Biden has been in office around 240 days. How is his net approval compared to other US Presidents?

1. Bush GW +72%
2. Kennedy +64%
3. Truman +61%
4. Eisenhower +60%
5. Johnson +59%
6. Bush GHW +53%
7. Nixon +42%
8. Reagan +31%
9. Carter+26%
10. Obama +13%
11. Clinton +7%
12. Biden -3%
13. Ford -9%
14. Trump -16%

Not doing that well when the only ones you are ahead of is Ford and Trump.

The Herald reports:

Three household members of a remand prisoner with Covid-19 who was announced today as a case today have tested positive.

One is a child who was symptomatic while at school on Thursday.

Two of the three household members attend Mangatangi School on the Hauraki Plains. All three positive cases, and an accompanying adult caregiver, are being moved to a quarantine facility.

The school has been closed and parents have been contacted. Arrangements are being made for the students and their families to be tested.

There are nine people in the household. Five others have tested negative and the ninth household member will be tested tomorrow.

This is very unfortunate.

The Herald reports:

An off-road driver who admitted crashing nearly 50 metres down a steep gorge, killing his girlfriend, has today been granted a discharge without conviction, on the condition that he pays his late girlfriend’s mother $5000 in compensation.

Outrageous that he is responsible for the death of someone, and he doesn’t even get a conviction.

Brown’s mother Catherine Thomson-Bush has been devastated to lose a twin daughter – and who died shortly before her joint birthday with her sister Charlotte.

She told the court that although she has no doubt that Page loved her daughter, she had concerns about his responsibility-taking because he did not say sorry until she got a letter from him about 15 months later.

A letter his lawyer probably wrote for him.

Through his lawyer Kerry Cook, Page applied for a discharge without conviction on the basis that it would be all out of proportion to the gravity of the offence, and that it would affect his employment prospects in organic farming.

Are you kidding me? The gravity of the offence is someone is dead. And the notion that a conviction would stop you being employed in farming is farcical.

A discharge was opposed by police, but Judge O’Driscoll concluded he was satisfied that direct and indirect consequences of a conviction would be out of proportion.

“I accept that some in the community may say there needs to be a conviction because someone was killed in a car crash,” the judge said.

Not because someone died, but because someone died due to driving carelessly or recklessly.

I am in no way advocating Page should go to prison. But at a minimum he should be doing some community service, or periodic detention or home detention.

Page had travelled the 4WD track, which crosses the Arrow River 23 times and takes about an hour each way depending on weather and conditions, once several years before.

He advised Brown that seatbelts shouldn’t be worn because the track was bumpy and they would strangle her.

So that was bad advice he gave her.

A guest post by a reader:

Having this week arrived back from nearly 3 months overseas, and being promptly bussed down to Hamilton where our allotted MIQ spot was assigned, I thought readers may like a little ‘inside information’ and to consider these points:

1. Travelling back from London, on a plane with just 49 passengers, with several of whom we then shared a 2 hour bus ride to Hamilton, the reasons bringing people through MIQ were widespread and genuine. Here are a few:
   1. A professional family emigrating from Europe to Gisborne
   2. A Kiwi sport professional returning to NZ to live with his large family after over a decade playing overseas
   3. A businessman who deals with many sites overseas, who felt his customers no longer understood or had patience any longer for NZ’s arms-length approach, and he just had to get over there in person for 6 weeks to avoid losing business
   4. Several solo younger kiwis, returning for various periods, some open ended, some re-immigrating and some for fixed terms.

And of course others.

Our own reason for travelling was that our 3 grown children and young grandchildren live in London and all adults are involved in demanding jobs. All have had degrees of mental ill health during the last 18 months due to their own lock-down circumstances. We are a close family and they normally come home annually for renewal. It was damaging them not to be able to link with home, as their Christmas holidays only amount to 2 weeks, meaning the MIQ rule denies them access. We visited several adult children of friends whilst there, for the same reason, and from all young kiwis, received the same message; that they feel excluded by their own country and very let down.

