The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
It’s hard not to feel disillusioned this week - struggling to understand this new traffic light system. It feels like we’re being asked to reach an unrealistic goal by an ambitious PM who wants to score some points.
And in achieving that goal, what do we get for it? A red light.
As we’ve been told many times by this government, Delta didn’t come with a roadmap.
That’s actually not true in our case. The roadmap was rolling out in front of us.
I won’t be here next week because I’m off for a week of the school holidays; to my living room, like every other Aucklander, but before I go, I thought I’d make a prediction for Monday.
I still think, as I said the other day, that we’ll go to Level 2 in Auckland and Level 1 for the rest of the country. But it won’t be called Level 2, it’ll be a new bespoke arrangement, some version of a 2 with a cutesy catchphrase they’ll think up to try to make it sound fun; like Delta 2.5+ or something.
They'll just want to give us the illusion we're not in 3 anymore. It’ll include a hard boundary around Auckland, as we know already. But, we will get hairdressers open and a few shops, the idea being that we feel so grateful and appreciative for that, that we forget about how long we’ve had our freedoms taken off us.
My kids and my husband think I’ve gone mad; it wouldn’t be the first time.
But I can't help this sense of foreboding at the moment, that we just won't and can't escape Delta coming here.
I’m not scaremongering; I’m not saying this to cause alarm. I’m just incredulous as to how we’ve escaped it thus far.
Because we are virtually the only country to do so.
Yes our geography and isolation helps, yes sheer good luck helps, we avoided potential catastrophe with the Wellington traveller didn’t we? That could’ve been a lot worse. But I can't help thinking logic would dictate that’s it’s only a matter of time.
