Beyond, Not Back

“I can’t stand this indecision, married with a lack of vision…”

A Rare Intervention

This week, we’ve seen the synthesis of the opposition to Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 strategy emerge in three similar forms. Firstly, former Prime Minister and noted waitress harasser, Sir John Key had a 1300 word Op-Ed published on every single media platform he offered it to, insisting that New Zealanders could not continue as a “smug hermit kingdom” being ruled by fear. Putting aside that Sir John is probably desperate to get back to his Hawaiian house, at a time when Hawaiians are desperately pleading for people to stay away from their Covid-19 ravaged motu, it’s interesting he chose now to make his intervention.

Following it up with a media round where he proposed ‘taking away rights’ of the unvaccinated as encouragement, paired with a $25 payment for being vaccinated Key’s appearance only highlighted what a dreadful, no-good, dogshit job his successors, successors, successors, successor is doing as National Party Leader. It’s not that Key’s ideas made sense, because they didn’t, but they were at least heard by the public. By comparison National’s Covid response minister, and social media outreach expert, Chris Bishop had his own op-ed turned down by the press the week before.

Then on Tuesday, David Seymour’s ACT Party (libertarian, annoying) preempted National’s own Covid-19 opening up plan by presenting their own. The five key points boil down to some staple anti-Govt anti-lockdown talking points: ending lockdowns entirely in favour of individual isolation and shielding vulnerable people, end the ‘singular focus on public health’ (in a pandemic) in favour of wellbeing, open up the borders to returning Kiwis with home isolation and, uh, ending the ‘government-knows-best’ approach in favour of agile sprints with goals of lower transmission, hospitalisation and deaths. Like Key, there is a repetition of the “living in fear” claim.

This plan would have failed in the current Delta outbreak in Aotearoa with case numbers in the thousands, community transmission expanding beyond Auckland and Wellington into the regions, hospital admissions beyond our limited capacity and a significantly increased death toll. It’s likely that the effect of this failure would also have prevented the vaccine rollout and uptake that we have seen during the lockdown period, making it impossible for Seymour to propose this plan in the first place.

Let me be perfectly clear, Sir John Key and David Seymour and Judith Collins would not be presenting their ‘alternative plans’ to open up if the current plan, the singular focus on public health run by a government-knows-best approach, had not been overwhelmingly successful. Most of their suggestions represent little more than the failed strategy of the New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian during June of 2021, one which led to mass infection of thousands and hundreds of deaths. 

Living In Fear

COVID-19 and its variants are an invisible, highly infectious and potentially deadly virus. If you have pre-existing health conditions, or are elderly, the chances of you dying of it increase massively, although it can also kill previously perfectly healthy people of any age. In 2020 it got into a rest-home in Canterbury, and accounted for 12 of the 27 deaths Aotearoa New Zealand has had since the beginning of the pandemic. It can be transmitted through the air, your kids can have it, it can be contracted and infectious asymptomatically, it has a dormant time meaning someone can easily carry it from work to home, home to elsewhere in the country, or in another country.

“Long COVID”, the after-effects of the virus, include psychological and physiological symptoms which are debilitating in the extreme, and will have long-term consequences for individuals and the health system that will need to support them. It is something not really experienced in Aotearoa New Zealand yet — but all of the accounts from overseas make it clear, this virus is not like the flu, it does not just go away once you’ve had it and it doesn’t kill you. Even with double-vaccinations, you can still catch COVID-19 and while the jab reduces the chances it will hospitalise you or kill you, it can still do that.

In short, it’s fucking scary. 

Boldly claiming not to live in fear of the greatest viral threat since the 1918 Flu Outbreak is the preserve of those who are either ignorant of the realities of this outbreak, like many deluded anti-vaxxers and far-right activists, or those who are fully aware of the realities but believe that their privileged position in society — their abstraction from the hoi-polloi — the safety of their gated communities and rarefied social circles mean that they are unlikely to face any personal consequence of community circulation of COVID-19. 