2. So to MIQ itself… there is obviously a considerable diversity of offerings and a considerable diversity of hardship being inflicted. Some of our fellows in lockdown, with families, managed to communicate their needs adequately through the site. In one case though, a mother and daughter with a baby, were interpreted as a couple and given a room with one double bed. But our MIQ is far from the toughest. The main Facebook sites (New Zealand Hotel Quarantine, and MIQ: New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine) show whole families in tiny rooms. In some of the Auckland hotels, exercise is for half an hour timetabled, and they can only walk as fast as the slowest walker to maintain social distance. In at least one case, the exercise yard is in a car parking building so inmates see no sun at all in their 14 day lockdown. In some the food is wonderful. In others, rather awful, and in our case, there is little option for variation. For example, we are only able to obtain salads by buying them in, even though we are paying thousands to be locked up.
3. The whole scenario of this lock up idea, is, for me at least, a lot harder to stomach than I expected. For me to have my liberty curtailed, to be guarded day and night by police, army personnel in uniform and security personnel in uniform (always visible, day and night – surprisingly large contingents) sticks in my craw. To have our own army and police turned against the freedom of our own citizens seems to be as unconscionable now as I found it when Muldoon turned the police on peaceful protesters during the Springbok tour of 1981.

Additional to this large incarceration team, there is a substantial team of nurses and counsellors, at least five at my count, for some 80 odd inmates including children. This may be some indication of the mental and general health damage that is being inflicted by this draconian approach, predicated on a misdirected belief that we can live without Covid going forward. In Britain they are using the expression tht Covid is now endemic not epidemic.

Each day we are telephoned by this aforementioned health team and asked the same bank of questions, including how happy we are on a scale of  10, and are we feeling irritable. Duh! To what purpose this data is collected is unclear, but it surely contains huge numbers of lies. What captive lightly tells their captors that they are unhappy and angry about their incarceration? Stockholm syndrome anyone?

4. Having plenty of available time to ponder this whole business, I can think of no time in history, where the needs of the elderly have been so massively favoured directly against the needs of the young.  In the time we have been back in NZ there have been sufficient numbers of high speed car crashes and deaths as to justify a hypothesis that there is massive psychological damage being rendered to the young. They are giving up schooling in substantial numbers as Alwyn Poole has described, while self-harm and suicide statistics are astronomical, not just here but overseas as well.

There is a distinct and identifiable loss of hope amongst many younger folks.

5. Associated with this is the callous destruction of businesses. Having been a small business person myself, I know the risks one takes with ones capital and how destroying it can be when it all goes wrong, and in this matter, it keeps going wrong beyond reasonable expectation for so many businesses. The truth is that if you are losing sleep at night worrying over what level of freedom you may discover you possess tomorrow, you are not living in a free country.
6. Having spent all of our time overseas in Britain and Spain, (where we visited our daughter in Law’s elderly relatives , all in the late seventies and eighties, and all of whom contracted Covid and recovered from it without hospitalization since they had no other co-morbidities)  we have witnessed in depth, people living openly in a Covid world. We took our grandchildren to packed theatres and parks etc where mask wearing was optional. And strangely, after lockdown, people continue to look after themselves (as they see fit) without Government intervention.

We witnessed at first hand the recovery of the London underground service from light passenger numbers to rush hour crushes in the time we were there, and again, about two thirds of the passengers continued to wear masks though it is no longer mandated.

Are we as Kiwis, unable to be trusted with looking after our own welfare? Why are we so incapable?

7. There are many more points I could make, but one final one I feel is important is the sheer anger of so many of our best and brightest young kiwis working overseas. It has always been our tradition to develop skill sets and capital overseas then later to return to NZ where the value of that experience benefits all. So many wonderful young folk we spoke to felt they had been disowned by their country and would never, now, go back. What a loss!

