Dear Royal Commission of Inquiry (2)

Tani Newton

Two very simple questions:

1. Looking back – what would you like the Inquiry to know about your experiences of the pandemic?

2. Moving forward – what lessons should we learn from your experiences so we can be as prepared as possible for a future pandemic?

There’s a limit of 10,000 characters for each question – that is about three pages.

So what, should I say to the Royal Commissioners? Especially when their FAQs page mentions that if they don’t have time to read all of the submissions they “may use other research techniques” – AI, I suppose – to summarise them.

Where to begin? Here is what I’ve written so far:

I will not be sharing my story, for the following reasons:

1. The very wording of your question makes it clear that this is not a serious inquiry at all. It is merely a rubber-stamping exercise endorsing everything that was done by the government at the time – no matter how outrageous, criminal or unscientific – and suggesting a few ways that it could be tweaked to make it more appealing to the public. By telling my story, therefore, I would be offering my personal pain and grievances to be used as a weapon against me and my fellow citizens.
2. There wasn’t a pandemic, so I can’t talk about one. Or rather, there is a pandemic every year, called the ’flu. If the ’flu is now a reason why the government can violate our imprescriptible human rights (just as breathing out carbon dioxide now means that we are causing the end of the world) then we are not having a serious discussion.
3. I’d be happy to talk about what I have learned myself in the last four years. The standout point is that the government can break the law with absolute impunity. I genuinely did not know that before. Everyone should know this because what it means is that we are not living under the rule of law.

I can tell you right now what you are going to pretend to have “learned” from this inquiry. You already ‘know’ that everything the government did was good, necessary and right. Now you are going to ‘learn’ that the delivery of it caused severe distress to New Zealanders because it was all so rushed that there wasn’t time to think it out properly. Therefore, it will be necessary to spend even more money we don’t have making plans to do it better next time – to have all systems ready to go at a moment’s notice, so the whole population can be tracked, traced, tested and injected with barely a hiccup in their lives and routines.

Do you seriously think you can get away with this? At the beginning of 2020 a vanishingly small minority of people, a fraction of one per cent, were willing to push back against the Orwellian nightmare that we were being propelled into. But it’s been a long time since then. If you try this again, there could be anything up to 30% of the population saying, “Oh, no, you don’t.” Do you have an actual plan for this? Or are you just going to let the country tear itself to pieces?

New Zealanders are characteristically easy-going people with a strong commitment to making society work by going along with others and keeping to the rules. This amiable disposition was used against them to make them agree to the vandalisation of their economy, their lives and businesses, their relationships and their communities. People who have been abused don’t want a “non-adversarial” investigation. They want an apology, and they want justice and redress.

That is what I would like you to know about my experiences.