The Australian PM has hit back at New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern over her continued pursuit of Covid elimination, rather than opening up and “learning to live with” what will become just another seasonal virus.
Scott Morrison’s rare attack on his trans-Tasman counterpart (in contrast to the continual sniping of the “Queen of Kindness”) triggered the predictable high dudgeon from Ardern and Deputy PM Grant Robertson. Not to mention the equally-predictable wave of pearl-clutching from the Twitter and media echo-chambers.
But at least one mainstream NZ journalist is on Morrison’s side.
Australian PM Scott Morrison is on to it. Once 70 per cent are vaccinated, he’s opting to live with Covid.
And New Zealand?
Are we living with Covid? Who would know? The Government isn’t giving targets. Why not?
Because, as I wrote recently, Ardern’s (and, by proxy, her “team of five million’s”) approach to Covid can be summed up in three words: lazy, complacent and selfish.
Our vaccine rollout is an embarrassing joke and if the smugness that guided the rollout and lack of planning hadn’t been so all-consuming we might not be in level 4 as we are, yet again this morning, and with the ongoing threat of more lockdowns.
It might be said that governments and public health bureaucrats could be excused early in the pandemic, dealing with a novel virus. But that would be to ignore the fact that they had spent years drawing up careful plans for just such an event: plans that went right out the window in a mad panic.
18 months on, some governments have learned better. Not Ardern.
To Morrison’s credit, he has apologised for the New Zealand-style smugness he, too, suffered post locking up his country and pretending that’s all he needed to do.
When their AstraZeneca plan blew up in his face, and he had to scramble for Pfizer and Moderna, he said sorry for saying it wasn’t a race, admitted that was a mistake, and he since then has set about accelerating the vaccine programme to such an extent that if you follow the daily numbers they are out-jabbing us per head of population and will be finished well before we are.
You might also want to ponder, how it is that when he had to, he could drum up more than a million new Pfizer doses.
While Ardern apparently continues to look to China for inspiration, Morrison is clearly learning from Britain.
Britain is not the disaster so many like Michael Baker and Helen Petousis-Harris said it would be. Baker called it barbaric.
If you look at Britain today it is nothing of the sort. Yes there are cases, and yes there are hospital admissions and deaths. But dig beyond the superficiality of a headline and see how many are the unvaccinated or the old with underlying conditions, or a combination of both.
This is what Morrison is arguing, this is what the bulk of the world, the vaccinated world has and is working out. Living is a risky business.
Does anyone remember risk? It’s what you take every time you drive the car to work, go for a bike ride, take a swim: balancing the small risk of injury and death against the definite reward.
Yet we apparently cannot ever countenance the least risk, when it comes to Covid. No matter how rich the reward of opening up.
Because the simple truth is that too many, in New Zealand more than anywhere else apparently, have been scared beyond sense or reason by hysterical “experts”.
In Australia, the Doherty report, their version of our Skegg report, suggests 70 per cent vaccination then open up. Skegg says elimination is a must … and offers no targets, so who’s right?
There has not been a lockdown of any description here that Baker hasn’t wanted us to be in for longer.
Is he more right than the Australian professionals, is he more learned than all the Oxford and Cambridge experts that have advised the British governments, all the scientists and epidemiologists that have advised Singapore’s government?
If those who support this approach of ours are honest, they have to admit that we are now captured by our own arrogance and incompetence.
NZ Herald
The world is moving on from Covid. New Zealand is locked into “last year’s response”. Scott Morrison, Mike Hosking says, gets it and has said sorry.
Should New Zealanders hold their breath, waiting to hear the same from the “Sole Source of Truth”?
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