Kiwis are basically good people. We care about others and we care about our country. We’re what you could describe as empathetic and house proud, to put it in the simplest terms. We tend to be a bit politically naïve and it seems we’re suckers for doing ‘the right thing’ whatever that might be. But we’re also depressingly apathetic and allow ourselves to be pushed around, and never has it been more obvious than over the past 6 weeks.
Our economy, our future, our livelihood, our health, our well being have all been held to ransom by an unelected committee of bureaucrats and public servants plus a few senior politicians led by the PM, who chose to lock us up in home detention. And we all took it without so much as a murmur of discontent. Why? Well, because we were convinced rightly or wrongly, that it was the right thing to do so we meekly went along with it.
But then the whole rationale for this disastrous situation is paling into complete insignificance on a daily basis as accurate statistics confirm that nothing is what it seemed to be. Yet in New Zealand, the one place where our isolation means we could manage this sensibly and with little economic damage, our leaders clung with tenacious abandon to the tragic mistakes they made when none of us knew what was going to happen.
Sensible leaders would have confirmed that we had the numbers wrong and disentangled the shambles. Not this lot!
Are any of us asking ourselves yet: When is this going to end? Or what about why it’s continuing? Who gains? Who loses?
The revelations of the past week make it abundantly clear that we have well and truly had the wool pulled over our eyes by “the most transparent government” and the Prime Minister who would never lie. Seriously, how many times does she need to be caught out in blatant untruths before we accept that yes, untruths are lies, and she lied to us about that too?
Last week in parliament she managed to drop yet again in “we went early and we went hard” in response to a question from Simon Bridges. Again: Seriously – how many times does she get to do this before we say “NO MORE LIES”?
Unless we wake the hell up and do something about it, beginning with resisting the current nonsense and making Ms Ardern aware that we don’t all think she’s a saint, we are destined to a long time in a painful, never ending purgatory. Maybe it’s too late already to avoid that but if we act now, we may be able to ameliorate some of the damage. If not, we’re destined to float along at the PM’s pleasure and sorry, that really just isn’t good enough.
Right at the moment, we’re facing a major constitutional crisis. The best-case scenario is that the PM and her minions are as inept as many seem to think they are and the whole thing is just more of the same. The worst-case scenario is that it’s a calculated, organised power play, and while I’m usually no conspiracy theorist, the way the PM has stretched out every step of this COVID Alert system has no simple explanation.
We really do need to be awake to what’s happening and what the possibilities might be. All that sparkles is not necessarily gold.
We must ask the questions. We must insist on honest answers. We must resist the name callers whose only method of debate is abuse and put downs – the old “thugs veto”. We must support the few journalists who do ask the questions and encourage them to do more of it. We need to contact ALL our MPs and let them know what we expect of them.
We need to stand up and protect our democracy. Where we are right now is just not good enough.
