Something didn’t seem quite right about the government’s address to the nation on Wednesday. Here we had deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, telling us how the Ministry of Health had asked the government to shut the borders to everyone, including Kiwis. I was surprised to hear him say this, as I distinctly remember him warning all Kiwis overseas to get home as fast as possible, because we may have to close the borders. That was in March. In spite of repeating Jacinda’s fallacious claim that we went “hard and early”, Peters strongly implied that the government went against the Ministry of Health’s advice because it was the kindest thing to do. But most of us know perfectly well that no country can close the doors to its own citizens, and even if we did, they still have Kiwi passports, so that would not render them stateless. Anyway, the Ministry of Health was only viewing matters from a public health perspective, which is what it is required to do. It is the role of government ministers to weigh up all the issues and make decisions based on all the information presented.
I couldn’t help wondering why exactly they were defending themselves? Was this yet another party political broadcast on the part of the Labour-led government, or was there something else going on?
It isn’t as if we have seen a lot of dissent. Politicians must be amazed at the way most of us gave up our freedoms and put our faith in an incompetent and mostly inexperienced government to keep us safe from the plague. Look at the reaction to Simon Bridges questioning the decision to extend the Level 4 lockdown by almost a week. He was only saying what many of us were thinking – that with less than 20 deaths and less than 1500 cases, there is really no justification for not getting the country back to work – but the reaction to this was extreme and nasty. Bridges was saying that we need to weigh up the economic cost against the health cost, and that job losses and a lack of income could cause worse health outcomes than COVID-19 ever will.
Personally, I think Bridges was right, and that the reaction to him saying this was over the top. But today I read Mike Hosking’s article, and the pieces of the puzzle all fell into place.
Did you notice we were played like a fiddle yesterday? Well we were, if you weren’t alert to it.
From nowhere comes Winston Peters, with his startling revelation that Cabinet was given advice by the Ministry of Health to lock all overseas New Zealanders out of the country.
When was the last time you saw a press conference in which we are told what the Cabinet had been advised on any given day? You haven’t, because it doesn’t happen.
But yesterday it did. Why? I reckon it’s because they’re panicking. They are panicking about the reaction to the health side of their response and the growing reality that the economic fallout is going to be their nightmare.
Of course, it is going to be their nightmare. It was always going to be, and they must have known this. But suddenly, we are focusing on the touchy-feely stuff, showing what a government of kindness looks like, in case we didn’t already know.
This particular government of kindness is one that is doing absolutely nothing to help business, apart from a few media companies and Air New Zealand. Even the tame media goons often ask questions about how much help is the government going to give to businesses to help them survive this, but the answer, from Jacinda and Grant Robertson, is always the same. There was the wage subsidy, and there is a raft of tax changes. Neither of these moves helps business though.
The wage subsidy was money given to employers by the government to enable them to keep on their staff while they were doing nothing. Can you think of another case in history where employers have had to pay people to not work? Sure, they pay annual and sick leave, and under normal circumstances, many employees would have been taking annual leave during the lockdown, otherwise, they would not have been paid anything. The wage subsidy is no help to business. Nor is a bit of tinkering around the edges of the tax system, allowing loss carry-backs and changes of shareholders without losing losses. There have been no tax holidays, no tax rate reductions, no deferment of payment dates and no grants to business.
I watched Carmel Sepuloni the other day, talking about how MSD are setting up a new system to help redundant employees find work, by matching employers with prospective employees. I almost laughed out loud. There are lots of these sort of places, like employment agencies and the dole offices themselves, but the government seems to be missing an important cog. If there are no employers, there are no jobs, and their brand new little scheme, which no doubt is costing millions, will be dead in the water upon arrival.
The reality is starting to sink in to the government that, once companies start to fall over, once the restaurants and cafes fail to reopen, once the toll of unemployment is calculated from the tourist industry, the public are going to be asking questions as to whether or not it was all worth it. Less than 20 deaths, about 1500 cases, and an economic meltdown from which it will take years to recover. What about the backlog of surgeries now which will take at least two years to catch up? How many people will die because of that? How many suicides, foreclosed businesses, lost houses and mental health problems are we going to see, not because of the virus itself but because of the recession that is starting to gain momentum? How many older people are going to lose their retirement savings because the government didn’t know what to do? Once the comparisons start coming with Australia, which is doing better than we are, but which never went into full lockdown, and treated every worker as essential, we are going to start asking a lot of questions. And “hard and early” is not going to answer them.
The government knows this. Maybe they have data showing that things are already worse than they expected. They have forced a lot of people, businesses and employers, to the wall. So brace yourself for many more party political broadcasts on behalf of the Labour-led government in the next few months. They know they are in trouble, and they don’t have a clue how to fix it.
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