I’ll let you decide which camp Key, Seymour and Collins fall into. But to claim that the current, successful, policies of the Government are ‘living in fear’ and to portray both the success of 2020, the ongoing work in 2021 and the overall minimisation of potential deaths as a result, as a failure of sorts, places mass infection, deaths and the knock-on consequences to the health system and wider society as acceptable. The boundaries of acceptability are defined by whatever replaces the Government’s policies meeting their metric of success. But what precisely is that metric? What does success look like to the right-wing?

Looking Backwards

In short, what Key and Seymour and Collins all appear to want is for things to get back to normal. They want things to go back to the way they were in 2019, before the entire world became relatively well educated in the concept of R values and incubation periods and not forgetting your mask when you leave the house. They want business class flights and hotels and golf with friends on sunny courses. It’s no surprise that the right-wing are looking to the past as inspiration for what they want the future to look like, but the similarities between all of their positions place the current situation as one motivated by fear, and their ideal one to be a return to the pre-pandemic world.

It is a startling lack of understanding about the pandemic, and a complete collapse of vision as a consequence.

There is no returning to the pre-pandemic world. Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 changed the world, and the 9/11 terror attack changed the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. It is interesting that Key, Collins and Seymour would most likely castigate anyone seeking to return to the Cold War, or to the world pre-9/11 as hopelessly naive to the hard realities of momentous historical, social and cultural shifts, and yet here they are — yearning for the world that was, ignoring the world that is and completely unable to imagine the world that can be.

We live in a time which, even without COVID-19, required an ability to understand the realities of the present and its effect upon the future. The pandemic has only brought the need for recognising these realities, and their consequences into sharper relief — and has revealed the paucity of this among many politicians, often with a high death toll attached to it. I mentioned Gladys Berejilkian, but equally Boris Johnson’s failure to take the pandemic seriously in early 2020 and the subsequent policy failures accelerated the UK death toll beyond 100,000. All in the name of returning to a normal that no longer exists.

The Virus Doesn’t Care About Your Plans

It is supremely ironic that all parties named so far describe their attempts to reassert the pre-pandemic world as “living with the virus”, when accepting that the virus is an element of the normal and the mundane clearly indicates a dramatic and significant change to the world. For those people viewed as acceptable losses to COVID-19, the elderly and immunocompromised, there is no living with the virus, only dying from the virus.

Of equal irony is that the right-wing, after a solid decade of accusing the left of being over-emotional, touchy-feeling and absent of their real-world grit and rational logic, have decided that their solution to the most serious immediate real-world challenge is to simultaneously decry the left’s “fear” while offering solutions that operate in a world where COVID-19 can be managed by setting targets for humans, with the hope that good vibes and productivity will outwork a virus which does not need a plan, only an opportunity.

That is what lies at the centre of most of the plans offered by Key, Seymour and Collins. Opportunity. They believe that the opportunity they are offering is to the public, to get back to normal and stop living in fear. Instead the majority of their proposals offer the opportunity for the virus to get a foothold in Aotearoa that it has been denied for over 18 months. They are attempting to offer a people-pleasing solution to a problem that does not require positive public opinion, but does require the bodies of the public, to accelerate and worsen. 

A freedom which is ultimately conditional on the inevitable deaths of the vulnerable, something which has been effectively prevented for the most part during this pandemic, should not be regarded as a good deal. Equally those who would seek to run the country admitting that, were they in charge, they would have already abandoned the successful strategy in favour of joining countries who have failed to deal with COVID-19 seems strange when they expect to be applauded for it.

Retaining Solidarity

There has to be a plan though, there has to be a strategy. We cannot go on like this. Personally I haven’t seen my parents since 2019, and they haven’t seen their grandson since then — thats half of his life. The MIQ rooms situation is a nightmare, and the risk of bringing back the virus or bringing it to my parents is one that has precluded any attempt to visit them. Even with everyone vaccinated, the risk still exists.

