In contrast to the fawning adulation of the legacy media, venerable think-tank the American Institute for Economic Research has cast a jaundiced eye over the reign of Jacinda Ardern.
Suffice to say, they’re not much impressed.
For months we’ve heard the cry: oh how wonderfully New Zealand dealt with the Coronavirus! They did the tightest lockdown in the world! The coronavirus – no doubt astonished by the decisiveness and ferocity of prime minister Jacinda Ardern, the heroine of all media – just decided not to make this wonderful country a home. The virus was bested by political wit!
Sunetra Gupta, a leading Oxford epidemiologist, argues that New Zealand is merely delaying the inevitable – at catastrophic economic and social cost.
The tactic of “treating [COVID] like an external disaster, like a hurricane or a tsunami,” she says, is a fallacy. “As if you can batten down the hatches and it will be gone eventually. That is simply not correct”.
Gupta also calls New Zealand’s “self-righteous attitude” “completely ridiculous”, comparing New Zealand to a nation of anti-vaxxers:
If it turns out that the rest of the world, through herd immunity or vaccination, manages to reduce the risk of infection, then what New Zealand will have done would be tantamount to not vaccinating your own child. Just waiting for everyone else to vaccinate their children and then go “ok it’s all safe now”.
By the way, she also finds New Zealand’s approach immoral, a selfish demand that the rest of the world bear the burden of herd immunity while Kiwis hide in their homes and surf the Internet. Indeed, interestingly, she regards the New Zealand policy as a violation of the global social contract — the first truly persuasive deployment of that phrase that I’ve heard.
Which stands in stark contrast to Ardern’s self-serving globalist rhetoric.
More importantly, Ardern’s “kindness” rhetoric is completely opposite to her authoritarian behaviour.
Her upcoming election, proclaimed Ardern the Magnificent, is a “Covid election”[…]if the goal is complete banishment of the virus through an aggressive application of state power, clearly something has to be done.
You can observe how much the country locked down and then opened up with a sense of false comfort, only to lock down again.
The AIER also point out what I’ve long argued: Ardern has locked New Zealand into a strategy that deliberately cripples one of its most important industries.
There was always an issue however. New Zealand’s economy relies directly and indirectly on international tourism for 10% of its GDP, and the industry employs 188,000 people. Would it have to end permanently, or perhaps every visitor would be subjected to testing and quarantine forever? That wouldn’t exactly be good for business.
But Ardern the Wise didn’t apparently think about what happens after she personally decided to deny her entire population natural immunities to a virus that has otherwise spread all over the world.
With four cases, what to do? Well, sure enough, now Ardern the Great has announced a full lockdown in the city of Auckland[…]This announcement immediately caused panic buying. Customers blasted past security to load up in preparation for a long period of disaster.
That’s one way to end a dream.
Camelot is now under police-state rule yet again. Road blocks. Delayed elections. After four cases! We await videos of police tackling people to the ground, commandos breaking down doors, restrictions on hoarding groceries, a brutal contact-tracing regime, fines and jails for daring to gather with friends, and all the concomitant side effects of lockdowns: drug overdoses, alcoholism, depression, and suicide.
Safe is not the first word to come to mind in Ardern the Magnificent’s safespace, where cops are a greater threat to the public than Covid-19.
And yet the virus will stay to vex the country.
The greatest conceit of Ardern’s police-state mentality is that state power is some kind of magic truncheon that only has to be waved to make the virus go away.
New Zealand, a country of earnest people who pride themselves on intelligence and good government, took the theory of virus eradication through force to an extent not seen in any developed country. It went full barbarism, pitched by a suave politician with a charming accent[…]
It’s tragic what has happened to this wonderful country[…]Sadly, thanks to brutal and deeply incompetent political leadership, that paradise is lost, lost to the superstitions of the COVID faith that power, police, and adoring news coverage can scare a pathogen to go away and stay away.
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