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Plenty of New Zealanders still remember the Covid years as they actually were: long lockdowns, mandates that cost jobs and businesses and a daily podium-of-truth briefing that treated questions as disloyalty – unless they came from Tova or Jessica. The royal commission noted the social damage.
Labour owned the domestic decisions then. Not so much now, according to Hipkins – everyone had a choice, apparently.
At the same time, the WHO and UN spent the same period issuing guidance that many governments treated as gospel, even while the evidence kept shifting and the lab-leak discussion was still being labelled misinformation and many experts were applauded with others blatantly dismissed, no matter their credentials.
This week New Zealand abstained on a non-binding UN declaration that welcomes the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the 2024 IHR amendments. Winston Peters, as foreign minister, made the call – the right one.
National ministers, showing their spinelessness again, preferred to vote in favour with reservations. No cabinet decision was required, so Peters as the foreign minister decided. He cited the coalition clause that keeps health decisions in Wellington, not Geneva.
Chris Hipkins called it cowardice. He might want to look the word up, then try walking past a mirror without remembering he didn’t front up to the royal commission in public.
Helen Clark called it bad company. That is because her company is the UN, and anyone who questions it is, by definition, in bad company.
The official line Peters presented was simply that New Zealand will run a national interest test before it signs anything. At least we have one politician with a spine, a bit of common sense and some political nous.
This is the same common sense Peters used when making his speech to the UN last year. Peters seems well respected in foreign affairs around the world and often it is his shrewd commentary that keeps NZ respected as a country of integrity by many that we should be aligned with.
The same people who ran the last emergency still prefer the private interview. Ardern, Hipkins, Robertson and Verrall all declined to appear in public at the second phase of the royal commission.
Ashley Bloomfield, the director-general who stood at the podium and delivered the health advice that underpinned the lockdowns and the mandates, was not required to answer questions in the open either. Private interviews were enough. A public hearing would be performative. The commission did not summons any of them – there’s that smell again.
So the ministers and the chief health official who imposed the rules never had to sit in a room, under oath, and explain themselves to the people who lost work, lost businesses, couldn’t visit dying relatives and friends or reported adverse effects after the shots they were mandated to take.
Most people look at that refusal and see cowardice. They also wonder what, exactly, they have to hide – many will answer that with their own ‘special style of critique’.
So now consider: if New Zealand cannot get its own former leaders and its director-general into a public hearing to account for the decisions that upended ordinary lives, then the idea that we will somehow hold a Geneva bureaucracy accountable when the next framework goes wrong is pure theatre.
The people who took the shots and lost their jobs already know how that story ends.
Most of those who disliked the lockdowns and mandates are not arguing that New Zealand should ignore the rest of the world, as Clark would like you to think.
They are arguing that the lesson was not ‘hand the next script to organisations with no electoral accountability and hope the next government treats it as optional’.
The national interest test exists because enough people watched the last round and decided they did not want the same process repeated by default. The WHO and the UN have budgets and careers that reward expansion. Treating their next text as the responsible default is how the last set of mistakes gets locked in rather than examined.
If Ardern, Hipkins, Robertson, Verrall and Bloomfield can dodge a public hearing in Wellington and still call it ‘co-operation’, Geneva will have no trouble skipping the explanations altogether and we will be left with a costly receipt – again.
In reality the most ridiculous part of the whole political narrative is Hipkins and Clark lecturing Peters, or anyone for that matter, on pandemic decisions after the mess Labour left the country in.
