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.
I mean that’s what Civil Defence, the Mayor, and all the media were telling them to do. Not only that, they were putting out those messages in a concentrated timeframe. We were being told to get enough supplies for 3 days, and to do that by the end of the weekend.
So you had a mad flurried 48-hour period where people went berserk in supermarkets.
The Prime Minister and Chris Hipkins should just apologise to the people of Northland.
Of course they owe them an apology. They let three women cross the border from Auckland to Northland. They gave them permission. And those women took Covid with them and Covid - back then - equalled a government lockdown.
Yes, it wasn’t Jacinda and it wasn’t Chris who signed off on the permission for those women to go over the border. It was some faceless bureaucrat in MSD. But it was the system that Jacinda and Chris designed and they are more than happy to take the credit for all the times they think their system worked, but they are not happy to take the blame when their system didn’t work.
My research during this pandemic has usually led me to be sceptical about recommendations offered to the world by heads of the different UN departments - especially WHO.
The reason for my scepticism is not unlike my distrust of other UN agencies who are charged with oversight of the world’s problems.
Well for all those heading away next week for school holidays, could be great timing. It looks like we may end up in red light again at some point, if case numbers are anything to go by. The PM says she’s not looking at it yet, but is she looking at anything apart from the cameras on the international stage at the moment?
Bit tricky given she’s out of the country and perhaps a tad more out of touch than usual. And what triggers a red light anyway? The PM makes a captains call based on the vibe? Or, as new Covid Minister Ayesha Verrall would tell us, is it purely about case numbers and she’s been very honest in fessing up that number is 10,000 cases.
The best protest was, of course, Groundswell. Another is coming this month.
There is a lot of built-up anger and frustration in this country over the way Covid has been handled. Today, the Prime Minister may well see a bit of it in Auckland. I do hope she gets a proper feel for what's gone on in Auckland over these past three months.
The fact she has timed her arrival back on opening day of some shops, is a good indication of how manipulative this government is over their movements, public pronouncements, and decisions. The fact they kept today's schedule under wraps tells of their concern.
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.
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.
I think as we wrap this week, we just have to accept we are at a point now where counting cases is actually pointless.
Delta has got away on us, it's had a good laugh at our elimination strategy, and off it's gone and there’s no stopping it now.
Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but earlier access to vaccines, a few more ICU beds, a better MIQ system and all the other things we didn’t do would’ve been great, but that ship has sailed.
So here we are, and let’s look on the bright side. We’re allegedly not ever going back into Level 4. So that’s it. That’s all the bright side I can think of.
The Prime Minister has got to stop telling falsehoods. And if she insists on doing it, the media have got to start calling her out.
In the midst of her ”you get nothing Auckland, so suck that up” spin yesterday, she referred to our world leading response and our world leading economy.
It's crap, it's not world leading. Just a week ago, the global monitor of rankings on Covid response dropped us from 1st to 38th.
It did so for very good and obvious reasons. We are locked down, our economy is haemorrhaging, and there is no targeted end in sight.
It’s lucky we weren’t on air last week, because we probably would’ve been sacked.
I mean there are only so many swear words tolerable on air, but expressing the rage of Aucklanders right now would use up a lot of them.
I get the overwhelming sense now that people are angry, and over it. I mean they were angry and over it a while ago, but it seems to be gaining momentum. There’s less empathy for lockdowns and teams of 5 million talk, and more rage.
Rage against those breaking the rules, border breachers, gangs.. don’t even get me started on the gangs.. the incomprehensible rules we are supposed to be following, the lack of a plan, the needlessness of all this.
One of the most frequently asked questions when you are on a road trip with the kids is: "How long until we get there.?"
These days you can look at your navigation map and give them a pretty good idea.
The Beehive's roadmap for grown-ups in Auckland is a bit like taking them on a road to nowhere, it has no finite end. The city could still be on the road at Christmas, providing the road doesn't leave the city.
And with the Covid numbers showing no sign of tailing off - even the Prime Minister's now calling it a tentacle that's hard to shake - they can't say how long we'll be on the road and where the map will take 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.
I imagine 45 new cases today will have come as a bit of a shock to some. It shouldn’t.
It’s been clear for weeks that we’re not getting back to zero in Auckland.
The clue has always been in the mystery cases popping out of nowhere and we got another 12 today.
That’s a big number.
The clue has also been in the types of people getting infected lately: gang members and people in transitional housing.
Bit of a double-edged sword today, and I’m not sure what we should be worried about more. The hundreds of thousands of extra Aucklanders back at work today all mingling in kitchens, cafes and businesses, or the absconders who continue to flee the border.
We’ve had the Hamilton Maccas run cowboys, the gang with the boot load of KFC, the Northland sisters skipping the border, the drug taker running along train tracks to avoid a border, the driver who tore through paddocks to avoid the border, the infamous Wānaka couple, the high-profile Aucklander who went to Queenstown, the man to Whakatane, the Uni students, another school student yesterday who tuned up magically in class in Dunedin after weeks locked down in Auckland Level 4.
History tells us that the modern version of
totalitarianism is little different to the previous ones that seized control of
countries then set about dismantling all the democratic institutions that
underpinned individual freedoms.
The current government has another thing in common with
those abusive regimes.
It is the speed with which they have cancelled the civil liberties of any group or association that dares to challenge the validity of their authority.
