OPINION:
The stars aligned for me this past week.
I have been wondering for some time now what happened to the Labour Party that I have supported all my life.
I am 72, which means I was voting Labour before the current Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was even born.
When she was elevated to the top job, I travelled the world bathing in the glow of her international reputation. Her initial response to the Covid pandemic was the envy of the world. Reasoned, compassionate and effective. That was the message so many of her supporters, me included, proudly shared with our international colleagues who marvelled at what was happening in our small corner of the world.
My answer to them was simple - the world needs more leaders like ours.
But somewhere things changed and I wondered where it had all gone wrong.
Last week four events coincided that helped answer that question for me.
The announcement of the Royal Commission on Covid; Willie Jackson’s “train wreck” interview with Jack Tame on the merger of RNZ and TVNZ; the Three Waters constitutional “mistake”... and the Prime Minister featuring on the front page of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
I have no idea who is advising the Prime Minister at the moment, but surely that article, on sale in supermarkets across the country where ordinary Kiwis come face to face with the cost of living crisis every week, was as tone-deaf as it possibly could have been.
The pictures of the Prime Minister accompanying the article clearly demonstrated that the crisis was not something that was at the forefront in the thinking of whoever approved those pictures. Under other circumstances, the pictures might have been viewed as aspirational, but in the context of the very real cost of living crisis, they simply flew in the face of the thousands of Kiwi parents who are struggling every week to find ways to simply clothe and feed their children.
Having access to the designer clothes the Prime Minister featured in the article must have seemed like some far-off fantasy land where the cost of living was never an issue. But it wasn’t just the pictures.
In the article, the Prime Minister extolled the importance of being together as a family - especially in challenging times.
Well, times didn’t get more challenging than they did at the height of the Covid pandemic. Imagine how those hundred of thousands of Kiwi citizens who found themselves locked out of their country by a totally unfit-for-purpose MIQ system, felt seeing the PM finally acknowledging that being together as a family was important.
Being there when a loved one was dying. Being there for the birth of your child. Being there because you were now an illegal overstayer holed up in a foreign country with no money and no way to earn it.
The stories that were shared with me during my fruitless attempts to engage with the Prime Minister’s office over ways we could use new technologies to start bringing our fellow Kiwis home, safely, will remain with me forever.
Stories like the father who didn’t meet his son until he was two years old. Stories like the son who had tested negative on his final test in MIQ (his third negative) but wasn’t allowed to leave a day early to be at his terminally ill father’s bedside. There would have been thousands of people reading the Woman’s Weekly with similar stories.
Then there were those whose health was placed at risk because of a one-size-fits-all lockdown of hospitals. An estimated 35,000 women placed at risk of breast cancer is just one of the numbers that are overlooked by those who argue “but look how many lives we saved!”
We will be measuring the costs long after today’s politicians are retired on their taxpayer-funded superannuation schemes. And that brings me to the Royal Commission on Covid.
The convenient statement that it will not be looking to blame anyone begs the question. Why not? That’s called accountability and there is nothing to prevent that accountability being measured by the circumstances under which decisions were made.
Everyone accepts that these were challenging times when decisions had to be made fast. But that should not be a blanket to protect against incompetence or an unwillingness to adapt as circumstances changed.
One question for the Royal Commission to ask is - what happened during the 16-month period between the first lockdown, which we all accept was the right thing to do, and the second one that saw Aucklanders having to carry the burden of a multimillion-dollar economic impact under level 4 lockdown, conditions that were identical to the ones put in place a year and a half earlier?
Had we learned nothing at all during that time? It appears we hadn’t.
Instead, we sat on our laurels. Bathed in the afterglow of the praise being heaped on us from around the world. And then we watched as the world sailed by.
There are other questions that the Royal Commission needs to be asking. Like, why did the Government persist with a testing regime that very quickly overwhelmed our laboratories to the extent that it was no longer even remotely able to be justified as a gold standard test because of the days it took to get a result?
Why weren’t alternatives explored with urgency?
What happened to the $65 million offshore saliva test programme that, to this day, has not delivered a single result, when there was a Kiwi version already available?
Then there are the questions around the tardiness in progressing the vaccination programme. We dropped to the bottom of the supply chain, just as we did with an unacceptable delay in approving the use of RAT tests. We were one of the last countries in the world to tick that box and it took business interests to fill that gaping hole by accessing 65 million tests in less than a fortnight for the Ministry of Health, which had missed the emails that made the initial offer.
There are many people outside the government who worked at the cliff-face to try to provide answers to a Government that seemed increasingly devoid of them. They probably should not hold their breath in the hope their opinions might be sought over the next year and a half the commission is going to take.
And finally, there is the Three (and growing) Waters and the RNZ/TVNZ merger.
When the Labour government became the first under MMP to win complete control of the House, I really believed that at last there was a party in power that would use that privilege to show the compassion, leadership, collaboration and transparency that was needed to address some of the major issues around the growing social and economic divide that was facing Aotearoa New Zealand.
Instead, transparency has disappeared, the economic and social divide has grown and the dangers of a party led by ingrained and inflexible ideologies have come to the fore.
And into this gap has stepped Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta.
I don’t need to highlight the concerns around the ideology-driven agenda that appears to have taken control of Cabinet. Both ministers did that for us last week.
What the five Māori MPs in Cabinet (and 15 Māori MPs in the Labour caucus) need to reflect on is the damage they are doing to those who argue that Māori have an increasingly important and constructive contribution to make to the future of Aotearoa New Zealand. I believe the majority of Kiwi share that view, but the increasingly inflexible, we know best, we are owed this, stand some of our Māori ministers are taking has opened the doors for those who don’t.
This is a future we can all grow together. It is a future we need to pursue, with dignity, for the benefit of our mokopuna. That was the Labour Party I used to know.
Sir Ian Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research.
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