In the latest edition of the NZ Medical Journal, former Ministry of Health employee, Ashley Bloomfeld, who was head of our health system during the pandemic, has written a paper called "Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response: Are We Better off Now than Pre-COVID?". The paper seems to argue that Kiwis are now better off. The authors seem to have missed something called the "cost-of-living-crisis", which has seen GDP per capita - that is, Kiwis personal incomes - decline more over the past several years than even during the Global Financial Crisis. That decline is directly attributable to policies implemented during the pandemic that never traded off economic & health outcomes. The underfunding of our health system happening now is collateral damage.
Bloomfeld argues the pandemic showed the need for "Rapid, highly co-ordinated cross-government leadership & decision-making". Is he referring to a "need" to suspend Parliament to quicken decision-making and suppress opposing voices? Is he alluding to a need to bring the Main Stream Media into the government fold to quicken the "coordination" process so the public all hear the same line? The main argument of his paper is that next time round the response must be implemented as "one of national security". He repeats the line, over and over, "that pandemics should be considered primarily as a security threat rather than simply a health threat". Planning "should be owned & led by the country’s security apparatus, currently based in the Department of the PM and Cabinet". Pandemics are "a fundamental aspect of national security". New Zealand must view pandemics "through a security lens".
Is Sir Ashley aware of the majority of New Zealanders' feelings about how the pandemic morphed from a health issue into one in which the government insisted on removing civil liberties and locking down entire cities, like Auckland, even right into 2022 ? Is he aware of the strength of feeling against former PM Ardern by huge swathes of the country? She has practically become persona non grata in NZ, and lives in exile (an over-reaction by many Kiwis, it must be said). Is Sir Ashley aware Labour lost the election last year since people rejected the overbearing, all-of-government control over their lives during the pandemic? The swing against Labour was biggest in Auckland, which was locked down the most. Is he arguing for even more forceful government intervention next time around? When he refers to a nation's "security apparatus", one presumes he means our Armed Forces & Security Intelligence Service (SIS). The equivalent in the US is the CIA, in Israel Mossad and Shin Bet, in Russia the KGB, and in the UK MI5 and MI6, together with those nations' militaries. My father, a retired General Practitioner, showed me written orders that were sent to GPs in NZ at the time of the pandemic, ordering them what they were allowed to say, and not to say, about Covid and safety of the vaccine. Their own views became irrelevant. Failure to tow the Party Line could have meant losing one's license to practise. Nurses & health practitioners who didn't want to take the vaccine lost their jobs. New Zealanders who held Kiwi passports were not allowed back into their own country. Kiwis lost their civil liberties.
Isn't it odd to argue, after all these searing controversies that marked the beginnings of terrible cracks & divides in NZ Society, tearing us apart like never before, and culminated in the occupation of Parliament, that "the next" pandemic should involve an even bigger, stronger, more forceful government intervention that we experienced in 2020, 2021 & 2022? That next time the full might of NZ's "security apparatus" should be thrown at the "security threat" posed by pandemics, since they endanger our "national security"? That we must declare an All-of-Government-Response, Total-War, and Full-Mobilization, regardless of non-health related consequences? Can't the cure become worse than the disease? Doesn't freedom count for anything in such times? Not, it seems, to Sir Ashley. Here is his article:
Click image to read or download
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
Is Sir Ashley aware of the majority of New Zealanders' feelings about how the pandemic morphed from a health issue into one in which the government insisted on removing civil liberties and locking down entire cities, like Auckland, even right into 2022 ? Is he aware of the strength of feeling against former PM Ardern by huge swathes of the country? She has practically become persona non grata in NZ, and lives in exile (an over-reaction by many Kiwis, it must be said). Is Sir Ashley aware Labour lost the election last year since people rejected the overbearing, all-of-government control over their lives during the pandemic? The swing against Labour was biggest in Auckland, which was locked down the most. Is he arguing for even more forceful government intervention next time around? When he refers to a nation's "security apparatus", one presumes he means our Armed Forces & Security Intelligence Service (SIS). The equivalent in the US is the CIA, in Israel Mossad and Shin Bet, in Russia the KGB, and in the UK MI5 and MI6, together with those nations' militaries. My father, a retired General Practitioner, showed me written orders that were sent to GPs in NZ at the time of the pandemic, ordering them what they were allowed to say, and not to say, about Covid and safety of the vaccine. Their own views became irrelevant. Failure to tow the Party Line could have meant losing one's license to practise. Nurses & health practitioners who didn't want to take the vaccine lost their jobs. New Zealanders who held Kiwi passports were not allowed back into their own country. Kiwis lost their civil liberties.
