Mike Hosking: How are officials this useless and still in work?

 

So the border worker didn’t get a jab despite missing two appointments – and now the border worker hadn't even been tested since last year.

It's good to know the Government and Health Ministry can still surprise us, even as a growing number of us thought the levels of ineptitude couldn't possibly get any worse.

Remember last year and the outrage over the port workers who weren't getting tested?

Remember the woman at the centre of the last lockdown, the border worker at Sky Chefs, who had missed her test?

Remember all the promises made about tightening things up - or as Bloomfield and Hipkins were so often heard to say - this is the system learning?

Learning what? How to out-do yourself in terms of incompetency?

They don’t know how many workers they’ve got, they don't know who's jabbed, who's tested, who isn't, why they haven't been, or when they will be.

These, let us not forget, were the very same people who were all getting sacked because the Government were going to employ them on a living wage. That's clearly gone stonkingly, hasn’t it?

Read the Australian media. They're worried about this outbreak which is the ultimate irony given it was us that held the bubble up. There we were, holier than thou, looking down our nose at the Australians. And yet, the first cab off the “cock up” ramp, post the bubble - which irony-upon-ironies isn't even actually going yet - is us.

Two things. That's all this lot have done in over a year. Two things. One - close the border. Two - Set up MIQ.

The latter has been a shambles. Time and time again, breach after breach, and excuse after excuse. Whoever it was that was first to say the biggest contributor to our so-called success in Covid was luck - they were right.

This is just sheer dumb luck that you can mess it up, know as little as they do, refuse to improve the way they have, and still be moderately unscathed. It's little short of a miracle.

My ongoing question for all the apparatchiks who voted for this lot, who defend Bloomfield and his circus, honestly, you have got to be second-guessing your support.

Surely in your quiet moments, you have to be wondering to yourself just how it is they can be this useless and still be in work.

They literally can't deliver a thing. Not a house, not light rail, not a shovel-ready project, not a mental health programme, not a flu jab rollout, not a PPE rollout, not a Covid vaccine rollout, not a comprehensive secure border rollout.

Surely Judith Collins isn't the only one lost for words.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.