Jacinda Ardern’s Labour party was returned with a majority under MMP in 2020, ostensibly off the back of perceived good management of the pandemic.
What is becoming more and more obvious though is that keeping out the CCP Virus was a case of good luck rather than good management. Furthermore, while they were focusing on that, every other policy area languished as a result.
Now, as the rest of the world advances towards opening back up their economies and border, here in the Hermit Kingdom ruled by an increasingly doctrinaire and dictatorial Labour Party, we appear to be rudderless. Absent any briefings to the contrary it appears there is no plan to exit the pandemic.
Media are starting to wise up about the lack of foresight from the Prime Minister and over the weekend there were no fewer than seven opinion pieces or articles pointing out these inconvenient truths.
Advice released from this week from a five-person advisory group headed by Sir Brian Roche makes painful reading.
The Roche team’s review of the February Covid outbreak found a lack of coherence among central agencies, conflicting messaging that could undermine public confidence, and a Government that had failed to learn the lessons of past reviews.
Jacinda Ardern‘s own Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — which is central to the co-ordination of a “whole of Government” approach to the Covid-19 pandemic — clearly needed to lift its game.
My question is, why leave Sir Brian as an adviser? Why not put him in charge of the Covid-19 response with a clear prescription to “get stuff done” instead of reporting to ministers who sit on his reports for another couple of months before releasing them?
Businesses are looking for clear signals that underscore that the Government now puts a priority on ensuring their people can safely travel offshore (and back) to drive up exports and financial returns to underpin the economy’s success.
That question is echoing in boardrooms and senior executive suites as businesspeople continue to wait for a concrete signal from the Government that their ability to get out of New Zealand will be expedited.
NZ Herald
Fran O’Sullivan clearly thinks that no answers will be forthcoming.
Businesses have to plan ahead.
But so far there is precious little coming from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to give them comfort.
There was a hint of forward thinking earlier in the week when the Minister for Covid Recovery, Chris Hipkins, hinted that the Government was still considering proposals for private MIQ facilities to be established. A number of companies including Fletcher Construction and City Rail Link ponied up proposals last year.
But they were turned down by officials.
It’s been close to 16 months now since New Zealand’s border was closed.
NZ Herald
Jamie Morton also questions: where to now?
New Zealand’s hard-line elimination strategy against Covid-19 spared more deaths than any other developed country – and also brought economic results that were better than the OECD average.
That’s according to a new analysis that again suggests a zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 delivers the best benefits for both public health and the economy.
But now, the researchers say, New Zealand and its bubble buddy Australia need to decide what their long-term plan will be.
There will have been little point to the lockdowns if we become laggards behind the rest of the world. And it turns out the lockdowns weren’t kind at all, especially for the poor:
Meanwhile, researchers have found lockdown was still a stressful, anxious and hungry time for New Zealand’s most vulnerable.
In a paper published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, Otago University researchers explored the experiences of 27 Kiwis on low incomes, to find many had to lean on charities – even with higher welfare payments.
While the Government moved to offset the economic pain of New Zealand’s elimination strategy with its Covid-19 wage subsidy, allowing employers to keep paying staff over lockdown, the number of working-age people signing up to benefits between March and April was almost double that of the past 24 years for the period.
Hardship Assistance payments also climbed sharply, food banks reported a 100 per cent increase in demand during the lockdown period, and charities aired worries over the rising number of Kiwis seeking support due to unemployment.
NZ Herald
So much for the much-vaunted “kindness”.
‘Red’ Claire Trevett decries the laggardly approach to an exit strategy from Jacinda Ardern:
Ardern’s roadmap, when it comes, will almost inevitably look a bit the same – a plan to stagger reopening the borders to vaccinated travellers with no or shorter quarantine periods, and to respond to outbreaks differently.
There have been questions since the very beginning of Covid-19 about when and how to emerge from Fortress NZ.
People need certainty and Governments need to set out what might happen – and what needs to happen to achieve it. Such plans also give people a glimpse of hope: and manage expectations.
But Ardern is at ease with her lack of haste, not least because the public also seem to be in no big hurry.
NZ Herald.
It doesn’t sound like much of a plan if any. I think that Jacinda Ardern has become drunk on the absolute power that a closed border, a constantly fearful public and the threat of more lockdowns gives her. That is why she praises the gods every time she gets to ratchet up the fear factor with every little potential breach in our flimsy border protections.
