The success story is fraying at the edges
The Government’s real ability to run anything, far less a country in a crisis, has been masked for the past six weeks or so because, basically, we don’t have a government.
We have the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, and the director general of health.
The advantage of that is that all the stuff that was going wrong for them last year, the year of delivery, the ineptness of KiwiBuild, the slowing of the economy, the borrowing programme that had started due to all the money being spent, the record queues for social housing, the extraordinary increase in Jobseeker claims despite a veritable smorgasbord of work, was now on the back burner if not forgotten. They could in a sense, start afresh. That’s why you saw a lot of beatification of Jacinda Ardern. She was back in her happy place, the boss of everyone, able to hand out smiles, kindness and vast generalisations without too much pesky follow up questioning.
The success of the lockdown, even though it came too late and was messed up through a lack of quarantine, enabled them to fudge their way to global recognition as far as “crushing the curve” was concerned. Sadly for them, those days are fast fading.
Turns out we aren’t going to eliminate the virus after all.
What we missed over these past few weeks is that the Prime Minister passed her medical papers and became an epidemiologist and started talking to us in medical-speak.
Elimination is not what we thought it was.
We were thinking of the other medical term — eradication — and she never used that word.
Sort of in the same way she was “utterly consistent” a couple of weeks into lockdown, when she had told
butchers and greengrocers that they could trade if they were online, that was despite hearing it for what most butchers and greengrocers could have sworn was the first time ever, and there seemingly being no real evidence she had ever been consistent on it at all.
The PPE — and flu jab — saga deserves almost a thesis of its own.
This is where both the Prime Minister and director general of health could give the best from Broadway a run for their money.
For example, the utter insistence that all those people in the medical profession who, day after day, week after week, claimed they didn’t have gear or jabs or both were wrong. The swabs that were nowhere to be found — it seems sadly they were all either blind, or looking under the wrong cushions.
The “war footing” line was gold, distribution was an issue, but once we had moved to “war footing” . . . all was going to be well.
Until of course it wasn’t, and still isn’t, and now they’re blaming the district health boards, which is probably fair, but then it was probably fair five weeks ago as well, when they were basically accusing medical clinics of making all this up.
Unfortunately in the middle of all this David Clark went for a bike ride and reminded us of the Labour Party of old, which then reminded us of the
Labour Party of old even more, when the Prime Minister re-enacted her oftused party piece of putting on her best stern face to deal with trouble and then huff and puff . . . and . . . do nothing.
Clark and his bike are still in charge of health.
Do we have time to deal with the iwi-based roadblocks, I mean checkpoints?
It is a very close call in terms of Oscar performances between PPE defence and roadblock defence.
PPE is merely inept — roadblocks run by civilians are of course illegal.
Not that they were admitting to any of that, no the Prime Minister’s freshly minted Police Commissioner could not defend them enough.
There was, sadly, potential trouble a week or so back when it turned out some of these blocks were operated by gangs. But Police Minister Stuart Nash came bounding forward and sorted it by calling them “ratbags”, thus putting them well and truly in their place.
I think they must have become close last year when they all returned their semi-automatics in that gun buyback.
We will need another column for the Wall Street Journal comparing the Australian approach versus ours, for the growing tension between the banks and the Government, for the growing tension between businesses going bust and the Government, potentially as we have found out this week, for the legality of all we’ve been put through.
But, as we said last time, also in level 3 lockdown, this story is only just starting to get told.
It is a very close call in terms of Oscar performances between PPE defence and roadblock defence. PPE is merely inept — roadblocks run by civilians are of course illegal.