Yesterday the National Party released a comprehensive 56 page plan for reopening our economy after we’ve lived like hermits for more than 18 months. While the plan is by no means perfect, it is at least a detailed and peer-reviewed plan to get out of the cul-de-sac that this government has driven us down. It also provides a policy framework that can be extended, for example, in allowing various therapeutics to be brought on stream as international evidence shows that they help in supplementing vaccines as a method to more capably deal with Covid-19.
All we have got from this government, though, is sneering disparagement of that plan. The government act like they have a monopoly on good ideas. Chris Hipkins and the Prime Minister have come up with a line that they think is clever but just shows how nasty these clowns actually are.
And despite precision questioning in parliament yesterday, all we got from Jacinda Ardern is a single A3 page of pretty pictures, fleetingly waved around, as she waffled and warbled with nonsensical answers.
The hesitant and frankly wobbly responses from the Prime Minister show that she is all at sea in a rather leaky boat. Ardern needs to share with New Zealanders just precisely what her plan is, and stop keeping everyone in the dark. If you asked the man on the street what the plan is, they’d say they have no idea but we are still locked down.
What this government would have us all believe is that despite demonstrable failures in housing, where they couldn’t build a house in a room full of Lego, that they’ve got this with something vastly more complex than building houses.
They’d also have us believe that despite the demonstrable failure of the light rail to the airport and their inability to lay even a single piece of track the size of Neve’s Thomas the Tank Engine set, that they’ve got this in handling the pandemic.
At the same time, these clowns are embarking on a massive restructuring of the health system, an order of magnitude far greater than anything they’ve attempted thus far, which by the way, has all failed.
National’s plan addresses what this government should have addressed 18 months ago. We have never been leading the way in all this; in fact, we haven’t even been fast followers.
Instead of abrogating democracy under urgency, and pursuing an apartheid agenda in Policing, Health and Justice by foisting He Puapua on us all, this government could have instead fast-tracked the building of a dedicated ICU facility in Auckland that would cope with any surges hospitals experienced.
Instead of closing off the border to all and sundry, they could have prioritised the arrival of suitably qualified nurses and hospital staff. Instead, we saw preference given to The Wiggles and cricket and rugby teams, while Kiwis wanting to return were locked out by a cruel and uncaring government that is about as far from the kindness the Prime Minister has banked her reputation on as you can get.
I’m sure that even this government could have built an emergency hospital if they’d actually turned their mind to it. It took just 17 months, in the middle of a war, to build the world’s largest office building, The Pentagon, in 1943. The Pentagon is still the world’s largest office building. A small but significant dedicated ICU hospital in New Zealand should have been able to be built in a similar time frame.
The problem we face in New Zealand is that the government used the pandemic as an excuse to cement their political position. They’ve politicised it from the get-go, instead of treating the pandemic like a wartime exercise in multi-party governance for the good of the nation.
They’ve invested heavily in propaganda to tell everyone that they know best, that only they have the answers, and they’ve shut out plenty of others who also have ideas. That’s why you are seeing the frustration from people like Rob Fyfe bubbling to the surface.
Labour don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and neither does the Ministry of Health. If they did have a monopoly on good ideas then they wouldn’t be blithely driving down the same dead ends the rest of the world has with useless mask mandates, vaccination mandates and failed lockdowns. We also wouldn’t be seeing massive drops in our rankings.
National’s plan addresses the myriad of failures in planning, the vaccine roll-out, testing, contact tracing and MIQ. The government has had 18 months and multiple reports to steer these things in the right direction, and they’ve basically sat on their hands and paid the Big Media to pat them on the back for doing so.
Reality has caught up with them and they’ve been found wanting. They’ve shown us that all they’ve got is snide comments and disgusting smears. Someone needs to tell the Prime Minister to poo or get off the pot. Where is the plan?
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