Politicians who burst bubbles

Tauranga is a pleasant city, with some of the nicest beaches and sunniest weather in the country, but it can often feel like it’s very far from the action, which is why it is easy to forgive Opposition leader Simon Bridges for his long, lonely commutes to work in the capital.

The question of whether it is necessary for Bridges to drive for more than six hours, a distance of around 520km, to chair the Epidemic Response Committee during the national lockdown arose in the wake of Health Minister David Clark’s sudden demotion.

Clark broke the lockdown rules and not once, but twice. To mangle the famous Oscar Wilde quote, Clark’s first breach, which saw him drive 2km to go for a bike ride, seemed misguided but trivial. A second offence committed earlier, involving a drive to a beach 20km away, looked like foolishness, and no-one argues with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pushing Clark to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings.

Only the all-consuming seriousness of a health crisis, during which Clark has somehow had little public presence, has allowed him to keep the health portfolio for now. But he is widely seen as a placeholder whose political career is finished once the Covid-19 crisis is over.

The Bridges story is very different. Bridges didn’t burst his Tauranga bubble for his own amusement but to deliver an essential service.

While the six-hour drive through the centre of the North Island would be less hellish with so little traffic on the roads, no-one would prefer to be away from home and a young family during this crisis.

Aside from the politics, there is public interest in the definitions of essential travel, given that police are set to crack down on errant drivers over Easter weekend, but the criticism of Bridges’ travel has been largely tribal. Labour supporters, upset that one of their own has fallen so spectacularly, want to pin the label of hypocrisy on the other side. But, as noted, the cases are too different for that to stick.

Besides, Clark was criticised for being at home in Dunedin during the crisis rather than in a war room in the capital. We can’t equally expect the chair of the Epidemic Response Committee to do everything by Zoom.

The committee has performed effectively in the absence of a Parliament during the lockdown. It was during one of the committee’s online meetings, broadcast to all, that Clark confessed that he had ‘‘stuffed up’’, the epidemiologist David Skegg called for quarantines at the border, and speakers for vital industries such as tourism have revealed the economic cost of the lockdown.

During a time of social distancing, the committee has made the business of politics unusually intimate. We certainly learn more than we do watching Question Time.

As Bridges told RNZ, Wellington is ‘‘where it happens’’. But it must be said that a couple of his reasons for driving to work rather than working from home were less convincing. Bridges backtracked on a claim that his internet in Tauranga only works half the time but then argued that one of the reasons he needs to be in the capital is to see the press gallery.

We can be pretty sure that the press gallery already has Bridges’ phone number. The reality is that he did not need to make feeble excuses for his essential travel.

Bridges didn’t burst his Tauranga bubble for his own amusement but to deliver an essential service.