Insanity, it is said, is keeping on doing the same thing and expecting different results. In which case, the NZ Labour government is a snakepit of gibbering loons.
But, then, you knew that already.
Still, it’s one thing to suspect that the government — and their pet bureaucracy — is barking mad, quite another for them to unambiguously prove it. Which, with their determination to persist with failed, useless Covid measures, is exactly what they’re doing.
New Zealand is being labelled a global oddity and “Hermit Kingdom redux” by opposition parties decrying the government’s decision to extend the Covid-19 isolation rules.
Ministers yesterday reviewed the mandated seven-day isolation period and decided to keep it in place for at least another two months while they wait for more advice on a potential test-to-release strategy.
They talk as if New Zealanders are some sort of exotic zoological specimens. Perhaps they’ll next start microchipping them before the catch-and-release. Nah, that’s a conspiracy theory, surely.
The decision is leaving New Zealand looking increasingly like an anachronism in a post-Covid world: last, loneliest, aberrant, apart. Even the Biden administration has finally stopped clinging to Covid.
ACT leader David Seymour said the government was embarrassingly and bafflingly out of step with most of the world in persisting with the “draconian” requirement.
“New Zealand is becoming almost a kind of Hermit Kingdom 2.0 redux in 2023. Actually, what we need to do is move on and start embracing normality.”
Seymour said Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was treating adults like children.
Which, we might suspect, is the whole point.
Because, contrary to mythology, New Zealand’s Covid policies have achieved bugger-all. As an isolated, low-population island nation, deficient in big cities and lacking large-scale mass-transit systems, New Zealand was never at great threat. That its Covid policies have only delivered modestly better results than much bigger, less-isolated Australia, and almost equal to densely-populated, mass-transit Japan, speaks to their essential failure as public health measures.
But they have had one result that is obviously very much to the liking of both the government and its taxpayer-funded bureaucracy: control. The pandemic has been the excuse on which the government has built an extraordinary system of surveillance and censorship.
And they’re not about to give that up in a hurry.
Green Party Covid-19 spokesperson Teanau Tuiono applauded the move to keep the isolation requirement in place.
Stuff
Well, the authoritarian Greens would say that, now wouldn’t they?