When the Prime Minister closed down New Zealand’s oil and gas industry in order to signal her environmentalist credentials and prove commitment to her comrades at the Socialist International, she did so against murmurs of discontent which eventually came to nothing.
When she did the same thing to tourism under the guise of a public health order, pretty much everyone acquiesced. What most people do not realise is that she is now rolling out a Stalinist pogrom of regulation across other industries. Her absolutist virus elimination plan, which masks a Green agenda of authoritarian control over both populations and enterprise, has brought the travel industry in this country to its knees. She has converted our international airports – once thriving nuclei of commerce – into Cold War border crossings.
Anybody who traversed the frontier from Hong Kong into China in the pre-British handover days will recognise the scene: humourless guards under orders from the Politburo, an atmosphere laced with menace, and always the threat that the overbearing machinery of state might spontaneously flex its muscle. Everyone is alert, nobody travels for pleasure, and no one is there unless they have to be.
Except the locus has shifted. What once played out in muddy Guangdong fields is currently the scene at Auckland Arrivals.
And Labour’s initiative doesn’t stop there. In our main centres, just as you will find in certain failed ex-Iron Curtain states, the 5-star hotels have been commandeered by the regime and are now being run as detention centres for the purpose of ‘rehabilitating’ travellers and monitoring them for signs of deviation from government group-think.
I refer of course to the Managed Isolation and Quarantine Facilities (or MIQs) which have displaced our once-private market for business and leisure travel. They are the symptom of the silent revolution in which a nation has cashed in its liberty with a gubernia of healthcare Bolsheviks for short-term peace of mind and a few ‘free’ roubles.
These militaristic travel gulags are mushrooming. Demand is insatiable. But who is in them, and why? As I am currently interned in one, I hope to answer these questions for you.
The prisoners are split into broadly three camps. In the first are New Zealanders who have not given up on international travel, and who make considered decisions to run the gauntlet at the border for either business or personal reasons. We have lived the past fifty years in an international age. Many people can’t or won’t give up on that, and a lot of lives are lived across borders.
My decision to exit and return was commercial. The $3,100 that I will pay to be imprisoned in MIQ for two weeks is nothing less than a tariff, coupled with a legal disincentive, on travel. It’s a Jacinda stealth tax which business must pay. It’s another no-new-taxes financial imposition, ‘kindly’ applied.
New Zealanders have been very slow to realise that constricted borders and restrictions on personal freedom are now a semi-permanent state of affairs. The globalist totalitarian virus industry is not going away. COVID is here until at least 2025 according to the UN’s own agencies, New Zealand has secured no vaccine, and when it does it might only be in time for the next pandemic.
We have been boxed into a corner by a Prime Minister who is herself in a corner, and the message is clear: the age of broad ambit, of commuter flying and of mass tourism is over. Travel now comes at a cost, and with penalties. In relative terms, the rich will pay less to travel; the poor will pay more. Because this is socialism, and isn’t that how socialism works?
The greatest obstacle to MIQ for the business traveller is booking. This is, after all, our newest nationalised industry. As with buying a car in the old Soviet Union, it is a cumbersome process, administered by bureaucrats, with places in short supply.
I enquired at the outset with the National Party. They assured me that quarantine facilities are an avenue to which pressure is being applied, and upon which the economics of demand will eventually be brought to bear. The more ordinary Kiwis who book, the more of these facilities will open – until they pepper the country. Even the most autocratic regimes do eventually bend to the will of the people and the Prime Minister, ever the expedient, is your flexible friend.
In light of this, the second group to be found here consists of Samoan fruit and vegetable pickers, whose presence is the direct result of industry pressure. Their stay is funded by employers as a tax on business which will be felt throughout 2021 in a series of unanticipated inflation shocks. However, that won’t matter because Ardern will surely fund us through Universal Credit and implement wage controls so that people can keep up.
The final travel category belongs to the home-comer. Anybody who departed prior to 11 August 2020, for any reason at all, gets to stay in MIQ either for ‘free’ or on the taxpayer, depending on your point of view. Winston the Handbrake said that might not happen, but he’s no longer in the car.
Recipients of Labour’s largesse include the following. Let’s say you are an expatriate who has been working up in Asia in insurance, banking or IT, paying 10 percent income tax on your first $200,000 to a foreign government, and nothing at all here. On your return to New Zealand you would enter straight into Jacinda’s magic bubble of middle class welfare.
If you’ve been chillin’ up on the Gold Coast but now want to come home, the same thing applies. Naturally, if a Kiwi is deported from Australia for criminal activity, it’s the taxpayer’s responsibility. Likewise for the refugee programme, which never sleeps.
Some might argue that it would be tyrannical to lock out citizens, to whom we owe a right of return. But wasn’t it just the slightest bit tyrannical to close the borders in the first place? Recipients of Jacinda’s free taxi ride home at the end of their big day out might still face a hangover in the morning. For the sobering truth is this: for many, that was their last overseas engagement, and now they are house-bound. Because next time they’re on their own – and it’s user-pays.
On that basis I suspect Australia’s gain is our loss, and our welfare bill is about to get a whole lot bigger.
The future detainees of MIQ I have yet to mention. And that is YOU, if, as I predict, the restrictions last for years, and you decide that you want your life back. Then, like me, you’ll be out of the prison ship, but returning on the plague ship – enjoying twenty-first century political healthcare, New Zealand style.
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