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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Nathan Smith.
COVID-19 and the Civil Disservice
Yesterday, my friend said he couldn’t chat because “Queen Jacinda” was about to perform her daily Covid-19 ritual…I mean, announcement.
I told him if Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern really were the Queen of New Zealand (with the powers of Elizabeth I, not the tourist attraction that is Elizabeth II) then perhaps we wouldn’t be in this mess.
And by “this mess” I don’t mean Kiwis would now be frolicking at the beach breathing all over each other with nary a mask in sight. After all, maybe in a parallel universe, Queen Jacinda would still have chosen the path of lockdowns for consecutive double-digit weeks. But the important point is at least in that universe she would be making an executive decision.
In this reality, however, there is no one steering the ship of state. Executive authority in New Zealand’s government does not exist in any historical sense.
After an election, most Kiwis think they have voted for New Zealand’s next CEO. With John Key, who had decades of private-sector experience, it certainly appeared that the PM was the CEO. But Key will be the first to tell you that getting the civil service to follow orders was like trying to herd cats that know they are cats and understand all the herding tricks. Sooner or later, it is the PM who becomes house-trained, not the civil service.
This was masterfully described in the old British TV show Yes, Minister. (If you don’t know the show, there is no need to watch it – the bound scripts are available; they’re highly readable and do not distract the reader with awful 1960s-BBC production values.)
One of the major sources for Yes, Minister was the diary of Richard Crossman, who was Minister for Housing during a period which was not, in retrospect, the golden age of residential architecture. That position was the highest Crossman ever got, but he was no clock-punching timeserver. He was perhaps one of the last two real intellectuals in British politics. (No points for guessing the other.)
Crossman depicted the hideous practice of policy formation from below, which is the fundamental engineering flaw of the entire progressive design for government, created by people who thought that democracy, in the old traditional sense of a system in which the people elect leaders who manage the country, was a disaster.
Therefore, these folks thought, government policies should be formulated and implemented not by politicians or their stooges and patsies, but by impartial “experts”. This was just another case of the same old perpetual-motion machine: setting uber-watchmen to watch the watchmen. The machine spins quite nicely for a while, but in the end, you have just exchanged corrupt watchmen for corrupt uber-watchmen. Not an improvement.
The specific result of this system is the ruthless domination of process and “policy”. For anyone with any experience in the private sector, the overwhelming smell of government is the smell of sclerotic, mindless procedure. This is not a happy, flowery summer smell.
In the corporate world, major policy choices are made by individuals who have what the military calls “mission orders”. The leaders are responsible for results but free as to personnel, budget and strategy – the three core components of executive authority. If a person cannot make a binding decision, they are not the true sovereign of the organisation they claim to lead.
By this basic principle, our modern system of government shields civil servants from any consequences of their policies. It’s a bit unfair, if you ask me, to have thousands of civil servants, each holding a tiny slice of formal power, who can lump all their failures onto the office of the prime minister who can’t even utter the word “no.” But, that’s what we have.
Unfortunately, the ship of state is not a sleek corvette. It’s more like a supertanker. Once it gets up to speed it can run relatively efficiently. But the tanker takes a kilometre to stop, and its turning circle is about the radius of four city blocks. Not exactly an agile beast, and agility is necessary when dealing with a dynamic virus.
This structure is a major reason why the response to Covid-19 feels so convoluted, vague and ridiculous. While the civil service had plenty of motivation to solve Covid-19, it lacked any clear strategy. What it did have, though, was plenty of process. The supertanker knows only how to sail in a straight line.
So, in 2020 everyone in Wellington was banking on solving the Covid-19 crisis with a vaccine. Sure, that vaccine would be rushed with zero medical testing, but all the civil service needed to do was print a bit of money, block the borders and hand Queen Jacinda some notes for her 1 pm briefings. No need to buy more ICU beds. Just focus on the vaccines.
A year later, the vaccines start rolling out, not just in New Zealand but in other countries as well. Israel gets the vaccine, and then a booster. Then another booster. And then a fourth booster. Soon, many people are beginning to notice that the vaccines may not be working as advertised.
In fact, because Covid-19 rapidly evolves into new variants (by the way, a virus always trades lethality for transmissibility, so new variants are a good thing in terms of public health risk), the long-awaited vaccines cannot even immunise a patient. The “vaccines” only lessen the symptoms of getting Covid-19. Hmmm.
Fast-forward to October 2021 and the data are proving more concretely each day that the “vaccines” are not working as vaccines at all. Kiwis start noticing this as well. Yet the civil service supertanker steams full speed ahead and has even declared a goal of 90% “vaccination” to reach herd immunity! But this confuses everyone because even a 7-year-old knows that a vaccine that doesn’t immunise is really just a therapeutic.
The data is now making it hard for officials to continue their course. You can hear the supertanker slowly, grindingly, change direction in the government’s subtle shift from using “vaccines” to solve Covid-19, to instead using the “vaccines” to get out of lockdown. If you can’t see how those goals are different, let me explain.
If the “vaccines” did work like real vaccines, then getting to a 90% vaccination rate would probably stop Covid-19’s spread. But they don’t, so they can’t. In other words, since the “vaccines” are really just therapeutics, the goal of 90% “vaccinated” is irrelevant if more effective therapeutics already exist on the market, which they do. They should just distribute these therapeutics to get us out of lockdown.
Yet the ginormous civil service supertanker needs a kilometre of open ocean to slow down. It can’t pivot like a start-up company and no one is even allowed at the helm to unwind the anchors.
So, we find ourselves in a farcical situation where millions of Kiwis are being forced to inject themselves with an untested substance that has zero, repeat, zero, long-term safety data, does not immunise people and cannot teach the body how to fight newer Covid-19 variants because it was manufactured before those variants emerged. The “vaccine” is worse than useless – it is actively blocking us from finding better solutions to Covid-19.
The only reason we are chasing “90% vaccination” is not to stop Covid-19 from spreading (because the “vaccines” can’t do this), but because the civil service “process” still has a bunch of propaganda posters about saving grandma they want to paste onto bus stops and no one can stop them.
Getting to 90% is no longer a real epidemiological strategy, it has degenerated into a bureaucratic exercise run by a bloated and inept supertanker civil service running on autopilot.
There is no Queen Jacinda.
If it makes you feel any better, our hilarious Brezhnevian bureaucracy will not lead to systemic collapse. New Zealand is just headed for Third World status. But go ahead and laugh at the idea of restoring competent, responsible executive authority to this wonderful land.
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