I’ve said it more times than I wish I had to, but the grim fact is that Jacinda Ardern has, for the foreseeable future, locked New Zealand into a bleak cycle of infections and lockdowns.
The plain fact is that SARS-CoV-2, the Wuhan virus, is not going away. A vaccine is at least months away, possibly years. Even so, as polio shows, viruses can be dismayingly persistent, even with an effective and widely-used vaccine.
It’s just over two months since Jacinda Ardern declared: “We are confident we have eliminated transmission of the virus in New Zealand.” She made the statement after revealing that, on receiving this news from her officials, she “did a little dance”.
For a brief time, Ardern was – yet again – the shining star of the global(ist) media. A young, “progressive” female, socialist leader had beaten the modern Black Death with a wave of her political wand! This was the greatest socialist achievement since Trofim Lysenko grew grain on the frozen steppes of Russia.
Except that Ardern’s claim was as false as Lysenko’s.
New Zealand had the toughest lockdowns in the whole of Australasia. But COVID-19 has not been eliminated. Victoria had the toughest lockdowns in all of Australia — but it has implemented an even stricter lockdown as it faces what appears to be a serious second wave of infection.
It’s no coincidence that Victoria and New Zealand should so closely mirror each other: both have similar populations and similar landmasses.
And both are run by socialists with absolutely no experience outside politics and living off the public purse.
It is no accident, as the Marxists were wont to say, that the two Australasian leaders in government who have been most willing to close down large sections of the economy — Ardern in New Zealand and Daniel Andrews in Victoria — have scant first-hand knowledge of the private sector.
The knee-jerk recourse to authoritarian lockdowns is fuelled by the central delusion of socialism: the command economy. Both Ardern and Andrews peddle the fantasy that economies can be switched on and off at the state’s will.
When you’ve spent your whole life on the public payroll, such a delusion probably seems natural. After all, public servants and politicians keep getting paid even when everyone else is forcibly locked down. Not for them the terrible economic reality of running a business: when the cash stops coming in, business very quickly starves.
It is notable that the attitude to the virus by some physicians and surgeons in the private sector differs from the policies proposed by some health professionals in the public sector — including health bureaucrats who make policy recommendations to state and territory governments.
It’s much the same with the media. It seems that journalists with secure public sector jobs are more inclined than others to call for even tougher lockdowns.
This is the inevitable outcome of handing absolute control to people with no skin in the game. It was easy enough for Mao to shrug off the worst man-made famine in history by saying that, “if you cut off one finger, you still have nine”. No-one went hungry inside the Forbidden City. Mao grew fat while tens of millions ate birch bark, clay, even each other…and still died like flies.
How many businesses will survive COVID-19 in Melbourne and New Zealand?
The only thing you can be certain of is that the public sector will be untouched.
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