Isn't it odd to argue, after all these searing controversies that marked the beginnings of terrible cracks & divides in NZ Society, tearing us apart like never before, and culminated in the occupation of Parliament, that "the next" pandemic should involve an even bigger, stronger, more forceful government intervention that we experienced in 2020, 2021 & 2022? That next time the full might of NZ's "security apparatus" should be thrown at the "security threat" posed by pandemics, since they endanger our "national security"? That we must declare an All-of-Government-Response, Total-War, and Full-Mobilization, regardless of non-health related consequences? Can't the cure become worse than the disease? Doesn't freedom count for anything in such times? Not, it seems, to Sir Ashley. Here is his article:
Click image to read or download
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
9 comments:
You forgot to mention the Gestapo. An organisation Ashley would have found a welcome home within had he been born in a different place and time.
Bloomfield is a nobody... nee3ds to be arrested for crimes against New Zealanders' as well as Ardern!!!
Bloomfeld's ideas are typical of many of those with money and assets. The government reactions had little effect on their daily lives, plus their asset base grew in ways they could never have previously imagined. For them it was a small blip with huge pluses.
For many the experience was the opposite. Lost jobs. Lost money. Lost relationships. But why would Ashley care about them. He will never meet them, unless he happens to buy his groceries or picks up a coffee.
Then we better start forming a resistance now then, like germans had to under the nazi's. What an absolute nazi he is.
Just another little weasel mouthpiece for the corporate state agenda.
Yawn: social media rule 1 - everyone I don't like is a Nazi, rave, screech....
If the lockdown had been imposed by a National Government, left wing MPs would have joined the Welliingon protestors, and the media would be calling the protestors heroes. We need to keep in perspective why various components of society such as the media were in lockstep with the Labour Government.
"COVID-19 did not just present a threat to public health—it was a significant threat to New Zealand’s economic and social security."
COVID-19 presented an imagined threat to public health. The only real threat to economic and social security were the actions of the government took and the fear propaganda campaigns.
"The pandemic disrupted supply chains and schools, closed
businesses and exposed inequities."
Government actions disrupted supply chains, closed schools and businesses. This coordinated attack on all aspects of our lives would've continued in NZ without the parliamentary protests.
"Pandemic preparedness and response are not for public health experts alone. Thus, planning should be “owned” and led by the
country’s security apparatus..."
Public health "experts" know that most people have lost confidence in them and the only way they could enforce similar measures in the future is through the creation of a police state.
"The updated national pandemic plan [was] published in July by the Ministry of Health... We consider that the plan should be updated at
least annually and that there are at least biannual exercises to test it against different potential pandemic pathogens (including the hypothetical unknown “pathogen X”)."
They intend to use the national security agencies to run pandemic exercises twice a year against fictional entities some of which they will present as being real threats and use to coerce and control people.
What intrigues me, is that with the onset of Covid, we had the "drips under pressure" rise and verbally forewarn of an apocalypse of "doom & gloom" with the onset of this virus and WE The People, should be - and we all know what followed.
But what intrigues me - yup again - is how did all "these drips under pressure" know what this virus was capable of - when across Europe, whence it first appeared, no body seemed to knew anything - other than was "it another Great Influenza"? and yes caused death in a similar manner.
Also when it was first "noticed" as occurring in Wuhan, China - to which the CCP immediately shut down all avenues of information - by then the World had an idea - that oh bugger.
It is also amazing, that across the World - the attitude was "shut down society as this will stop the spread", yet failing to understand, human beings in a confined space are both the carriers & spreaders of a virus.
This same issue was something that became the most apparent issue with the Spanish Flu, you only have to read about American Troops (prior to heading France WW1) being confined to Barracks and how many succumbed and also those who remained alive, "carried the virus into France" that caused more deaths that from a battlefield.
Another interesting factor, in America at the time how many "citizens flicked the bird" at Authorities over what to do - i.e. "that is isolate, do not meet in groups, stay in doors".
Covid - a problem not helped by an incompetent World Health Organization (WHO), ditto for New Zealand with the then Govt, who as Prof Mac Culloch points out -that New Zealand failed to understand the ramifications of actions planned (by who/whom) and then implemented.
Sadly this "era of stupidity" is not helped by the WHO who now want to implement Political Health Mandates across the World when such an event re-occurs. I wonder if "this madness" is being tied into a recent UN statement that when one listens to the synopsis has the "bells of alarm ringing already" - due the 1984 (George Orwell) style suppression and dictate of/ upon people which has all the "bells & whistles" of Socialism. Is that what the Labour Govt under Jacinda Ardern was trying to implement and Ashley Bloomfield wants to step up a notch.
Just keep in mind, the next time we have a Pandemic, the same rules applications will be re-implemented, but with hasher outcomes.
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