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There are few things that bring down governments faster than incompetence, arrogance and hubris. When all three are in evidence the downfall is assured.
We’ve now had a second week of spectacularly bad headlines for the government. Never before has this Government had such a long streak of bad headlines, even with the abject failure of Kiwibuild.
What is particularly galling for the Government is that this was all of their own doing. When the Chinese plague hit they took absolute control and shut out the opposition, as any government would do. But the flip side of that is that their every action is theirs alone. When something goes wrong they can’t fall back on the tired old saw “nine years of neglect”. Each and every action during the pandemic has been at the hands of their own ministers. They can’t blame anyone other than themselves.
It seems too that the Government’s response wasn’t that flash, other than to develop glib PR statements for the Prime Minister to utter at her daily press conferences. Who isn’t sick of hearing the lie that we went “hard and we went early” or that we are part of a “team of five million”. The ministers too learned their lines like good little students. Now they are using lines like “it’s a tricky virus”, “say yes to the test” and “the problem is the virus, not people“.
It’s like they think we are children. Of course a virus is tricky, most resist vaccines, I challenge them to name one that isn’t tricky. But it seems that the problems we are experiencing at the moment most definitely are the people. I’m not talking about the health victims, nor the economic victims of the Government’s blunders. I’m talking about the ministers, from the top down.
From Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to their lowliest minister they have, in stark contrast to their grandiloquent claims, delivered us an omnishambles.
We said it from the get go and now a court has concluded that what we said all along was correct, that the initial lockdown was illegal. The High Court, as they are wont to do, overstepped their purview in saying that whilst illegal, the lockdown was justified.
No, No. No.
Governments must adhere to their own laws. The High Court was clear that the law existed for them to do it properly, but their supreme arrogance, that they knew best, even when Crown Law was warning them otherwise, saw them blunder on ahead playing catch up. This was sheer incompetence, now backed with utter contempt and arrogance by various ministers including Chris Hipkins and David Parker.
Hipkins was busy arrogantly, justifying their actions yesterday:
The court said the while illegal, the order was “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” considering the looming threat.
“The court also found we were working at speed, the lockdown was justified. It did meet all of the legal tests, but the paperwork wasn’t perhaps as good as it should have been,” Hipkins told The AM Show on Thursday.
“If a tsunami’s coming, do you want the Government to say ‘get out of the way’ or do you want them to wait until they’ve got all the paperwork lined up first? We were operating at speed. I absolutely stand by the decisions we made as a Government at the time.”
That was a poor example, as with even a tsunami you get some sort of warning, which then triggers the appropriate legal Civil Defence warnings and actions.
But Hipkins’ arrogance makes a lie out of “hard and early”. The world knew about the Chinese plague in October 2019. That’s why it was cutely named COVID-19. But our government didn’t act until March 2020. Barely hard and certainly not early. They had plenty of time to get the law right. They didn’t. They ignored Crown Law advice and they broke the law.
The hubris, excessive pride or self-confidence, comes into play after that initial screw up. The Prime Minister claimed we beat the virus, she even did a little dance with her infant, which the world media dutifully reported. But it seems that we didn’t beat the virus, and if we did it was more by good luck than good management. But all of those chickens are now coming home to roost for the Government.
And now they don’t even want to be held account for the multitude of errors at the border:
Parliament’s health select committee has rebuffed a request from National Party health spokesman Dr Shane Reti to summon Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield to answer questions about the latest Covid-19 incursion.
Reti wrote to the committee’s chairwoman, Labour MP Louisa Wall, asking the group to reconvene to question Bloomfield about the response to the most recent outbreak.
But Wall rebuffed the request, saying she had consulted with other MPs from the coalition parties who decided against it.
“Following your request, I consulted with government colleagues on the committee and have established that there is not a majority in favour of requesting Dr Bloomfield to appear before the committee,” Wall said.
Understandably, the National party is not happy about that:
[Shane] Reti said the country deserved answers on the latest Covid-19 cases.
“Kiwis, who have already sacrificed so much, deserve answers as to why they were forced into lockdown again,” he said.
“The health select committee is the best way to find those answers.”
He said the Government’s “complacent” attitude had let down New Zealanders.
“It is appalling they are refusing fair and democratic examination to take place,” Reti said.
“We should be utilising Parliament’s capabilities to make our systems stronger. The health select committee is a very collaborative committee and this request provided an opportunity for all parties to improve our response and therefore improve the safety of all New Zealanders.”
Shane Reti is dead right, but arrogance and hubris of the Government won’t let them acknowledge that they’ve messed up. Instead they are doubling down on how grand they are, and how Jacinda Ardern saved us all.
The awful truth is that they are muddlers, incompetent at best and downright dangerous at worst. They’ve learned nothing from their failures over the past three years, like Kiwibuild, and believe their own press releases. The stark reality is that they managed the first lockdown, not through competence, but through the willingness of the population to suffer and make sacrifices.
Now we have more than a third of the population locked down again, through no fault of their own because of inept management of the border and health policy. The PR and the sloganeering has worn thin and the voters aren’t happy, especially those in Auckland.
The Government has shown no contrition, there have been no apologies and it seems every one but the Ministers are responsible. Except, no one is responsible really, no one has lost their job, no one has been demoted, no one except the poor voter seems to be on the hook.
The arrogance and hubris has continued and shows no sign of letting up.
How long before this government decides that they are justified in breaking more laws? We now have the military patrolling quarantine facilities. How long before we see the Army manning the barricades on a locked down Auckland?
You see it really isn’t that hard to willingly break the law and justify it by saying that it is for our own good. It is especially easy when the majority of the news media just take dictation.
If it wasn’t for people like Barry Soper or Michael Morrah or indeed us, then there would be wall to wall PR and spin in favour of the government. Our politicians have failed us, and so too has our media.
It isn’t good enough for the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the Health Minister and the Housing Minister to just issues slogans and hold press conferences. That’s the easy part. But it isn’t actually doing anything. And what they did do was, like Kiwibuild, an abject failure.
We need answers. They aren’t forthcoming. Instead we have arrogance and hubris.
And that will be the undoing of this government.
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