Jacinda Ardern once famously stated that her government would be the most transparent ever. That, like her claim to never tell lies, was a lie. Transparency, for her government, has become an optional extra, and nothing more than a slogan to use when they are about to lie.
See what she did there? She tries to declare that we only know about vaccine-caused deaths because of her “transparency”. Let’s be honest, since the Prime Minister is unable to, the reporting around Covid has been more opaque than transparent. They change definitions, making long term comparisons of data meaningless; they lump people who have had one shot in with those who are actually unvaccinated and give them a new title called ‘partially vaccinated’, and they’ve even counted someone who was shot by Police in his driveway as a Covid victim.
So, yeah, transparency is just a slogan liars use when they are lying. It’s like the guy who starts a sentence with “Well, to be perfectly honest with you…”. What you will hear next is a whopper of a lie. That’s our Jacinda Ardern.
It is perhaps unsurprising then to see Sir Ian Taylor wondering out loud whatever happened to transparency.
The level 4 lockdown that was imposed on the country, within 12 hours of the latest community case being identified, was exactly the same as the lockdown we had navigated as the team of five million a year and a half earlier. It was as though we had learned nothing from the initial sacrifices we had all willingly made back then.
One of those lessons was the inevitable truth that eliminating Covid from our shores would be impossible. We needed to start planning for that reality in a way that could both protect the lives of our people, and their jobs – their livelihoods.
It wasn’t as though there weren’t ways we could have done that but, as I began exploring those options in an effort to understand how businesses might be able to work alongside the government to do things differently, I realised that there had been a cost for that landslide victory back in 2020.
The promise of transparency had gone.
I should have seen it earlier. The decision to shut down the multi-party advisory group that could ask questions around decisions being made by Cabinet. The failure to take advice from the Independent Advisory Group headed by Sir Brian Roche to set up a stand-alone agency to take over from the Ministry of Health to manage our response to the pandemic. And, arguably the most subtle shift of them all, the power handed to unelected officials in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) to manage all the messaging coming out of the Government. A role which also appears to include the blocking of information being sought by those looking for answers.
NZ Herald
He then outlines the obfusation, deceit and the outright lies regarding the theft of RAT tests from private businesses.
The first crack in that door appeared this week when the Herald‘s senior political reporter, Thomas Coughlan, negotiated his way through the Official Information Act to confirm what many of us have known for some time. The Government had danced on the head of a pin when it denied that it had requisitioned supplies of rapid antigen tests that had been ordered by private businesses.
Requisition, consolidate, prioritise – whatever word the DPMC chose to describe their actions the reality is that the only reason the Government was in this position was that they had banned RATs for almost two years and, just as had happened when they failed to open a letter from Pfizer for six weeks, they found themselves at the wrong end of the supply chain when they finally acknowledged that RATs had a role to play in our Covid strategy.
The dates of emails finally released by the MoH are interesting. On January 14th they reveal that “… the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were getting restless about the status of tests ordered by the Government.”
Quite separately, on January 13 I had been sent an email from a lawyer representing a company that had offered to provide FDA approved RATs at up to 50 per cent less than the Government’s current providers with a guaranteed delivery of 1 million every 10 days with orders of up to 50 million able to be delivered within six weeks.
The reason the lawyer had contacted me was that no one from the Government had responded to the offer!
On January 20 I managed to put the lawyer in touch with director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, who said he had never seen the offer. Like many other offers of help, this one too appears to have disappeared into the bureaucratic ether.
On January 21 the Government placed an order for five million. A week later they added another 20 million. Three days later they added 50 million. That’s 65 million in under two weeks with nothing required from the Government agencies other than to sign off on the order. The 65 million RATs were delivered on time and on budget, along with a further 1.8 million RATs that were placed for a number of those private companies whose orders had been ‘requisitioned, consolidated, prioritised’ by the government.
Naively I thought that this demonstration of how businesses could help the Government accelerate our Covid response would finally open the door to a much closer co-operation between the Government and businesses whose advice and offers had been ignored in the past.
