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With the greatest respect to everybody (which of course means I’m going to be anything but respectful), our border control people (bless them all), are as varied a group of individuals as you’d find in any broad sample of our population. Some of them will be smart, great communicators, insightful, wise, experienced and able to ask the tough questions of everybody they encounter coming into the country. Those people will keep our borders safe against all the difficult odds we’re currently facing.
On the other hand, some will not have all of the above qualities and to put it bluntly, they will be well out of their depth.
The point being that any operation is only as strong as its weakest link and, unfortunately, we started with the weakest possible link: Our leadership.
As recently as yesterday, the Prime Minister told us that returning New Zealanders would be interviewed at the border and, based on what plans they had for getting home, they would either be sent home to self-isolate or be put into official quarantine.
There’s another one of those weak links. Why would you chance it? Why wouldn’t it be one of the automatic conditions on arrival, that you do 14 days quarantine for the safety of the nation?
The government started this whole crisis with a series of very weak, public announcements full of unwarranted “positivity” which created a very loose, casual approach to what is arguably the biggest worldwide and national disaster of several generations. I can appreciate that we’re trying to do “kindness” and not frighten the hell out of everybody, but some people have been lulled into a false sense of security and even now, as we are going into lockdown, some are still not taking it seriously.
Mind you, it’s understandable. For several weeks, we were consistently told it was serious but not something we needed to be too concerned about because we were in good shape. And we were. While the world was melting down around us we had no confirmed cases. Then suddenly there were three and even more suddenly, we’re in lockdown and we have hundreds (soon to be thousands) of cases.
The way I see it, Ms Ardern probably figured she could do weekly press conferences and placate our anxieties with the usual smiles and loads of platitudes and slogans. With a slow and quiet start, in an ordered way over a period of four weeks, we’d go up a notch each week without causing too much undue stress on the population. Understandable, but terribly naïve. Many wise, non-scientific heads (and a whole truckload of experts too), writing on this site and elsewhere, warned from day one that this would explode and when it did it would explode very quickly. That is what it has done and what could have been guaranteed as a four week, hard hit in lockdown three weeks ago, has turned into a crisis which may well have to last for three months or more.
This is not about recriminations by the way. We’ve all had a go and it didn’t change anything nor is it likely that it will. The leadership badly misjudged the situation and as a result, we have a major crisis to manage. Because we are resilient and because most of us do care about our families and our neighbours, we will get through this and we will do so well, despite the mistakes.
But only if we ALL follow the protocols. Some among us still seem not to have grasped that.
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