We have passed through the COVID Looking Glass and entered a strange new reality, according to Sherelle Jacobs in The Telegraph. While New Zealand reclines in splendid isolation, the rest of the world is dealing with ‘second wave hysteria’.
Not surprisingly, vaccines remain elusive and the race is on to stop the virus reestablishing itself in places it has already been. The political narrative is that it must, at any cost, be ‘beaten’. But in this respect, as the White Rabbit said to Alice, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
The West barely coped with the ‘first wave’. Outside of the developed world, which is where the overwhelming majority of the world’s population lives, governments which were never going to be able to cope with a pandemic simply gave up. India is overwhelmed. Pakistan didn’t even attempt a lockdown after President Imran Khan said the country couldn’t afford one. Africa is barely on our radar.
At a global level, COVID-19 cannot be ‘controlled’ and there are really only two possibilities:
1. That it will gradually peter out by itself (either through populations achieving herd immunity, or by successive mutations of the virus becoming weaker), or
2. That we will have to learn to live with it.
In the medium term — which means the remainder or 2020, and probably 2021 — coronavirus will be a fact of life.
Writing on The BFD, Alex Davis has suggested that New Zealand won’t be able to keep COVID-19 out. Or alternatively, that if we were determined to keep it out, we would have to shut up shop to the world, prohibiting all arrivals and isolating ourselves indefinitely from the global community.
The former scenario is the reality. The latter is untenable, and would be catastrophic.
The New Zealand government is fighting a losing battle because two groups of people now insist upon returning. The first is expatriate Kiwis whose jobs or lives overseas have been brought to an end by the coronavirus carnage. A lot of infected people seem to be arriving from Los Angeles, that celebrity Democrat pantheon where the virus took hold amidst the homelessness and marijuana smoke.
The second group comprises recent immigrants, members of the ‘new jet set’, who appear to live their lives between two countries — with one foot in their ‘old’ one, and the other in the ‘new’. It is no coincidence that on practically every second occasion the radio announces ‘two new cases’ or ‘four new cases’ of COVID-19 in New Zealand today, the presenter hastens to add, as if we would find it reassuring, that the new arrivals came from ‘India’.
The legacy media will really have to stop doing this in case people begin to notice.
We have been detained under coronavirus Level-whatever for some time now, so how is it that a select group of people is still jetting about? One answer, I suppose, is that a dual passport holder is able to say: ‘I am Indian and must return to India’. And do so. And then subsequently say: ‘I am a New Zealander and must return to New Zealand’. And also be allowed do that. Such divided loyalty is natural, and an inevitable consequence of our national development policy over the past three decades, whereby we sold passports in order to maintain an illusion of ‘growth’ and artificially inflate our Ponzi economy.
It’s a simple fact that you cannot stop passport holders, whether they be old-timers or those representing the ’new world order’, from returning.
With the nation’s managed isolation facilities now full to bursting, one wonders whether it’s the taxpayer who should really be funding them, or whether those who ignored the initial warnings of Winston Peters and others, to return pre-lockdown, should be funding the exercise themselves? The take-up, I imagine, would be a lot lower were it not the working public footing the bill for hotel stays. If ever there were a case for COVID ‘user pays’, this is it.
The biggest structural problem of all, however, which COVID has brought sharply into focus – and nobody wishes to talk about – is the state of hopeless deficiency in which our health service finds itself.
As Sir Roger Doulgas pointed out recently, our creaking and decrepit public health system is currently funded to the tune of $3,900 a year by each working person. This per capita contribution is set to rise exponentially as the population ages and fewer people work. Every year public campaigns are mounted to have new drugs and treatments included in our public health expenditure which are available overseas and which we should rightly expect to be available here, but which we cannot, in truth, afford.
Labour is always working to increase its constituency, and has made massive gains this parliamentary term by hitting the unenviable KPI (that’s ‘key performance indicator’ for those without management legalese) of having 50 percent of the population on some kind of benefit. The more dependent we become, the less we are able to afford a First World health system, or all the organic-free range schools we are currently building, for that matter.
It’s often falsely assumed that Germany managed the COVID-19 outbreak well because of its ruthless Teutonic efficiency. The biggest factor in Germany’s favour was actually its largely-private health system. The vast majority of German hospitals are privately owned, and funded by worker healthcare contributions. It is for this reason that Germany has some of the best hospitals in Europe, access to the right equipment, and a high number of intensive care beds per head of population.
The UK fared far less well because of its state-funded National Health Service, which has become the object of misplaced reverence and even a cultural obsession. It provides healthcare free at point of service, and for this reason has been a magnet for illegal immigration and other rorts for decades. The UK cannot afford the NHS but does not dare to admit it.
The real reason New Zealand locked down so hard (late, in fact, and in draconian and absolutist fashion) is not that our health service has suffered ’nine years of neglect’ – a slumber from which it will revive – but rather that, like the UK’s, it contains inherent structural deficiencies and cannot keep up with the demands of the elderly or of immigrants.
Every week, hundreds of people from Third World countries import their non-tax paying elderly relatives to New Zealand, equipping them with transport Gold Cards, healthcare and, if they play the system well, the universal pension. It never seems to occur to anyone that a working couple from the Indian subcontinent is never going to make a net positive economic contribution while their children are being funded through state schools and their elderly relatives are zooming around ‘for free’ on buses, or hospitalised on the taxpayer’s tab. This is especially true if the working immigrants are in government sector jobs, as frequently seems to be the case.
The immigration Trojan horse (why stop at one when you can bring the whole village?) has bolted and I don’t expect there’s much Labour or National (or New Zealand First, for that matter) will do about it. What we ought to be looking at is a privatised health system. It would be sensible if private health insurance were made tax deductible for both employers and employees, so that it becomes the norm.
It really is time that we all started living within our means and funding ourselves. The fact that some people paid 50 percent tax back in the ‘80s is no longer a valid excuse for having an ever-growing nation of dependents suckle on an ever-depleting taxpayer teat.
My proposition is: if you want to travel during covid and need to self-isolate, pay for it yourself. And if we want a world-class health system which can manage in a crisis, we need to slash personal and corporate tax rates in order to facilitate user-funded private healthcare, and private hospitals in particular, via (for example) employer/employee contribution schemes.
It’s no good raising taxes, as Labour and the Greens wish to do, and expecting a better result for our health system. And it’s no good pretending that global problems like the coronavirus can be dealt with through ‘kindness’, or that, by the government’s enactment of punitive measures, they will simply go away. Our health system cannot cope, and in order to be able to manage this pandemic, and the next one, we actually need a new system — not policies which ‘protect’ the old one, or seek to revamp it.
Under the current system, to once again quote Lewis Carroll, “It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.” When in reality, we need to move forward.
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