Rather than decide that it’s time to join nations that have accepted hundreds of deaths a day, children under-12 becoming a large transmission vector for the virus and other ‘dying with the virus’ strategies, Aotearoa New Zealand has a completely different position from which to engage with re-opening and safely protecting communities. We have almost no community transmission of the virus, and a rising vaccination rate. That’s something to hold onto, as far as possible, because it has engendered a solidarity among the majority of New Zealanders.

The “Team of 5 Million” might be a hackneyed bit of branding, and obviously doesn’t include the small pockets of anti-vaxxers and nut-bars like Plan B. And yet there has been a genuine solidarity demonstrated in Aotearoa during the pandemic. When Auckland went into the subsequent lockdowns after the first ones, the rest of the country recognised the region was taking one for the team. As the largest city, with the biggest international airport, Auckland has been the locus of every subsequent outbreak — and has hung tough in lockdowns, because we recognise our duty to our fellow people and everyone outside the lockdown boundaries gives us our dues for the work we’re putting in.

Perhaps that’s it, that’s why the right wing and libertarians want to atomise the current system. An outbreak of cross-class solidarity (tinged somewhat with a fierce resentment of the Wanaka tripping upper-classes) is a nightmare for political parties which have relied on selfishness as the model for the ideal citizen. By offering freedom at the expense of people you might not know, nor ever meet, they are trying to reassert that this collective action (which has worked) is just not as good as doing what you want, while not caring about what happens to other people (which is, basically, the centre-right in a nutshell).

A Possible Plan

So, what do we do? Mass vaccination is an absolute must. Not in terms of everyone who wants one should have access, but everyone who can have one must have one. Having castigated the right for looking backwards, we should be looking to the models of immunisation that stamped out Polio and Smallpox. Everyone who is physically able to have vaccinations has to be vaccinated. No arguments. 

Anyone visiting the country should be fully vaccinated, and have a recent negative test. Quarantine will hopefully be allowed to occur at home for those with the ability to do so, but I doubt we’re seeing the end of MiQ in the next 12 months. Mask wearing on planes, trains and public transport might be here to stay, wearing them in public may become as common as they have in nations that were affected by SARS in the early 2000’s. 

In terms of outbreaks, I know the Government wants an end to long-term lockdowns but the virus doesn’t do what the Government or the Opposition want it to do. The Delta outbreak has provided a model of a way to limit those lockdowns, with the public checking their own movements against locations of interest and getting tested if they coincide with a case — as does the MoH requesting entire neighbourhoods get tested. The Covid-19 App is here to stay, keep your bluetooth on, sign in. 

You might notice there’s a lack of the word ‘freedom’ here, or ‘fear’. There is no declaration that everything is going to be fine, because to say that is to trumpet the bliss of ignorance in the face of grim reality. Everything I suggest here are just slight changes to how Aotearoa has already handled the pandemic, based on what we know about COVID-19 and Delta. A year ago, Aotearoa’s elimination strategy was successful even before we knew if there was a vaccine that could mitigate the worst effects of the virus. A year from now, perhaps there will be further developments that will help us all.

The word I am using here is caution. The virus is dangerous, it seizes on every opportunity afforded to it. To recognise this is not to live in fear, it is to be appropriately cautious in the face of reality. Caution has guided our public health response, solidarity in the face of the virus has characterised the public’s response. There are far too many examples of countries whose leadership led their people or were forced by their people to open up too soon, to desperately lunge for a past that no longer exists. Let’s not fall into the idea that looking backwards is the same as looking beyond the pandemic. 

Despite what some antagonists, domestic and overseas, would have you believe — Aotearoa’s response to COVID-19 has been a resounding success in terms of preventing infection, hospitalisation and deaths. The reason the right-wing are seeking for us to align with countries which failed in their response, is because they cannot imagine something different. I genuinely believe our unique position provides us with the opportunity to do things differently, better, without as much death and suffering as we have seen elsewhere. To do so would be brave and thoroughly reject the fear being offered in the guise of a false freedom.

John Palethorpe is a political commentator and cohost of PostingCast

This article originally appeared on (and has been syndicated from) PostingDad