Kerre McIvor also questions the lack of a strategy from Ardern:
The Government’s recalcitrance in opening up New Zealand for business reinforces the divide that Covid has created between us.
There are two types of New Zealanders – those who are quite happy hiding behind Jacinda’s skirts, who don’t see any reason whatsoever to allow “foreigners” in; indeed, they’re reluctant to let New Zealand passport-holders back in.
The reluctant New Zealanders might be on a pension, they might be on a benefit, or their salary might be funded by the taxpayer. They, or members of their family, might have a health condition that would put them in Covid’s sights; but all reluctant New Zealanders are united in the belief that New Zealand is doing marvellously well just the way it is.
Look at the rest of the world, they say. Jacinda Ardern is a saint and anyone who is calling for the borders to be opened – even just a crack – is at best reckless; at worst, a granny-killer.
They have no truck with the hospitality industry and dairy farmers screaming for workers to be allowed in. Just pay New Zealanders more, they say, and the workers will come.
Besides, if we let “foreigners” in, where will they live? What few houses we have are eye-wateringly overpriced – and that’s all the fault of the “foreigners” John Key let in back in the 2010s.
Some of those reluctant New Zealanders within Fortress New Zealand believe the disruption Covid has caused has shown that capitalism doesn’t work and it’s time for a major reset.
NZ Herald
McIvor is dead right. Almost exclusively, those calling for the maintenance of Fortress New Zealand are on state-funded stipends. Almost none of them have lost even a minute’s pay because of lockdowns, or are watching fruit wither and die because of a lack of staff. Kiwi workers have shown a distinct reluctance to do the jobs that we import labour to do, despite the pandemic.
As for the calls for more socialism because apparently, capitalism has failed, well…they ignore the decades of failure and misery that socialism has wrought on those countries foolish enough to embrace it as a system. Capitalism, for all its faults, is still the best system to provide the little bits of socialism we all enjoy. Margaret Thatcher was always right when she said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money to spend.
But we can’t keep shaking the Wellington money tree forever. At some point, we are going to have to pay back that money. And those reluctant New Zealanders, on their pensions and benefits and taxpayer-funded salaries, have to realise the money that funds their lifestyles comes from the Eager Engagers.
Sure, put restrictions on immigration. Ensure that those who come here aren’t just playing Monopoly and buying up our houses without putting down roots and making New Zealand their home. But don’t just pull up the drawbridge and expect New Zealand to continue to thrive.
If you cut off one of the vital arteries that pump life into New Zealand business, and that’s skilled staff, businesses will wither. As will the tax take.
The money to fund New Zealand Inc comes from New Zealand businesspeople and all they have ever asked is for the opportunity to do what they do best. And yet this Government continues to treat them with contempt.
A constant complaint is that this Government doesn’t understand business. The reluctance to let skilled workers into the country is another example that reinforces that complaint is justified.
NZ Herald
We need to open up. Our economy is being slowly throttled by a bunch of nonces who don’t understand even NCEA Level One Economics.
This brings us to Heather Du Plessis-Allan’s questions about what lies ahead for a post-CCP Virus New Zealand:
How crazy is it that none of us knows what happens to the country in less than six months’ time?
Everything going to plan, we should all be jabbed by the end of the year. And then what?
No one knows. Not even Cabinet if you believe the Prime Minister, who says she doesn’t have a plan yet.
What is it that you think happens?
I’m personally working under the assumption that vaccination leads to some reduced restrictions.
Because, otherwise, what’s the point of us all getting the jab?
Do we get to travel overseas without quarantining on return?
Shorter MIQ stays?
Permission to bring in offshore workers again?
The return of $5 billion worth of international students?
The return of some tourists?
We don’t know.
And that’s completely absurd given how many lives and businesses are waiting for this information.
Even more absurd is how little time before “next” arrives.
NZ Herald
When you read it like that you start to realise that we have a bunch of bed-wetters in charge.
This is no way for a country to run its economy. Businesses have no idea what to plan for in only six months’ time.
We have growers labouring under the assumption they only have to make it through one more season without staff and then things will go back to normal.
There are tourism operators without tourists, restaurants without chefs, white collar employers without foreign skilled workers. All of them are just holding on for the other side of the vaccine roll-out in the hope a jab equals a return to some normality.
This week we’ve learned just how bad our worker shortage is. We’re now at never-before-seen levels, close to full employment, at risk of burnt-out and poaching staff off each other in a game of musical chairs.
