I’ve Been Thinking… UPDATED

Thank you, Richard Prebble, for the above title. I have been thinking too, although about different things from you. Life in the Time of COVID (with thanks to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez) makes things very interesting, but the government’s daily briefings, like something out of 1984, do beget more questions than answers. And here are just a few thoughts. Bear with me.

Poor unfortunate Hamish Walker was both foolish and inexperienced. He was accused of being racist, and in desperation to disprove that particular claim, he released a list of the names and nationalities of the people in quarantine at that time. What was he trying to tell us? In our dystopian world, it all got lost in a cloud of supposed racism, and we never got to the truth of whatever it was he was trying to say.

While he may have handled it very badly, we need to remember that, the point he was probably trying to make was that many of the people in quarantine were unlikely to be reasonably described as returning Kiwis.

I am not condoning out-and-out racism, but I always wondered what would have happened if he had handled this better? What exactly was he trying to tell us?

Was he trying to warn Southlanders that they were about to be accommodating large numbers of refugees without them knowing it?

Then this week, a security guard in Auckland tried to release the details of some of the people in quarantine. He was stood down. Again, you have to wonder – what was this guy trying to tell us? Why would he put his job on the line to get this information out there?

I am not going to speculate. It is strange though, that every time we have a new person who has tested positive for COVID-19 at the border, they seem to have come from Afghanistan, Islamabad, Dakar, Pakistan or the Philippines. I would swear that more than three-quarters come from countries where we don’t have many Kiwi citizens. Is that what these guys were trying to tell us?

So now I am going to speculate, just a little bit. I have three theories. Bear with me. The first is that some of these people are coming in from ‘shithole’ countries to attend the sentencing of Brenton Tarrant.

We already know this, although we do not know how many there are. But why? The sentencing is going to be done by video link anyway. He is not going to appear in court in their presence. I know this must be tough, but we are in the middle of a pandemic. Why did we make special exemptions for people from COVID-infested countries to come here? Everyone knows what is going to happen, bar a few details. He will never leave prison for his whole lifetime. Why do we have to risk our public health by allowing these people to come here? And the next question is – will they go home afterwards? Many of us think that they will not.

The second theory, which I admit that I have heard mainly on Twitter, is that many of these people coming here are refugees. The government has neither suspended its refugee policy while we fight the pandemic nor has it stopped bringing people here. The number of refugees that we take has now been doubled, and they are arriving. I assume they are being described as returning Kiwis because technically, they will be Kiwis at some point, although ‘returning’ is a big stretch.  I admit I have no proof of this, except for claims on social media, but it does make some sense. We all know how dedicated Jacinda is to her refugee programme. Do you really think that she would allow a little thing like a pandemic to stop her from achieving her goals within the UN? No. Nor do I.

Is that what Hamish Walker and the security guard were trying to tell us?

Now let us stop and think about that for a moment. Every week we are regaled with stories about Kiwi families who have relatives overseas who cannot get back here. Are we prioritising refugees over Kiwis who desperately want to return home? It certainly seems that way to me.

Thirdly, some of these people are not returning Kiwis at all, but tourists. How can this not be true? A Korean man spent time in Auckland, in Queenstown, and then tested positive for COVID when he got home. What exactly was he doing here? Then there was the Japanese man who went to a noodle house in Wellington and tested positive for the virus once he got back to Japan. Then just yesterday, we have a person who went to Hobbiton and has tested positive, now that he has got back to his home country. But weren’t we told that the only people coming back to this country were returning Kiwis? So how did these people get here to do a bit of sightseeing?

Did they go into quarantine? The visitor to Hobbiton was in a group of 25. Were they all foreign nationals? The media reports on these people, how they have tested positive since arriving home, but no one ever asks the question of what they were doing here in the first place. My question is this. If these people tested positive when they arrived home  (presumably at the border of their own countries) then does this mean that they were sightseeing in New Zealand while they had the disease? It certainly sounds like it to me. In the case of the Korean tourist, it has been stated that they believe he caught the disease in Singapore, but no one actually knows that. The incubation period of the disease can be two weeks. Was he in Singapore for that long? I would bet that it was only a transit stop of a few days at the most. As for the others, we draw a blank. All we know is that these people have the disease. No more than that.

Yes, all I am doing is raising questions. I have no answers. But the media should be asking these question too, but they do not.

The very least I can say is that the government is not being honest with us. They have given the very strong impression that everyone coming into the border is a returning Kiwi. Admittedly, we do know about the special exemptions for those coming here for Brenton Tarrant’s sentencing, although personally, I bitterly disagree with that. As for the others, they seem to be mostly a mixture of refugees and tourists. They are not returning Kiwis at all. Either that or more than half a million Kiwis live in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines.

No. They don’t. There is something we are not being told. This government is not telling us the full story. We are being taken for fools, once again.

UPDATE: Stuff has revealed this morning that the Japanese man who visited the Wellington noodle house is the same person who visited Hobbiton, and they claim he has been here since March. If that is the case, it seems to me  more likely that he caught the virus while he was here and the Ministry of Health is obfuscating in claiming that the chances of him catching it here were ‘very low’. He was in Hobbiton on August 7th, so clearly did not spend more than a few days in Singapore.

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