Key’s baaaack

• mickysavage
• 3 years ago
• Categories: brand key, covid-19, health, john key, Judith Collins, Media, national, same old national

What a way to wake up in the morning.  We lost an hour because of daylight saving and by the looks of things we also lost four years, because John Key’s reckons were being broadcast in stereo in both the Herald and in Stuff.

It was classic Key.  His opinion piece amplified the absolute certainty in the accuracy he has of his reckons that can only be formed by being educated in a private school, being a member of the National Party and a merchant banker and working at Merrill Lynch.

And what were these reckons you may ask.  Essentially that we should be more like Apollo 13 in our response to Covid.  Yep we should have jammed everything together with whatever we could get our hands on, make really quick decisions based on limited information and hope.

And we are living in a smug hermit kingdom.  Yep Key has not lost his ability to invent really annoying and highly inaccurate rhetorical flourishes.

He thinks that we need to “get back to a life where New Zealanders can travel overseas – for any reason – knowing they can return home when they want to, and where we again welcome visitors to this country.”  It is all about the international travel with Key.

And rather than keeping us safe in a way that no other western country has been able to manage Key thinks that our public health experts have “done a good job of making the public fearful, and therefore willing to accept multiple restrictions on their civil liberties which are disproportionate to the risk of them contracting Covid”.  Clearly we should have put up with those tens of thousands of deaths and crippled health system just so Key could visit Hawaii.

He describes the MIQ system as a “lottery” and a “public embarrassment” and decries Kiwis no longer able to return home.

He also sides with business owners who are worried about their future.  I don’t dispute that some businesses are doing it tough but there is compelling evidence that New Zealand’s short sharp lockdowns and for elimination are better for the economy than more permissive alternatives.

Key proposes the following:

1. Give Māori and Pacific health providers a financial incentive for every person they get vaccinated in the next six weeks.
2. Give every person aged between 12-29 a $25 voucher of their choice if they get vaccinated before December 1.
3. Allow only vaccinated people into licensed premises (and maybe park the Shot Bro bus outside a few nightclubs as an incentive).
4. Tell New Zealanders when borders will reopen. It might incentivise more people to get jabbed.
5. Stop ruling by fear. Instead, reassure people that living with the virus is possible, as long as you’re vaccinated. Take positive actions like funding Pharmac to invest in therapies proven to help fight the virus, build up our hospital capacity and workforce, use saliva testing for Covid, subsidise home-testing kits for Covid and order booster shots now.

Key is copying the Chris Bishop approach to Covid, propose something that is already being developed and then try and claim credit when it happens.  Of his proposals:

1. Maori and Pacific health providers have already been given significant resources.
2. Key obviously still thinks that greed is the only way to persuade people.
3. Being developed.
4. The Government has clearly indicated that when we reach 90% plus then the response will be different.  But rather than making it a binary decision now I prefer the Government makes decisions based on current circumstances.
5. The guy who oversaw the continuous run down of the health system so that we had hospital buildings with raw sewerage in the walls is not the person who should lecture us on the state of the health system.

Why Key chose now to go public is interesting.  Yesterday Judith Collins said National had Covid policy almost ready to go and that it was now being peer reviewed.  What is the bet the policy is similar to what Key has set out?  And I wonder why he felt the urge to undermine the announcement by releasing his opinion piece now?

The overwhelming two emotions that I felt were firstly annoyance and a feel of deja vu at the closed minded simplistic uber confident rantings of a merchant banker.  And secondly a sense of relief that Jacinda Ardern and not John Key led the country during this global pandemic that has brought pretty well every western nation except New Zealand to their knees.