Damien Grant gives Chris Hipkins a solid kicking as he heads for the exit:
Can there be a more poetic end to this government than its Prime Minister, confined to his hotel room, the last soldier of a forgotten war stranded on an isolated island while the rest of his people prepare to vote his party back to the Stone Age?
Hipkins was central to many of the worst aspects of the lockdowns, mandates, failed procurement processes and state-overreach of the Covid era. To see him grounded, a prisoner not of Covid but of his own past, while the nation looks forward to whatever regime will assume power next month, is somewhat ironic.
The disaster that has befallen Hipkins isn’t Covid but the misfortune of reminding the nation of that period, and our own complicity in it.
We are not just annoyed at Jacinda Ardern and her ministers; some of us are embarrassed at how we acted, how we were complicit in what went down.
We embraced the home-confinement, locked border and forced vaccinations.
Our lowest point occurred right at the start. March 2020. The Prime Minister was issuing stay-at-home orders, to remain in our ‘bubbles’ which were enforced enthusiastically by the police and citizen vigilantes, but for nine days the executive had no legal authority to do any such thing.
And no one, other than Mr Andrew Borrowdale, who successfully litigated the issue, noticed. Not the executive. Not the Director General of Health. Not the media. Not the Police.
Stuff
Au contraire: we here at the BFD noticed, when we leaked Police legal advice that it was all illegal.
Read more here. Discuss it on the BFD.
