Not a moment too soon. What we got Saturday afternoon was at least a week too slow.
There have been too many stories of people wandering around the world, too many people arriving at Auckland Airport without a question or check. To think we don't have community spread is delusional. It is here, they're simply not testing enough, and/or they don't want to know.
I doubt there is a single New Zealander who would disagree with what the Government did. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said we must go hard, correct. We must go early, too late. The cost of this will be enormous, and that should be being addressed today.
The fact it isn't is yet another example of a Government that has been caught in too many meetings, and doesn't know how to be bold. You don't close your country on Saturday and tell us to wait three days to be told how the economic gaps are to be filled.
A lot of governments have been too slow. But that doesn't excuse it, you can see the result of governments being too slow.
What we all need and want right now is leadership and certainty. We want decisions and answers, we want a sense that adults are actually in charge driven by experience, brain power, insight, and intuition.
Trump learned that lesson last Thursday. His catastrophic bumble of an attempt to the nation led to the biggest single day sharemarket fall in history. By Saturday, when he declared a state of emergency, the market and business got what it needed: confidence.
This is a confidence game. The virus is a health emergency, yes, but the bigger problem, is the economic fallout from a disproportionate reaction. The world has decided to freak out, and we are all going to pay the price for at least half this year, if not the whole year.
VirusFacts2
Yes it will all work out fine, but how we handle this now impacts tremendously on what sort of shape we are in when we bounce out the other side.
Without making this too political, what has dogged this Government is indecision. They're talkers and procrastinators. This is not a time for any of it.
I just wish there were more of them that had run a country through tough days. Be honest, given the GFC and Christchurch, if Sir John Key was still here, would the decisions have taken this long? Would a March 15 commemoration in Christchurch have still been going ahead Saturday morning when most of us were saying Tuesday last week to bail? Would you feel just a bit more reassured?
The decisions, so far, look and feel like calls they've been reluctant to make, calls they've been dragged into. That's not leading, that's being led.