In conclusion I have to say that as double vaxxed Kiwis, we could easily have been tested at the border and released to self-isolate in our homes. At most a 3 day lockdown, allowing 2 tests would have sufficed to exclude the vast majority of risk.

Many times overseas we were tested with spit tests. Two of my children are supplied these by their workplaces, self-testing regularly to ensure safe workspaces. This is not a Government initiative there but a workplace initiative. But it is here, now, illegal for a company to import these tests. Why? There are clear political imperatives for a maternalistic Government to keep the population scared and controlled. But is that the country we want New Zealand to be?

WCC Councillor Fleur Fitzsimons writes:

Last week, the Wellington City Council released an external review into its communications and engagement functions. The review found that the council needed a “refreshed corporate identity” as if the council is a corporation with something to sell, like a sneakers brand or insurance company.

The council does not operate in a competitive marketplace, and there is no share price to protect. The council exists for simple reasons, to make Wellington function properly as a city that residents can live well in. The council has enough challenges living up to that basic expectation.

The council exists to address the reality that for residents and businesses, it is better if we collectively build pipes, transport and recreation infrastructure. It is better if together we plan for housing, shopping and hospitality and it is better if we as a city provide the support needed for residents who are struggling.

Ultimately, the council’s reputation rests on whether we meet the needs and expectations of residents, and their assessment is made via democratic elections. It’s nice to have an appealing logo, and essential we communicate with residents with clarity and honesty. But we are not a “brand” in any meaningful sense of the word, and nor should we aspire to behave like one.

I can only agree. Well said Fleur.

I doubt there many people in New Zealand who aren’t emotionally affected by the news of the three young girls killed in Timaru. I don’t think I can find the right word for how upsetting it is.

The fact their mother has been charged with the murder, makes it even more awful.

I’ve reflected on how I tend to have a somewhat different reaction to an (alleged) killing of children by one of their parents. If it is a father I tend to have emotions of hate and anger and regard the father as an evil bastard. But if it is a mother, I tend to have more disbelief and sadness, and just automatically assume it must be mental illness. Having talked to a few people on this, I don’t think this is unique to me.

I guess we instinctively regard mothers as more protective of their children.

It is hard to describe how strong the protective instinct is in (most) parents. At times I find it almost debilitating, as I tend to get anxious at the best of times anyway. For instance if I’m walking along the road I live on (a country road with no footpaths) I am constantly working out in my mind what I would do if a car skidded out of control towards us (basically throw my son over the fence between some trees). If we are near a river I am mentally looking at how I could most quickly get downstream if they slipped in. And the feeling of absolute dread when they disappear even for a few seconds in a playground is overpowering. Basically whenever I am with them outside our house, I am constantly focused on keeping them alive. As they get older, hopefully I get to relax some more.

But this makes what happened in Timaru even the more harder to understand. There really are no words adequate. I just wished we lived in a world where this never happened.

An interesting speech from the new Israeli PM:

We will do everything to avoid lockdowns, which – to livelihoods, the economy and the education of our children – are destructive tools. Lockdowns are only a last resort.

It would be very easy to declare a lockdown and give money to the closed businesses and the workers sitting at home.

But the policy of lockdowns has a terrible price.

One consideration that we have is the lowering of morbidity and the reduction of mortality. But, of course, there are other considerations including Israeli citizens’ livelihoods, the education of Israeli children and safeguarding the economic future of Israel.

For example, we thought about the people killed in traffic accidents. It would be possible to reduce to zero the number of fatalities from traffic accidents by banning travel on Israel’s highways. But we all understand that we have to live and allow traffic in Israel.

Thus it is with the Delta strain: Daily routine is part of life and we must find a responsible balance between all the needs.

It is important for me to emphasize something:

The price tag for the three previous lockdowns, was NIS 200 billion.

That is 200,000,000,000.

This is NIS 200,000 x one million.

This is our money, yours, and our children’s and great-grand children’s.

