
See Trump take a question about the disbanding on his watch of the White House pandemic office. “It’s a nasty question.”