Translating Civil Servant Speak

You’ve got to love how civil servants fight back when they are being maligned by their political masters.

When faced with mounting embarrassment and public discord over the failures at the border both Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern said that their “expectations weren’t met.”

Ignore for a moment that the government failed to give the public officials the necessary tools to ensure compliance. Their expectation was for full testing, yet when promulgating their rules and laws for border control while we suffer from the Chinese plague, they made it neither compulsory nor required. Little wonder then that there was almost no compliance with their wonky and ill-considered expectations.

The Ministry of Health Public Health Response order mandating tests for MIQ workers required a one-off test, but did not require subsequent tests. It beggars belief that incompetence of that magnitude is allowed to stand.

Add to that the interesting case of the person breaking in to quarantine who can’t be charged with anything because the health orders only cover breaking out of quarantine. Again, this is weapons-grade incompetence on behalf of health officials and the ministers signing these health orders.

Little wonder then that Dr Ashley Bloomfield, in a classic example of ‘Yes, Minister’ style answering, provided an answer that threw the politicians under the bus while appearing to take the blame.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield says there was “dissonance” between the Ministry of Health and the Government over the scale at which border staff were being tested for COVID-19, but denies politicians were misled over the extent and scope of the regime.

In June as part of “targeted surveillance testing”, people who work at the border were due to be tested to ensure the wasn’t undetected infections among staff.

However, a Newshub investigation found nearly two-thirds of all border and managed isolation and quarantine workers in Auckland had never been tested for COVID-19 a week before the outbreak.

On Saturday, all 12,000 staff across the Auckland and Tauranga ports were ordered to help rule out where the latest outbreak may have come from.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield says the testing across all border staff required “a lot of coordination” with the Ministry of Health, those in charge of managed isolation and quarantine facilities, and people managing a range of workforces at airports.

“We were giving the Minister [of Health] and Cabinet very regular updates on the extent of that. And based on our updates, they were again making sure on a very regular basis that we were quite clear about the imperative to get the testing scaled up as quickly as possible for our border workers as one part of continuing to strengthen our border measures,” he said on Monday.

“It was being implemented, and as I say, this was quite extensive testing across a number of sites, a number of workforces.”

But Dr Bloomfield says when providing these updates to Cabinet and the Health Minister, it may have been miscommunicated.

“There was clearly a dissonance between what the Prime Minister thought was happening and what was happening on the ground, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t providing full information through.

“Just think about this as part of the suite of actions that were underway but we couldn’t suddenly flick a switch and test all members of that workforce overnight.”

What Ashley Bloomfield was saying was actually ‘We know that you believe you understand what you think we said, but we are not sure you realize that what you heard is not what we meant.’

Or in simpler terms, ‘Clear the wax out of your cloth ears you morons.’

The incompetence of this government grows daily. No wonder the Prime Minister didn’t want to move the election date and was only forced to by a wily Winston Peters.

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