Will the jab mean we can start bringing workers in and fix this? Your guess is as good as mine.
Clearly, the PM and her advisers are thinking about this. They say they’re watching the world’s reopening for lessons.
But, frankly, many of us are thinking about it.
That now needs to turn into making decisions about it – or even just giving us a rough idea about it.
Because even if the Government doesn’t yet have a plan, some Kiwis getting their jabs do: plans to holiday, plans to visit offshore family, plans to get workers in.
Their expectations will only mount with each jab, each passing month. The Government had better get itself a plan. Six months isn’t a lot of time.
NZ Herald
This is no way at all to run a country unless your intention is actually to run it into the ground.
Even columnists in The Guardian, of all places, are questioning just what the plan is and, indeed, if we even have one:
New Zealand has dismissed suggestions it should follow in Britain’s footsteps to “live with” Covid-19, saying the level of death proposed by Boris Johnson would be “unacceptable”.
If cases in Britain explode as a result of the lifted regulations, New Zealand may also consider putting the country on a no-fly list.
On Monday, Johnson announced plans to scrap regulations including on face masks and social distancing by 19 July, saying that Britain must “learn to live with” the virus. He said Covid cases would likely reach 50,000 a day within a fortnight, and “we must reconcile ourselves, sadly, to more deaths from Covid”.
“That’s not something that we have been willing to accept in New Zealand,” the country’s Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, said at a press conference alongside the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, on Tuesday.
“One of the things the UK government have been very clear about [is] that there will be a spike in cases, potentially thousands of cases a day. There will be more people dying,” he said.
“We are likely to see more incremental change than dramatic change where we wake up one morning and say: ‘We just go back to the way things were before Covid-19.’”
Ardern, asked whether the country would accept deaths from Covid, said: “Different countries are taking different choices.
“The priority for me is how do we continue to preserve what New Zealand has managed to gain and give ourselves options, because this virus is not done with the world yet.”
The Guardian
So it appears that the plan, (if you can call it that), is to not do what Britain, or indeed Australia are planning to do. The plan, for want of any indication to the contrary, seems to be to hide in the closet, or under the bed and wait.
This is why even Tracy Watkins at the ever-increasingly woke Stuff thinks we need to end the Fortress NZ mentality:
As the world starts to open up, New Zealand is both blessed, but perhaps also blinkered, by our phenomenal success keeping Covid out.
We have become fearful of the world beyond our borders and most of us would rather things stayed the way they are for the foreseeable future.
We know this from the government’s own research, which shows a majority of Kiwis are comfortable with keeping the borders closed for now, and largely content with the way life has panned out under Covid.
We can assume some of that fear of opening is driven by confusion over the vaccination roll-out; when there are still tens of thousands of vulnerable people in group 3 who are yet to even get an appointment for their first dose, we all know the risks of opening up are too high.
And the snail’s pace of our vaccination roll-out isn’t the only justifiable reason for caution; as the rest of the world marches into the unknowns of a new post-pandemic era, we have the luxury of learning from their mistakes.
But nor should we be squandering that time. New Zealand businesses, and workers, have soaked up a huge amount of change in the last 12 months.
They have responded with grace, and kindness, and by finding innovative, and novel new ways of working and doing business.
But the Government has not responded in kind; we have seen few signs of fresh thinking about the challenges that we are going to face us as an economy, or of a roadmap for navigating a world where Covid, and its variants, will be around for the foreseeable future.
It’s not just businesses and workers who need to know there is a plan, but younger generations wondering whether they can build any kind of future here.
Recently, former Prime Minister Helen Clark reportedly told a business group she did not expect life to be back to normal, as we knew it, in her lifetime. We all know how formidably fit and healthy Clark is. So drifting isn’t an option.
And nor is a return to the bad old days of fortress New Zealand.
Stuff
The media loves to use the word “unprecedented”. I’d suggest that it is unprecedented that media outlets would suddenly all sing from the same song sheet, criticising the distinct lack of a plan from this majority Government.
The sad thing is that the Government is using their majority to foist substantial anti-democratic and constitutional change that is seeing a more divisive society in stark opposition to their rhetoric. All the while as they are doing that, they are keeping us locked up and quivering like a combination of Pavlov’s dogs and a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
When a large segment of the media appears to no longer be drinking the Kool-Aid, then you know that Labour’s leaked UMR poll is as much a fantasy of the Prime Minister’s feeble imagination as her belief that keeping us all locked up for the foreseeable future is a winning strategy.
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