While the Legacy media (with an eye on government handouts) might swoon over the New Zealand government’s response to the Chinese virus, the actual record is one of indecisiveness, ad hoc panic-button-pushing, non-stop evasion and deceit.
Jacinda Ardern dithered for weeks over border closures and social-distancing measures, then panicked and rushed to all but shut down the entire New Zealand economy. As leaks published by The BFD show, the government constantly misled the public and endlessly shuffled the peas and shells to justify their clown show.
“Flattening the curve” – a strategy which is explicitly predicated on simply spreading the same number of infection and death over a longer time-frame – somehow became “save lives”. At no point was this change of plan ever explained or justified.
More to the point, have lives really been saved?
This has never been a matter of lives lost from coronavirus versus the economy, as some have painted it and a line of thinking the government has tacitly endorsed. Due to economic pressures caused by these government measures, suicide rates in Australia are forecast to rise by up to 50 per cent due to the socio-economic impact of government measures. These measures may give rise to at last 25 per cent more suicides, with up to 30 per cent of those among young people aged 15-25 years.
As can be seen, the Australian government has created a problem that appears to be much bigger than the coronavirus. Our ruling political class has developed policies that have endangered jobs by trashing the economy and seriously compromised the future of countless people.
New Zealand’s experience is hardly likely to be much different to Australia’s (our suicide rates are identical, for instance).
“Save lives” is a lie. What they really mean is “trade lives”. In this case, trading the lives of the young and working-age for the elderly and retired.
Maybe that’s a fair trade, maybe not. But let’s not pretend it’s anything else.
In which case, the justification for such a trade-off must be demanded.
Lockdown may have seemed like a bit of a bludge to many, but the hard, economic reality is going to bite, very soon – and not loosen its death grip for years. Hundreds of billions of public debt now has to be paid…somehow. Millions of people are going to realise very soon that they are not just on a bit of a holiday – they are unemployed.
They will never be able to resume their jobs simply because the company for which they had been working has simply been forced to shut down.
Despite Jacinda Ardern’s virtue-signal of cutting politicians’ wages, the fact remains that the political and public service class are sailing through this with little more than a trim to their already excessive salaries and benefits. Their jobs are secure, as are their generous entitlements – especially should they, against every effort of the cheerleading Legacy media, actually be held to account and booted out of government.
World-leading research carried out by [Australia’s] top health experts has predicted that the impact of such government measures may result in an extra 1,500 deaths a year over the next five years, which is at least 10 times more deaths than caused by the coronavirus[…]
When this is over almost none of us will know someone who lost their lives due to this virus. We will all know, however, numerous others who have lost their jobs, their businesses or even their lives as a result of the actions of the government on the basis of “catastrophic” medical advice that has ultimately proven to be unsubstantiated.
The parroted response of lockdown enthusiasts to calls to reopen the economy is that “we have to save lives”. Well, yes we do: so, whose lives are we saving and how many?
If lives are the metric of success or failure responding to the Chinese virus, then Jacinda Ardern, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, and every proponent of lockdowns must be held fully responsible for the death of every Kiwi who lost their job, their business and their hope as a result of the government’s policies.
Policies based on doomsday “modelling” that we know now was completely false.
Will they ever cop to their responsibility? You’ve more chance of dying from COVID-19 (about 0.1 percent) than getting an honest accounting from those in power.
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