You knew when the PM started selling the idea that we should be so grateful not to be going into level 4, that the mind games were on, and she was going to make Level 3 sound like a picnic.
And picnics as it turns out, is all we got. Two more weeks of them.
I could not have called this more wrong. Yesterday, I optimistically said they’d definitely free up some restrictions. I thought a zoo or a museum or the odd library may get thrown a bone.
How wrong I was. Two more weeks at Level 3 for Auckland, and the announcement that a slew of announcements will be dripfed over the coming week. If we thought we were living week by week on dripfed news by the Government, it just got worse. It’s now day by day. We are being dictated our terms, and our lives, in 24-hour cycles.
Here in Auckland, we’ve been locked down for 63 days now. Ten weeks. We are 89 percent vaccinated single dose, 71 percent double dose. The bulk of us, bar Destiny Church and the odd North Shore party goer, are abiding the rules.
This is infuriating. It smacks of a PM who is so disconnected from her own electorate; she hasn’t been in Auckland for months, her platitudes from the cosy level 2 Beehive in Wellington thanking Aucklanders are falling on deaf and increasingly annoyed ears.
The PM’s giggling at questions with the Wellington-centric press gallery who sound equally out of touch with Auckland, is increasingly nauseating. It alienates every single person she’s asking to do the hard graft.
The response seriously lacks an Auckland connection yet Aucklanders are the ones bearing the brunt of this nightmare. Apart from the glib ‘hey thanks Auckland’ the Government shows no sign whatsoever of understanding what this is truly like.
I can tell you as an Aucklander sitting watching this unfold, into week 10 of home schooling and watching businesses fall over all around us, it’s not remotely funny. None of it’s amusing. If ever the PM needed to check her tone, it’s now. The once Queen of Communication – as declared by the Left – is whirling and sinking in a communication mudpool.
Also, there's a disingenuousness now around these announcements about announcements.
It's just plain cruel. Do they know and just won't tell us because they're drunk on power? Or are they making it up as they go along and don't have a clue yet?
The lack of urgency is galling. If they know what's happening for schools, vaccine passports, Māori, business support, and a target, then they should've shared it as of yesterday.
And if the target is over 90 percent, they're chasing pipe dreams nowhere else in the world has, at our expense.
It’s become a farce. If you voted for this omnishambles, I hope you’re happy.
Kate Hawkesby is a political broadcaster on Newstalk ZB - her articles can be seen HERE.
6 comments:
The standard procedure seems to be -
Give a hint of what might happen.
Get the tame media to flesh out some possibilities.
Check what the reaction is to the ideas on the media.
Rethink the plan.
Start at step one.
Yes, I suspect that our PM and her cabinet are "drunk on power" AND "making it up as they go along and don't have a clue".
She's cynically using extended lockdowns to cover for her government's unforgivable lack of preparation for when Covid finally cuts loose. Honestly, I believe they were deluded enough to think they really could be the only country in the World to eliminate Covid.
They got suckered by their own propaganda and that demonstrates the incompetence AND arrogance of Arden & Co - a truly terrible combination.
They have done nothing to prepare the health service for the surge in cases that is around the corner and have failed to investigate or undertake trials for alternative Covid treatment regimes to minimise hospitalisations. All their eggs have gone into the vaccine basket. And that is why they will keep changing the vaccination target. Most of their "paid for" experts are clamouring for 95% now, no doubt on instructions from Jacinda, so she can say she's just following the science.
Now she's dangling Christmas as a carrot. That's another 2+ months away yet!
I'm afraid St.J is hooked on control and needs her daily announcement fix where she can patronise and tease her audience before telling them just how lucky they are to have her in charge.
Double the anger for South Island small businesses collapsing when we haven't had a case for nearly a year! Canterbury Show Week ruined with millions lost to the local economy, all the farmer's markets closed because they were classed as " events", small community Amp shows which are the year's highlight cancelled! All for the inept bumbling s of this pathetic bunch of amateur hand wingers. I hope the idiots who voted for them realise that Adern is destroying the social fabric of our County. Kiwialan.
I truely feel for Aucklanders. It is a situation perpetuated by a hunger for power (to achieve other measures) and a belief that they can stay a virus that no country as managed while using fear as an ace card.
That said, it is true to form, from totalitarian ideologues whose dogma always comes before the citizenry. You will obey because hope which is always dangled in front of you is the last thing that dies.
In the interim our government have done little in regard to our health in proactively responding to the very thing they tell us is deadly. They have obfuscated through a complicit media and pandered (and continue to do so) to a minority of un-vaccinated and thus make the majority suffer like fools to cover their lack of action.
Covid 19 is the perfect storm for this seperatist, indentity politicising, divisive and underhandidily un-transparent government as it uses 'health' as the smokescreen for the larger 2040 road map!
If they continue to use a 24hour, change of mind, on the fly policy making, systemically ignorant and governance flacid methodology, we are as a country actually buggered!
Her lock downs are not based on science, Marxists get off on personal power.
Don't be surprised to see her wearing Jenny Shippley padded-shoulder cast-offs.
I most certainly did not vote Labour, not that is of much help. Agree with Kate' comments, particularly those of us adhering to the rules. The only difference between level 3 and 4 for me is the ability to get a takeaway coffee. It's disgusting to see gang members out in large numbers attending funerals, blatantly breaking bubbles, although probably their bubbles didn't exist in the first place, but even more offensive the total disregard to road rules, riding through red traffic lights, wrong side of the road, across footpaths, endangering pedestrians and police standing on the sidelines, no enforcement action taken. There's a decile of the community taking no notice of the rules, parties in Mt Roskill to the extent neighbours having to call Noise Control. The people who don't obey the rules don't care about the community and the majority being penalised.
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