BFD readers could be forgiven for assuming that the legacy media are bought-and-paid-for members of the Jacinda Ardern fanclub. Who could forget, after all, the stomach-turning sight of a simpering Waleed Aly hugger-mugging for the cameras, or the legion of taxpayer-funded leftists vowing to move to New Zealand?
Fortunately, not all of Australia’s media are squee-ing leftist fangirls.
I reckon that I’m in a relatively small group of Australians. When asked, ‘Who has handled the coronavirus better, New Zealand or Sweden?’, I would say Sweden. My bet is that most Australians would plump for the Kiwis. After all, the virus has been all but eradicated across the Tasman. Only a couple of confirmed cases right now in the whole country. Only 22 deaths all up due to the virus. Meanwhile in Sweden there have been some 5,700 deaths for a population not much over double New Zealand’s.
Timing, they say, is everything in comedy: which makes the “all but eradicated” line one of unintentional hilarity. The truth is though, that Ardern’s “eliminated” boast was a sick joke all along. By making that claim, Ardern set herself up for a righteous backlash when the virus inevitably re-emerged. Worse, she tacitly locked New Zealand into closing its borders at least until – if or when – a vaccine is developed.
That said, the problems with the Kiwi ‘try to eradicate’ approach are legion. To name just a couple, tourism constitutes somewhere between 6 and 20 per cent of the NZ economy, depending on how many indirect benefits and how much of the travel sector you count. Pretty hard to mimic 17th century Japan, with borders closed to all the world’s potential infectors and still have anything much left of those industries. In effect, then, the Kiwis are betting the farm on a vaccine. Meanwhile, the looming economic carnage is going to carry in its wake a less well-funded health care system, plenty of indirect deaths, massive inter-generational unfairness and a hobbled private sector.
At the same time, up in Sweden they look to be as close to herd immunity as anywhere on the planet. And don’t let anyone blow smoke in your eyes, the Swedish economy has weathered this virus better than most anywhere (save Taiwan) in the Western world.
Don’t expect to hear such an analysis from the media cheer-squad, though. Like their ideological chums in the government, they’re determined to milk the Wuhan pandemic fear-mongering for all they’re worth.
Still, most of the press is doing all it can to convey coronavirus fear. They almost never say how these corona deaths rack up against other causes of death, or how for those under 55 this is not, statistically and comparatively, dangerous. They hardly ever mention what the economic carnage will bring in its wake, certainly not in terms of deaths because of the lockdowns and shutdowns. They never deal in relative risks, or age-related differences. And so the heavy-handed, civil liberties-ignoring politicians are popular. Now in my view that popularity won’t last another year. But it’s very likely indeed to last till the 19th of September, a month and a half from now, when New Zealand’s voters go to the polls.
While a betting man would still likely go with that probability, it’s suddenly a lot less certain than it might have been. Especially if Ardern opts to postpone the election. The “team of five million” are entitled to think that they’ve done their bit, and any resurgence of the virus is squarely the fault of those in charge. Lockdown-weary Kiwis have earned the right to an almighty fury at a government that appears to have dissembled and fumbled.
That said, in some ways the winner of this election will be handed a poisoned chalice, in large part for the reasons I mentioned above but also for others. The big aluminium smelter at the bottom of the South Island has announced its closure because electricity prices are too high. (Sound familiar?) It’s been subsidising costs for other users and that’ll be gone. And New Zealand is far farther along the political correctness and cancel culture path than we are[…]Did I mention that the NZ Bill of Rights, in the hands of a woke judiciary, was useless, otiose and impotent in protecting free speech over there?
As has happened repeatedly in Australia’s political history, too, voters marry a winsome socialist in utopian haste – and, after a term or two of failed promises, spend many years repenting at leisure.
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