Garner lets loose
Duncan Garner writes at NBR:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her government have been exposed. The myth has been busted and only the truly deluded and card-carrying sycophants surely now think they’ve handled this pandemic well.
Just before half-time in the battle against Covid, Ardern left the field to take selfies and sign autographs, thinking the game was won.
The rest is called Delta. Can someone please pass this on to the luvvies who see her as a demi-god?
Ardern’s crew got lucky when Covid hit us the first time. But not now.
The sham has been revealed, the pandemic has turned nasty, and I suspect the voter worm is heading south too.
Put simply, this government had a couple of jobs to do once it realised we had dodged the first bullet. It had to prepare our health system for the well-documented second coming called Delta. And it had to secure a vaccine and get it into our arms as quickly as possible.
The result was no extra staffed ICU beds and until the Delta outbreak we had the slowest rollout in the developed world.
Yet this Labour administration had more than a year without level 4, 470 days to be exact, to beef up the health system, target more staff, secure a vaccine, work out how to roll it out, put in place 24-hour clinics, and organise a better MIQ – which, to my utter shock, senior Labour Minister David Parker described to me in one interview as “damn near perfect”.
I suggest we send David Parker on a global tour of Kiwi expats, to tell them how MIQ is damn near perfect.
This government’s inability to use the past 18 months to prepare and protect Auckland for the inevitable Delta arrival is not just utter incompetence it’s negligent and Auckland businesses and residents have every right to be angry and be banging on the government’s door for answers.
Now the economic and social cost to Auckland, Aucklanders, and the entire country threatens our very way of life. Look at your parents; has the spark gone? Look at your kids; have they lost motivation? Look at ourselves; what’s changed and can we ever return to where we were? It’s costing the country more than a billion dollars a week with Auckland in this hopeless and fruitless halfway house level 3 that feels like 4 at times. …
Auckland is in a state of confusion with weekly reviews that may confuse us further.
Far from leading the world, the PM and her team of missing in action minsters have dropped the ball.
We have been smug, complacent and, sadly, bloody lazy in the end, which won’t be agreed with by Ardern’s many followers who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak only in glowing terms.
All this uncertainty, and who knows if Santa will grant us freedom for Xmas. I think it will be limited.
Businesses can’t afford to be closed in the lead-up to Xmas. How do they survive such a sustained period of closure?
Hundreds of thousands of workers sit at home and their jobs are increasingly uncertain and the longer the lockdown, the more damaging the result at the other end.
There is meant to be light at the end of the tunnel. Not in Ardern’s slapped-together afterthought. It’s a plan that says ‘shut your eyes and hope’. It’s unravelling folks. I can’t imagine business will ever trust Labour again, if they ever did at all.
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