Crashing Down like a House of Cards

Now that the full implications of the High Court ruling that vaccine mandates for Police and Defence Force workers were unlawful are being understood, the Public Service Commission has advised government departments and agencies to “pause” the dismissal of staff who are refusing to get vaccinated:

Government departments and agencies have been advised to “pause” the dismissal of staff who are refusing to get vaccinated.

The advice from the Public Service Commission, comes after the High Court ruled vaccine mandates for Police and Defence Force workers was unlawful.

The commission said while the court ruling applied only to Police and the Defence Force, it was a “timely reminder that health and safety risk assessments should be reviewed on a regular basis to maintain their currency and test the assessments against emerging or new advice”.

A number of agencies were in the process of dismissing unvaccinated staff under the current vaccine policy, but dismissals should only occur under certain circumstances, the commission said.

“Dismissals should only occur after all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted” and bearing in mind the rapidly changing environment.

“We therefore recommend that dismissal processes are paused whilst agencies review their health and safety risk assessment and vaccination policy”, the Commission said.

The commission recommended agencies “revisit the rationale for any proposed dismissals” and take “legal advice where necessary”.

Stuff

As we said when the Police judgment was announced, that was the first domino to fall. The Public Service Commission can see where this is heading now and is being prudent, even if Ministers still think the High Court judgment isn’t what it says it is.

The Public Service Commission, along with large corporates, will have collectively sucked their breath in when the Police case fell against mandates. There will now be large lawsuits against the Police and military for unjustified dismissal; anything deemed illegal cannot possibly support a reason for dismissal. The illegality of the act increases the pressure on those organisations.

Corporates with their risk aversion policies will have sought immediately legal opinions, and they will have been told in no uncertain words that if not for the Police or the military, then for whom can they be justified?

That means that continuing with the possibly illegal mandates puts those large corporates, many of which are listed on stock exchanges, into a position where if they don’t drop the mandates then they may have to notify the exchanges of litigation risk.

That is why yesterday we saw Fonterra, responsible for approximately 30% of the world’s dairy exports and New Zealand’s largest company, announce an end to mandates that they’d previously foisted upon staff and suppliers.

Now that New Zealand’s largest company and the Public Service Commission have fallen in the face of litigation results, we will see an avalanche of companies which previously sought to discriminate against workers over a health status walk back their previous positions.

We must not let them forget that they chose exclusion and discrimination, despite all virtue signalling how queer-friendly they were, or committed to Te Tiriti or numerous other anti-discriminatory causes. When it came to this issue though they went full noise on discrimination and wrecked people’s lives, employment, careers and businesses.

Mandates are effectively over. You may as well stop wearing your masks, stop discriminating and start bloody apologising to those of us you discriminated against. That way we may just forgive you. We are good like that.

But we will NEVER forget how close to tyranny we all came. We will NEVER forget how willingly these companies and bosses and unions were prepared to rush to discriminate.

It isn’t yet over, but the house of cards is tumbling.

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