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David Seymour has called for an inquiry into the Government’s Covid response plans. If Labour won’t initiate an inquiry, he proposes that a “Glasnost” style inquiry be formulated in the first 100 days of a new National-Act government:
Act leader David Seymour says a full investigation into the Covid-19 response will be one of the items at the top of his list if National and Act get into government.
Seymour set out the plan for comprehensive inquiry into the Covid-19 response at his party’s conference in Wellington today – along with the list of what Act would be asking of National for the first 100 days of a potential new government.
He dubbed the inquiry “Glasnost” – the Russian word for openness and transparency, used by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. He said a thorough inquiry was needed into all aspects of the Covid-19 response – from the lockdowns to the Reserve Bank’s response – and the impact it had on New Zealand’s society and economy to ensure mistakes were not made in the future.
He proposed using both domestic and international investigators – from countries which had fared well during Covid and those who fared badly.
“The investigation is not simply about learning what Labour did wrong. It is about working out what we need to do right. There will be another pandemic. Probably not this year, hopefully not in the next decade, but almost certainly in our lifetime. In the future, it could save New Zealand billions of dollars in costly mistakes.”
NZ Herald
Part of me cheers David Seymour on for daring to question the Government’s Covid policy settings. But another part of me fears that he will use the inquiry to formulate better and more efficient plans for locking down people and restricting their freedoms harder, faster and better than Labour managed.
Seymour has always maintained that he would have been a more efficient fascist when it came to Covid policy settings.
The so-called bastion of free speech was noticeably silent when thousands of Kiwis, victims of the Labour Government’s uncaring and draconian Covid policies, voiced their rights to freedom of speech and enacted their right to free assembly.
When he should have been standing for freedom, he was missing in action. While the Government trampled on our right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation, and our right to refuse to undergo medical treatment, and our right to freedom of expression, and our right to freedom of peaceful assembly, and our right to freedom of association and our right to freedom of movement, he supported each and every Government position that destroyed those rights.
His silence, when a Government minister said in Parliament that protestors were part of a ‘river of filth’, meant that he participated in and encouraged the loss of our right to freedom from discrimination. His support of mandates for vaccines and masks, as well as his support for Ardern’s two-tier society, likewise trampled all over our rights.
So excuse me if I just don’t believe that any such inquiry, whether instigated by Seymour or indeed anyone else, won’t just become a white-wash justifying the abrogation and degradation of our rights that were supposedly protected by the Bill of Rights.
I’ll be more interested in listening to a politician who suggests that the Bill of Rights is placed at the forefront of our constitutional conventions, rather than the afterthought it is now. The Bill of Rights must be given primacy, and laws and regulations must not ever infringe on those rights.
These people, like David Seymour and Christopher Luxon, would like us to forget about what they did, and also what they failed to do. They expect us to vote for them purely on the basis that they aren’t Labour.
Who would ever have thought that a nation with heroes like Charles Upham, Sir Edmund Hillary and Willie Apiata would be so lacking in leadership and champions of freedom. There was literally no one to stand up for those rights and freedoms that were so hard fought for. Every single MP currently in the parliament stands accused of betraying the Kiwi ethos and rank cowardice.
We literally have no champions for freedom in the ranks of politicians, which kind of leaves us with having to consider voting for a handbrake in the absence of any freedom-loving patriots wanting to fight for freedom.
Our country is crying out for leadership, not the simpering cowards currently infesting the parliament. If there are to be no champions, then let’s have a strong handbrake.
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