Keep your hair on, we’re doing just fine
It’s a weird day when Kiwis are complaining that we’re not more Australian. And yet just as soon as we limp out of the ring from round one with Covid-19, tired but grimly successful, there are voices in politics and the papers saying we should have taken a more Australian response to the pandemic.
We overreacted, they huff in the haughty benefit of hindsight, the Australians had takeaways! And hairdressers! And they did just fine!
Simon Bridges kicked off the Australia envy, and since then it’s largely been carried by conservative media voices, including this week’s Daily Mail running a story arguing that Australia had achieved lockdown success with ‘‘less collateral damage’’.
The inference behind all of this is that Jacinda Ardern overreacted with too harsh a level 4 lockdown. And this often comes from the point of view of small business owners, and suggesting that we could have softened the level of lockdown to avert the pain of four weeks of closure.
Before we get too worried that we could have done this better, I think we need to be careful before comparing ourselves to Australia.
Especially as the latest research released this week suggests that we were in a worse situation going into lockdown than the Australians were. University of Otago associate professor Brian Cox’s research this week shows that, at the point when community transmission was detected, we had a much higher confirmed cases per capita rate than Australia.
And our rate of per capita daily cases was rising much faster than theirs. So we weren’t exactly in the same situation – we were facing a worse one.
Given that threat level, in those circumstances, I understand why Ardern would have opted for a much tougher lockdown than Australia. She’d be looking at places like Italy, and wouldn’t want the chance of that happening here.
And even though it’s been hard, I’m glad that she chose to be over, not under, cautious when it’s literally our lives on the line. Especially since she didn’t know it was going to work . . .
But the real source of my irritation with the ‘‘look at Australia’’ argument is that it’s not what I want to hear right now. I do understand that, aside from the desire to provoke or score political points, MPs are voicing the very legitimate, very sharp pain of small businesses.
But as someone who lives in a sea of small businesses, almost entirely in entertainment and hospitality, I also can’t listen right now. My partner runs an entertainment businesses, my friends all run one, and I’m personally a onewoman-gig-economy-band straddling a part-time ‘‘real job’’ and running my own, far more glittery side-hustles as an MC/nightclub hostess/ performer/event producer.
Practically everyone I know is in the face-to-face industry. Which basically means that the past few weeks have been absolute hell. So I do have a lot of sympathy with the small business owners who are also crawling through fire and brimstone.
But, especially in the bars and clubs scene, all we want is to get back to normal as quickly as possible. When we went into lockdown, my partner and I, and every friend I spoke to, were all pretty much in agreement. Go hard, stamp it out properly, and go back to being fabulous as soon as possible. We chose to embrace a tough lockdown, we chose to side with Jacinda’s stance, because we believed it meant a higher chance of getting back to normal more quickly.
The logic of go-hard-get-back-to-normal-faster has been the only thing that’s kept us going through depressing, demoralising and occasionally desperate days. So I don’t want to hear that it might have been easier.
We committed to it, it happened, it saved lives. We’re halfway through hell now, and we don’t want to pause and have a look around to see if the place could have done with a sofa and a throw rug. We just want to keep crawling back out into normality.
Even if I did think we could have had a softer lockdown, I don’t want this debate right now.
We’re tired. All we care about is getting back to normal. Can we please just focus on that?
I don’t want to hear that it might have been easier. We committed to it, it happened, it saved lives.