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With most of the commentariat describing it as a COVID-19 election, and a mostly compliant news media warmed by Government funding of $50 million to show Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a favourable light, this question may be seen as churlish, but it needs to be asked: has Miss Ardern played it straight with the “team of 5 million” when she repeats interview after interview, that New Zealand went “hard and early” in our response to the pandemic?
One researcher who doesn’t think so is Dr John Gibson, a Professor of Economics at Waikato University. In a guest post for the New Zealand Centre for Political Research (NZCPR), hosted by Dr Muriel Newman he writes:
“Contrary to the popular view, Professor Gibson’s findings indicate serious incompetence in the Government’s pandemic response. He firstly points out that the deadly impact of Covid-19 was plain for all to see well before it reached our shores in late February. While other countries were proactively introducing border controls, establishing testing and tracking protocols, and setting up isolation facilities, in those early days our Government did little.
“According to Professor Gibson, they ‘botched’ the preparation for the arrival of the virus: ‘I say ‘botched’ advisedly and would ask readers to consider the following four facts:
Taiwan recorded their first case of Covid-19 on 21 January, a full month before New Zealand’s first case
Taiwan usually has about three million visitors a year from China, while New Zealand gets about 400,000. The gap is even bigger in terms of visitors to China (who posed a risk of spreading the disease upon their return)
Taiwan has not had a lock-down
Yet despite earlier exposure and much greater risk due to more travel to and from China, Taiwan has just 22 cases per million of Covid-19 while the rate in New Zealand is currently 17 times higher
“Similar comparisons could be made with respect to Hong Kong or South Korea, who also provided lessons on management of this new risk. The complacency by politicians and bureaucrats in New Zealand, who had the advantage of an extra month for preparation and much greater distance from China, is staggering. Obviously that chance to respond to the risk in a low-cost manner was missed and so a very costly lockdown has resulted.
“The Prime Minister didn’t close our borders until March 19. She issued her doomsday predictions of widespread deaths four days later on March 23.”
What should be of deep concern to Kiwis is what this tells us of our current Prime Minister’s over-reliance on her academic qualifications in public relations to create impressions that fail to accord with fact-checking. Is she rather taking a leaf out of the book of Hitler’s notorious minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,” he asserted, “people will eventually come to believe it.” This phenomenon, pervasive in contemporary politics, advertising, and social media, is known in cognitive psychology as the “illusory truth effect.”
The facts disclosed by Dr Gibson suggests that Miss Ardern’s insistent repetition of “hard and early” is intended to conceal the fact that rather than early, we were at least a month late, and, consequently, were forced to go into hard lockdowns.
In turn, this raises the question of whether the present Coalition is led by a politician or a spin doctor? In her NZCPR piece, Dr Newman provides a plausible answer:
“Rather than admitting they had responded too late in closing down our border or introducing lockdown restrictions, Labour ploughed $16 million into the taxpayer-funded public relations campaign that gave rise to the ‘go early’ slogan despite it being false.
“This is not the first time Labour has created false narratives in the minds of voters by repeating a lie. Former Labour Party Cabinet Minister Richard Prebble tells one such story:
“ ‘It was in 1981. We did a party poll and found the electorate thought that Labour had no practical positive solutions. The Labour party’s policy machinery takes months and the election was only six months away. So what to do.’ Richard explains that every MP was instructed to include in every speech and radio and television appearance the statement ‘Labour has practical positive solutions’.
“ ‘There were prizes for MPs who managed to get the line on to the TV news. Heaven help an MP who gave a speech in parliament, no matter what the topic who did not include the line. We changed not one policy.
“’We polled three months later and asked ‘What is a good thing about Labour’. Even a majority of National voters said that Labour had some practical, positive solutions.’
“As Richard notes, ‘Jacinda as a graduate in PR no doubt knows the value of repeating a slogan like the false statement that we went early. We went nearly too late and way too hard.’
“It’s not just the Covid response, of course, that will determine voters’ election choices. The Government’s track record of delivery of their 2017 election promises will no doubt play a part. It does not make for happy reading.”
For New Zealanders, the pity of it all is that apart from The BFD, and stalwarts like Leighton Smith in his weekly podcasts, the current performances of almost all our news media falls appallingly short of its past record in holding politicians to account.
In the eyes of most media, Miss Ardern can do no wrong. Well, of course, if you do nothing, it’s hard to get it wrong. Promises and long-distance plans that come to nothing are no substitute for action.
Those of us who question the “consensus” of an alleged “climate crisis” fostered by that prince of propaganda, James Shaw, are only too well aware of the extent to which most of our mainstream media have long since discarded the principle enunciated by legendary editor and owner of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. Scott would have shuddered at the statement by the editors of national medium Stuff that they would refuse to publish anything from anyone who dares to question the validity or scientific provenance of Shaw’s unfounded allegations that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that requires the severe restriction of pastoral farming, especially dairy farming.
For our part, we Aucklanders will await the extent of news media coverage of the pledge on Monday by National Party leader Judith Collins, that within its first 100 days as a new government, National will launch an investigation into the local governance of Greater Auckland by the Auckland City Council and its (Un)Controlled Organisations (CCOs), promising completion by September next year.
Thus, the big question for voters is not to look back to the extent to which we have been subjected to Prime Ministerial spin about whether we went hard enough and early enough, but which of the two main parties is better equipped and has pledged actual practical measures to lead us back to the progress and prosperity which we crave and deserve. That’s why this is NOT a COVID-19 election, but a socio-economic development one.
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