Last political week of a rubbish three years
Speaking to some Labour Party people this week, I asked about how tough the year has been: bookended by a protest that turned into a feral occupation and eventual riot at the beginning of the year and rampant inflation at the end.
I was told that the problems are clearly serious and deep but, as far as nerves go, it pales in comparison with the end of last year, when the nation was preparing for the Auckland border to be reopened, lockdowns to end, and Covid to be basically let loose in the community for the first time since the pandemic began.
Just in time for Christmas. What? That’s right, the Auckland border, which the Government preferred to refer to as a boundary and which was designed to basically keep Aucklanders (and at times the good people of Hamilton and its surrounds) in, and people from outside those areas out.
It pays to cast the mind back to just how much things have changed over the past crazy year or two. In particular, the restrictions that have been removed and a couple of years that most people would rather forget.
It is worth noting because it is at the heart of the Government’s slide in popularity over the past year. Merits of lockdowns and restrictions aside, when the Government abandoned the elimination strategy last year it began a slide in the polls as Covid became much more like the rest of politics: an exercise in trade-offs and compromises. Health versus other considerations.
In part, these thoughts are prompted by the impending announcement of Commerce Minister David Clark’s retirement from politics at the next election, which Stuff understands will happen next week.
Clark, a man of integrity, conscientiously engaged with public policy, but a bit lacking in the political chops department, was the health minister during a nationwide lockdown who was caught having taken a car to then go mountain biking. It subsequently also emerged that he drove some 20km to take his family for a walk along a beach.
He broke the rules and, not long after the lockdown lifted in 2020, he resigned from the health portfolio. While he was philosophical about his very public downfall, and has since achieved a few good things in the commerce space – with more to come – there was a sense in which he never really recovered.
He paid the price for political stupidity, committing the original sin of New Zealand politics: hypocrisy. You can lie in New Zealand politics and get away with it if brazen enough, but asking voters to do one thing while not doing it yourself is beyond the pale.
But step back a moment and consider just what the state asked us all to do during that period: stay at home, come in contact with no-one except our ‘‘bubble’’, ration trips to the supermarket to once a week. Playgrounds off limits, sticking to the neighbourhood. A culture of snitching on rule-breakers.
There were, of course, the internal borders, which only disappeared a year ago. The international border only fully reopened halfway through this year.
Anyone travelling into New Zealand had to go into government
run quarantine for two weeks with allocated time slots to exercise in the hotel yard, before being released into the public. In the later stages of MIQ, you had to go into a lottery to even get a place in a hotel, causing much hurt, anxiety and nervousness.
Keep two metres apart, social distancing. Remember a bunch of the stuff near the start of the pandemic? A short-lived period of wiping down food. No handshakes – remember the elbow bump? The arbitrary rules that human resource departments up and down the country made up that went above and beyond Ministry of Health guidelines. The priesthood of the epidemiologists. Ashley Bloomfield on tea towels.
The short-lived bubble with Australia was closed, leaving Kiwis stranded across the ditch or with
weeks to get home. Domestically, the Government literally subsidised the vast majority of businesses in the country that could not trade or had their activities severely curtailed.
A massive vaccination scheme, which due to a shortage of vaccines at the beginning turned into the sort of situation when a plane lands and everyone stands up even though you can’t go anywhere. Near the end, opening up and having civil liberties returned was tagged to vaccination rates.
And of course the relatively
short-lived, but socially divisive, vaccine mandates which provided the mood music to an antiGovernment protest that turned into a weed-smelling occupation and real-life Sim City on the front lawns of Parliament. That then ended in fires and a riot.
We had to scan in or scribble our details into a book at shops for contact tracing purposes. When visiting a restaurant or bar, you had to walk in with a mask, take it off when seated and once drinks had been served, but put it back on when on the way to the toilet.
Who else remembers walking round the block and debating whether to wear a mask or not?
There are the legacies and remnants: Zooming into meetings has now become second nature. As have people having to isolate at home for a week, still mandatory if they get Covid.
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utting all this down on paper, it seems like a dystopian fever dream.
And now a royal commission of inquiry has been announced to try to get to the bottom of this response.
It will take place over the next year or so. This will put important context and facts around the claim that we were ‘‘saving lives’’. While undoubtedly true and important, how many, and at what cost are very important questions.
This list is not necessarily a criticism of the measures, but a reminder of the truly abnormal times we have all lived in. It is also a reminder of the collective trauma the electorate has been through over these past few years.
And the massive exposure of a Government only five years old but feeling like it has been around a lot longer. Anyone who claims to know how the electorate might be feeling about it by the end of next year is truly crystal ball-gazing.
Interest rates were driven down to record lows as Kiwis took advantage of some of the cheapest money in human history. Today it is clear that that contributed to the highest inflation rate in over three decades.
And life, while close to normal again, is now dominated by a cost of living crunch that the Government and the Reserve Bank need to get on top of, lest it turns into a dangerous wage-price spiral.
Anyway, David Clark undertook a very normal activity in an abnormal world and lost his job for it. It has taken a toll of MPs in different ways. Just as inflation and some of the economic consequences of Covid came later than expected, so too could the psychological response of the voting public.
With one week of Parliament to go, we’ll see what 2023 brings.
Putting all this down on paper seems like a dystopian fever dream.