I should have known better. The announcement of this change in the government supply of RATs carried no mention of the 65 million that had been organised by a lawyer, acting on behalf of a business whose original offer had been ignored, while continuing to do his day job.
No, the MoH had this all under control and this was proof of how well they had planned the supply of RATs and any suggestion that they needed to requisition supplies from private businesses were obviously untrue.
The emails released last week under the OIA highlight how the spin coming out of the DPMC has very little to do with transparency and more to do with covering some of the gaping holes in a strategy of “thanks for your offer, but we know best.”
NZ Herald
Which then brings us to the unwillingness of the government to hold an actual inquiry into how the Police came to the decision to set upon peaceful protestors with extreme force and the fact that has been revealed that the Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson was able to let residents of an apartment building know what was coming two hours before Trevor Mallard started using psychological torture on protestors.
And there is no sign of the Government launching its own independent review of the response, weeks after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern incorrectly suggested the IPCA could look into the actions of Speaker Trevor Mallard.
It comes as a February 12 email to residents at the Kate Sheppard Apartments, opposite Parliament, suggested deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson was aware of tactics to play loud music and health messages all night from Parliament’s speakers, in an attempt to deter protesters.
In seeking to grill the IPCA over its terms of reference, National wanted to determine once and for all whether the actions of the Speaker, and ministers, would be within the investigation’s scope.
The letter sent to residents said “tonight there will be loudspeakers going thru the night telling people they are trespassing and to move on and also loud health messages”.
“Our local MP, Grant Robertson, has phoned and apologised for the disruptions that there will be and has offered any help needed.”
The email was sent at 4.21pm on February 12, roughly two hours before the loudspeakers were turned on.
Stuff
The dolts doing damage control in the prime minister’s department are probably still wondering how on earth anyone found out about that. But they only have to look at the residents’ list to see that one Christopher Luxon is a resident of the apartments. Grant Robertson must be especially stupid, as he was one of those mocking Luxon for hiring a car to drive him from his apartment to Parliament.
Robertson kicked off by referring to the most recent chapter in the “National Party’s Grab A Seat sale” before referring to Luxon’s decision to use a black Mercedes to drive the 100m journey from his apartment to Parliament on the day he was elected leader.
Robertson even mapped the drive. “It required Mr Luxon to travel straight for 46 seconds, before turning right, turning right again, turning left, turning right again. This will be the pattern of his leadership.”
NZHerald
Now the cat is out of the bag and the government is running a million miles from transparency because they know that they were donkey deep in interfering in operational matters of the Police and also interfering in the Speaker’s office.
National Party justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith said the email suggests senior ministers were aware of the Speaker’s tactics before they happened.
“That’s a clear conclusion that you draw from the email,” Goldsmith said. “They were fairly aggressive tactics implemented by the Speaker, and it seems obvious that there were conversations had between the speaker and senior government ministers before that.
“These are the questions we’d like to ask. All we get at the moment is a wall of silence.”
… ”What we want to get to the bottom of is, what involvement did government ministers have in the whole management of [the protest],” Goldsmith said.
“They’ve consistently said it was a police matter. We’re not getting involved. And then when the Speaker did something, oh, that’s a matter for the Speaker. We weren’t involved.
“We don’t think that’s the case. And now they’ve effectively shut down anybody from finding out.”
Stuff
A wall of silence is not transparency, is it? It is the opposite of transparency since walls tend not to be transparent.
And those are but two examples of the intransigence and lack of transparency that has become the hallmark of this government.
It will not surprise our readers in the slightest that for the past six months I have been engaging with the Ombudsman to get transparency over text messages sent by the Prime Minister to Siouxsie Wiles about me. Her office has steadfastly refused to release those text messages. Whatever is in those messages must be very embarrassing. So embarrassing that they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent their release.
This government wouldn’t have a clue about transparency, if it slapped them in the face and had a big label saying “Transparent” on it. It’s just a shame that our media are neutered by the vast sums of filthy lucre dumped into their accounts.
We won’t and can’t ever be silenced, because we are beholden to no one but our members. We will hold the powerful to account.
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