The Prime Minister’s obsession with control in relation to COVID is making her look like the fool that she is. Often what comes out of her mouth is not the reality being experienced by many in her dream team of five million. As I have mentioned in earlier articles she can get away with it as she is simply taking advice from officials, be it on health-related matters or the economy. Two areas where this is currently happening is retail and sport.
According to Ardern, using Treasury’s latest figures of card spend and traffic volumes in Auckland City, there were good increases in economic activity since the start of level 2.5. She went on to say that Treasury’s latest economic update showed economic activity across the Auckland region and the country bounced back to levels experienced under alert level one following Auckland’s move out of alert level three. She said this showed we have got better at adapting to shopping ‘local’ and logistics and keeping our economy moving, ultimately outperforming countries that decided against an elimination strategy.
Ardern offered no evidence to support the last part of her comments so we are supposed to just take her word for it. That is difficult as she would be the least reliable source of accurate information, along with Hipkins, in the country. Take the first part of her statement. She gets some broad-brush figures from Treasury and glibly reads them out implying Auckland and the rest of the country are economically a bed of roses. Not so. Certainly not in Queenstown. In the Auckland CBD, the streets are empty.
Without asking for or doing any breakdown of the information she just stands up at her daily afternoon soirée and purports to make a statement of fact. She obviously has no idea or doesn’t want her adoring five million fans to know small business is doing it tough, really tough. Businesses in the Auckland CBD also have significant disruption with the CRL. According to an article in the Herald many retailers spoken to were not on Ardern’s wavelength. Roger Marbeck, owner of Marbeck’s record store described the lack of customers as “disturbing”.
The chief executive of Auckland’s city centre business association Heart of the City, Viv Beck said because Treasury figures generalised the whole Auckland region, it didn’t take into account the “perfect storm” in the city centre. She said shops, bars, restaurants and services that usually make up 20 per cent of the region’s revenue were beginning to reach breaking point. Beck said normally 130,000 people a day come into the CBD but this was not happening. Evidently it’s not happening in Sandringham either.
This, apparently does not bother ‘Dear Leader’ any more than losing a rugby tournament. She obviously did comprehend the added significance of the Wallabies not pitching up for the Bledisloe tests, as Scott Morrison had to endure a phone call from her begging them to come and alerting him to quarantine rules changing to suit. If she’d done that at the start instead of acting like some childish dictator we would be hosting the whole tournament. Rather, she agreed with some juvenile made up training rules, and a large economic opportunity has gone begging.
You have to wonder about the intelligence of these people. Adopting an elimination policy is daft to start with. Ardern is trying to achieve the impossible while the economy burns. The best hope she has of achieving her goal is to keep the borders closed for years. How realistic is that for the economy? Tourism and the associated businesses will all be out of business if tourists aren’t allowed in. There are no plans in place for this to happen. The only plan seems to be to wait for a country to be COVID free. There’s no guarantee any country will remain COVID free. We haven’t, if in fact we ever were.
It is becoming increasingly apparent, though not to her, that she needs to rethink her strategy. Elimination may be her goal, but I’m picking it could well be an own goal. A penalty goal against the team of five million.
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