What we've learned from watching other nations is there's no one-stop shop for getting through this. Photo / Alan Gibson
What we've learned from watching other nations is there's no one-stop shop for getting through this. Photo / Alan Gibson
COMMENT:
I would not have run this lockdown the way it has been.
Halfway through, we have "learnings", as they say in the boardrooms in front of white boards.
Firstly, it is transparently obvious the airports have leaked like a sieve and all arriving New Zealanders should have been quarantinedthey way they have been in Australia.
It is also transparently obvious we did not do enough testing early on, and indeed the ongoing mess around supply and distribution smacks of the sort of DHB ineptitude I have banged on about for years.
In a country the size of ours to have 20 fiefdoms is absurd and you never needed Heather Simpson's multi-year investigation - an investigation you will note that still hasn't seen the light of day - to tell you that.
The lockdown would've had a lighter touch.
In a week where large swathes of the world are more hopeful about the flattening of the curve, what we have learned is that there is no one-stop shop when it comes to doing this thing.
China did what authoritarian regimes do best, control their people, and it appears to have worked.
Ironically, what we have done, doesn't seem all that far behind.
Most countries still allow access to coffee and takeaways, we went whole hog ,and it may well be ultimately the advocates of that approach can argue we got out early because we went in hard.
But at what price?
Is there really a victory on the health side of the equation if the economic side of it got laid to waste?
We are paying $3.5 billion a week for this exercise, and we don't have to.
We don't have to be this draconian.
Social distancing, all the experts will tell you, is the key to breaking the chain.
That and testing to know what you're dealing with.
There is work in the economy that can be carried out, keep some jobs in tact, and help the money flow without being ridiculous about it.
Golf greens can be dealt to, parks can be mown, opposition leaders can travel to Wellington to do their job as essential workers.
Freightways is right. Its van leaves the warehouse . . . whether its got one box or 37, so let's make it 37.
In my lockdown the butcher, the fruit and vege shop, on a one-in, one-out basis, can trade.
If you sell online and it's delivered to your door in a contactless fashion, you can buy whatever you like. Keep building the motorways, keep building the houses and towers.
The fact we have 1000 hospital beds lying empty with people with conditions not being attended to because elective surgery is off, the fact we have barely a dozen people in those 1000 beds with the virus, the fact we have one death, it is all growing evidence that although preparing is one thing, over preparing "just in case", comes at a massive price.
That price is jobs, lifestyles, hopes, dreams and aspirations.
The trick was balance, and we've missed the balance, and although this is an art not a science, the balance has not been addressed nearly quickly enough.
When level 4 gets downgraded, and we clamour into a new and restricted light, how many people won't be back, how many doors won't be open, how much debt will have been wracked up only to be paid back by our kids and their kids.
One more point on my lockdown, I would have banned narks. The "dob in a beach goer" nonsense, and the email address for cauliflower pricing, merely appeases the miserable and nasty, and my word we have gotten nasty in 14 days with online bitching, back stabbing and an endless obsession with who is where, doing what.
My next column is due the day after the lockdown is due to end. I pray that that actually happens. The economy can't afford for it not to.
