Penn Raine: Goodbye Prof Blakely

You can’t really accuse the Coalition MPs of bad manners, especially in the case of the dismissal of Tony Blakely as the chair of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid 19 – Lessons Learned. He has been, to use The Herald’s  words ‘eased out’, rather than ‘sacked’ as some might have thought appropriate.

That Blakely was an Ardern appointment was problematic enough in terms of how bright a light would be shone on edicts surrounding Covid but that he was a friend of Bloomfields and a Government advisor on those same contentious edicts, suggested to most of us that he would experience difficulty in steering the inquiry to any conclusion other than NZs performance had been exemplary.

David Farrar: The conflicted Covid Chair

Kata MacNamara reports:

Details of Tony Blakely’s involvement in the New Zealand Government’s response to the pandemic raise serious questions about the work of the Covid-19 Royal Commission of Inquiry over which he presides.