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Matthew Hooton writes:
[…] The truly difficult decision, I wrote, isn’t climbing up the tree but deciding when it is safe enough to risk climbing down again.
Ardern and, from May 2020, Hipkins, as Covid-19 Minister, refused to climb down until much too late and even appeared to enjoy the view from the highest Wellington branches.
I write this not to boast – or, at least, not only to boast – but to underline that the terrible social and economic costs of lockdowns weren’t just foreseeable. They were in fact foreseen, right from the beginning.
[…] In that first column, I argued Ardern needed advice not just from public-health authorities but from macroeconomics experts, child-development experts and professional ethicists, including to manage the severe intergenerational inequalities her response would obviously create.
[…] As the Royal Commission notes, the government made its own judgments at crucial times. But Ardern and Hipkins clearly remained too greatly under the spell of tunnel-visioned academic epidemiologists and right-on science-educators.
Yet even at the very beginning, there was enough information for me to warn that “a lockdown of even several months would cause unprecedented social and economic damage”.
[…] Based on experience following the Great Depression and World War II, I warned Ardern and Robertson that “stimulus spending soon evaporates largely into inflation”.
I pointed out that while governments might want some inflation to reduce the real value of their borrowing, “inevitably inflation benefits those who own physical assets such as houses but devastates those trying to save, massively entrenching the intergenerational inequality Ardern was elected to address”.
Yes, but we were saving lives!
Sure enough, it was later estimated the Covid response had transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to home owners from everyone else and from future generations to the present.
When Hipkins became Covid-19 Minister, the picture was even clearer. A standout academic paper summarising the global data by a team from Harvard University, Dartmouth College and the University of Wollongong confirmed Covid was overwhelmingly a disease of advanced old age, with fatality risk almost negligible for younger people.
[…] As we have learned in New Zealand since Ardern and Hipkins finally let it rip in 2022, Covid’s mortality pattern most resembles dementia. Under 60s in practice only face the tiniest chance of dying of either, and are five times more likely to die by suicide.
On a years of life lost basis, New Zealand’s suicide epidemic among people under 60 is five times worse than was ever plausible for Covid, yet no one ever suggested borrowing $60 billion to fix it.
In any case, letting it rip was never the alternative to Ardern and Hipkins’ extreme approach. They could at least have allowed the construction industry to continue, butchers, bakers and cafes to sell through the window, and kids to go to school.
Yet anyone suggesting we could learn from Sweden’s more liberal approach, or even Australia’s outside Victoria, was smeared as homicidal.
Very true. Also Sweden was presented as the example of what not to do and how what we were doing was so much better.
It’s true Sweden’s death rate was higher than New Zealand’s, but that is almost entirely represented by people over 80 and, to a lesser extent, those over 70.
For people in their 60s, Sweden’s death rate was less than double New Zealand’s, at fewer than one in 2200, comparable with lung or colorectal cancer, and less than half as dangerous as heart disease.
For people under 60, death rates in Sweden and New Zealand were nearly identical, and effectively zero.
For all the social distress and fiscal vandalism, Ardern and Hipkins barely saved any lives under 60. Yet people under 60 will be paying for their “mistakes” for the rest of their lives.
What could possibly explain Ardern and Hipkins sometimes imposing tougher health responses during the second long Auckland lockdown than even health bureaucrats recommended?
My theory is that they had fallen in love with the crisis, with the television cameras and the adulation from the global liberal elite.
They were in love with their own sense of moral rectitude. And they were in love with the extraordinary powers the pandemic granted them.
Perhaps that’s inevitable for anyone who seeks political office. But had Ardern and Hipkins had the humility to listen to Aucklanders during the 2021 lockdown – or even deigned to visit – they would surely never have prolonged the trauma the way they did.”
In other words Ardern et al decided to borrow billions in order to save granny, ignoring everyone over 60. And all to stroke their own egos.
None of the blame can be put on the elderly, though. Many would have gladly stayed at home even without lockdown orders. It was Ardern who dictated that all of us should be subject to lockdown, even though the majority of us were not at any risk, apart from a bad case of the ’flu.
