New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern likes to witter about “kindness” and New Zealand’s “team of five million”. Ardern also likes to pontificate about New Zealand’s “international responsibility”, no matter its relative size. The international chattering classes love to heap praise on Ardern for her supposed “Covid leadership”.
Mighty fine talk – and woefully belied by the hard facts.
If the reality of the Ardern government – and, by extension, the Kiwis who voted for it in droves last year – could be summed up in three snappy words, it would be lazy, complacent and selfish.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in New Zealand’s vaccine rollout.
Leaving aside debates about the Covid vaccines and their efficacy, Jacinda Ardern has left no doubt that she considers getting vaccinated the first duty of the “team of five million”. She’s even mooted “vaccine passports” to prove it.
So how’s New Zealand actually performing?
New Zealand has come under heavy criticism for the slow pace of its vaccine rollout and failure to vaccinate its port workers as complacency bred by low case numbers is blamed for the government “dropping the ball”.
Almost half of New Zealand’s port workers are yet to receive a single dose of a vaccine, despite being designated a highest priority group for vaccination. The elderly in aged-care facilities are also not yet all vaccinated.
New Zealand ranks at the bottom of OECD countries in the pace of its vaccine rollout, with about 21.5 per cent of the eligible population (16-year-olds and up) fully vaccinated, behind Australia, which has 23.7 per cent fully vaccinated.
But how could this be, in Covid-world-leader New Zealand?
David Murdoch, a professor at the University of Otago, said there had been a lack of urgency in New Zealand on the part of the government and the population regarding vaccines.
“I think complacency is potentially a big issue,” Professor Murdoch said. “A lot of public life looks fairly normal apart from the travel, so it can be a bit easy to revert to previous behaviours and not think getting vaccinated urgently is an issue.”
Interestingly, while the New Zealand media were eager to falsely smear “white men” for allegedly not complying with Covid restrictions, they’ve not said much about brown people and vaccination.
New Zealand has so far administered 2.3 million doses of vaccine and 335,000 of those have gone to Maori and Pacific Islander people, who have been prioritised[…]
The marae, a communal sacred place in Maori culture, began offering vaccinations in an initiative to increase vaccination rates in the community[…]
Cynthia Tubby said. “The marae is so easily accessible to get to and you just feel so welcome.
“It’s very family-oriented, the kaupapa, which means the strength and our values, the aroha, the love, you feel makes you so welcome when you go there so you’re not shy.”
The Australian
Except that the numbers show that Maori are notably vaccine-shy. Despite being prioritised, Maori vaccination rates are less than half that of the rest of the New Zealand population.
But New Zealand as a whole lags well behind Australia. Mostly, it seems, because New Zealand’s Covid policies are lazy and selfish.
New Zealand is only apparently Covid-free because it is an isolated, island nation that has closed its borders. And when Jacinda Ardern boasts about “eliminating Covid” in New Zealand, there doesn’t seem much incentive to get vaccinated. Tourism operators might be itching to open borders again but everyone else seems complacently happy to keep the virus “over there”. Besides, once everyone else is vaccinated, she’ll be right.
In other words, New Zealand is free-riding. Forget “international responsibility”, Ardern and her followers are banking on the rest of the world shouldering the burden. Once everyone else has done the heavy lifting, this thinking goes, New Zealand can reap the benefit, without having had to take the risk.
This is lazy policy. If Ardern really believed in the Covid vaccines as much as she makes out, it’s selfish policy.
It’s much the same approach Ardern has pursued on a range of international issues, from refugees to climate change: lots of self-aggrandising talk that her actions never match.
So much for “kindness”.
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