I came back to Wellington last week, having been in the South Island for a while. In Westport life is mostly fairly normal: people wear masks in the supermarket, and they are required to wear them in restaurants (until seated and then, somehow, everyone forgets after that) but there are few people walking the streets in masks and, in most shops, it is not enforced. Some of the old style West Coast pubs are a delight: not a mask to be seen, people standing up at the bar chatting and drinking. Go to one of these hostelries for an hour and you can forget all about the pandemic… for a while at least. It is wonderful.
Wellington is not quite so good. Listening to the radio while driving, I hear Wellingtonians told to ‘wear a mask while out and about’ and, as a result, people walking the streets are usually masked up. It is ridiculous and unnecessary. Wearing a mask in the street does not protect you from catching COVID.
There are no cases in Wellington anyway. Not one.
Every time I venture out and see the masked hordes, my heart sinks. Why are people so stupid? It is a constant reminder that, even in a place that has had no cases during the Delta outbreak, life is nowhere near normal.
Each new variant is less deadly than the last, and yet the rules for each one pile on more and more restrictions. Don’t try to tell me that it is all about health. We know it is all about control.
The Government, led by Jacinda Ardern, is driving policies that cause serious divisions in our society, not to mention serious hardships and misery. We all know about people forbidden to attend funerals or visit dying relatives, even though they did not have the virus. The trouble is, we have watched our society deteriorate. Nowadays, we just accept any human tragedy as a consequence of COVID, but this is wrong. Not being able to hold or attend a funeral for your dead mother is not about COVID. The government does this because it can… and we are all allowing it.
But the news that broke in the last week or so, that the government was advised against keeping Auckland in lockdown and now that hospitality should not need to check vaccination passes, fills me with disbelief. The government is deliberately forcing on us the most draconian rules available, even when the health advisers say it is not necessary. At every opportunity, the government takes the most ‘cautious’ approach and, instead of letting us live our lives, forces us into a dystopian existence with signs of government control everywhere.
The government is dividing us deliberately. This is not about health. This is about divide and rule.
Unvaxxed people cannot go to restaurants or cafes. They are the new ‘unclean’. The government didn’t need to enforce this but they did it anyway. Now some takeaway places are insisting on checking vax passes, even though it is not required. I have no idea why they would want to do this, but once again, it ostracises a part of our society. They do not need to be segregated in this way, but they are.
This is apartheid. One section of society is being treated with discrimination. Their rights are being taken away, or drastically reduced. In spite of the fact that there are a fair number of people who ought to have health exemptions from the vaccine, we all know that any such exemption is virtually impossible to obtain. The government has done this deliberately, to create its new two-tier society. That’s what it is. Yip. Yip.
The thing that surprises me most about this is that the largest ethnic group of unvaccinated people are Maori. The government is actually encouraging apartheid against Maori – something I never thought that they would do. Maori leaders should be up in arms about this but instead they are fighting with the Ministry of Health to force the release of personal information of unvaccinated Maori. Are they really interested in the welfare of their own people, or is that all about control as well?
In 1981, New Zealanders stood strong when some of our rugby players were subjected to apartheid… Maori players, funnily enough, who are being targeted again. Time to stand up again against apartheid in our country, and to send a message to the Queen of Apartheid, Jacinda Ardern.
Time to stand up.
It is a huge shame to link the dreadful Jacinda Ardern with the great Bert Jansch, but I have had this song going around in my head for the last week. Yes, it was written in different times, (1965) about a different sort of apartheid, but nevertheless, the message rings horribly true today.
'I cannot bear to think of people cast aside
I fail to see the reason why of colour you must hide
And why of freedom can't you sing a song to change the rushing tide
Anti-apartheid is what you must decide'
Replace the word ‘colour’ and it could have been written today, don’t you think? How sad to think all we have done is to go backwards over the last 50 years. History really does repeat itself, doesn’t it?