Crown risks indelible stain on its honour
Judith Collins, unable to score tangible hits on the Government, has continued her rampage through her own caucus.
Afriend reflected during this week’s chaotic weather on when she lived for a time by the sea as a child. During storms, her father would switch off all the lights and open the curtains to expose wide panes of glass, and the family would sit in darkness, watching lightning strike the ocean’s surface and light up the room.
Lockdown makes New Zealanders, by necessity, spectators. Stuck at home, watching 1pm briefings, with their own tongue-in-cheek entries added to online movie database IMDb, life in level 4 can feel less like an incandescent show in the heavens and more like the comfortable but numbing groove of mindlessly binge-watching a series on Netflix, especially the second time.
But, like an electrical storm, some of the images before us light up the whole sky, and make everything else in the surrounds visible again. So it was with the footage of Afghans desperately crowding near Kabul airport to flee the resurgent Taliban.
It was not just an obvious and wrenching contrast to the comparatively whimsical scenes of New Zealanders crowding supermarkets a fortnight ago. After all, if the New Zealand Government and its Five Eyes intelligence partners could be caught by surprise by the swift fall of Kabul, perhaps Aucklanders can be forgiven for not having spare toilet roll at home even 18 months into the pandemic.
The fall of Kabul happened in the way Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Gradually, Afghans who had worked with New Zealand forces, family members, human rights workers, journalists and women applied for visa entry to New Zealand over the past months, only to face delays, technical obstructions, and (what they considered) outright rejections.
Then, suddenly: caught in a human crush around the tarmac in Kabul, unable to force their way safely through to planes, or short of the paperwork necessary to leave because it was in a pile of forms on the other side of the world.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Chris Seed on Tuesday estimated around 300 New Zealand citizens or visa-holders were still stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand called time on its rescue mission last week.
‘‘The honour of the Crown’’ is a term that is often used in Treaty settlements. It is something that statespeople take seriously. Faced with what is essentially the return of a nightmare for Afghanistan, one from which the West has essentially guaranteed there will be no delivery in the future, it’s hard to see how the honour of a country like New Zealand does not require taking as many refugees as possible.
But even if it does not, the failure to rescue Afghans who worked with New Zealand’s Defence Force personnel, and their families, represents an indelible stain on that honour.
Still, after the momentary flash subsides, our vision readjusts and the view returns to normal. All eyes remain on the familiar longrunning comfort viewing of the 1pm briefings and a Government that looks like it is in control. It’s a polished performance that, counterintuitively, more time in lockdown just helps perfect.
There’s no real competition, after all. The National Party’s attempts to share in the spotlight by returning to physically distanced sittings in the House, while eminently constitutionally justifiable, look like rehearsals for a play in an empty theatre. The cavernous, echoing chamber is a terrible metaphor for the abyss that has faced the Opposition in each lockdown since the pandemic began.
Leader Judith Collins, unable to score tangible hits on the Government, has continued her rampage through her own caucus: a minor reshuffle supposedly to cover the forced retirement of her predecessor, Todd Muller, marginalising the party’s best-performing MPs, by stripping Covid-19 response spokesperson Chris Bishop of his prized shadow leader of the House role, and shuffling Nicola Willis off the prestigious finance and expenditure committee.
Bishop was then enlisted to bear witness wordlessly behind his leader at her press conference on Monday, his only role seemingly to hold up replicas of her printed-out graphs. The scene recalled nothing so much as Chris Christie behind Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary after dropping out of the race.
While Collins appears to be flexing her muscles as leader, the scene is anything but triumphal: she is parading her enemies like Game of Thrones’ humiliating walk of shame, but through deserted streets.