If we continue with the policy of lockdowns and economically destructive restrictions, we will simply collapse economically.

The immense amount that we spent on lockdowns, the effectiveness of which was low in any case, is a sum that was taken from important goals for you and for your children.

Lockdowns were a necessary “evil” in 2020 and the current lockdown was necessary as we had so few vaccinated. But it is a useful reminder they do impose a huge cost on us, and on our children.

How many children and older people would we not be able to send to life-saving operations?

How many MRI machines would we not be able to finance and thus we would miss thousands of cancer patients at early stages?

How many lessons in science, mathematics or English would we be unable to finance?

How many old-age pensions for elderly without means would we be unable to provide?

Think for a moment: Every family in Israel is NIS 105,000 in debt due to the price tag of the three lockdowns.

I think it is similar in NZ. Our increase in debt per household is huge.

We are taking responsibility and are now implementing important steps that have not been carried out up until now:

1. We are inoculating millions of older people with a third dose.

At this moment, the State of Israel is the only country that is giving its citizens the possibility of receiving a third dose.

We secured approval of the medical experts.

We saw to the stocks of the vaccines.

We saw to it that the HMOs would be able to act and they are doing extraordinary work.

2. We are strengthening the hospitals with more positions for doctors and nurses, and the HMOs and the entire health system after many years in which these critical parts of the system were neglected.

3. We are closely safeguarding the vulnerable elderly in retirement homes and geriatric hospitals.

4. We opened the private market to rapid tests and the sale of home tests. I hope that we will see hundreds of thousands of tests a day during the pandemic, which will allow us to quarantine cases and break the chains of infection.

So their strategy is vaccinations. investing more in hospitals, safeguarding the elderly and more rapid testing.

I don’t advocate that strategy, yet, for NZ. But come 2022 we should have enough people vaccinated that we can abandon lockdowns.

Was sent this poem by a reader:

Dear Aunty Jacinda,
A moment if I may,
A response I think is needed,
To the protest the other day.

Farmers are generally too busy,
To rally and cause a stink,
But their overwhelming response,
Must have made you stop and think.

You see, thinking has been lacking,
in your policies I suggest.
Possibly economic incompetence,
and bureaucratic bullshit at its best.

Your policies are from fairyland,
Hindering what the farmers they produce.
I struggle with the economic logic,
Of screwing the Golden Goose.

You see New Zealand has been founded,
On the farmers and the land.
Farming and economic strength,
Symbiotically go hand in hand.

The reason isn’t rocket science.
Be it vege, milk or meat.
Irrespective of the daily grind,
All the people they must eat.

As we saw in Covid,
Panic buying to the fore,
Wonder what you’ll eat next time,
When farmers can’t be farmers anymore.

Choked by impractical bureaucracy,
They all have had enough.
Supermarkets full of humble pie,
Hmmm…the menu could be rough.

A majority of farmers,
Are a cut above the rest.
They understand the logic,
Of not shitting in one’s nest.

The bar is constantly rising,
By peering over the fence.
Labour, I suggest, should peer as well,
And view some common sense.

Labour in a literal sense,
Used to mean grafting in a role.
Labour in a current sense,
Means top pay on the dole.

Screwing the diligent workforce,
The productive and the hearty.
Sending the country down the gurgler,
Thanks to Jacinda’s “Labourless” party.

The protest by diligent farmers,
For the country shouldn’t shock,
They nurture and protect the land,
Infinitely better than Labour does with DoC.

Instead of crippling progressive farmers,
and dictating them with force,
I suggest leading the charge by example,
And controlling DoC’s broom and gorse.

So cheers to Laurie Paterson,
And Bryce McKenzie in the South.
You did what needed doing,
Giving the cause the focus and the mouth.

The Golden Goose is farming,
And common sense there needs to be,
Otherwise the goose and country’s completely plucked,
But spelled with an “F” and not a “P”.

Newshub reports:

Newshub can reveal the man who allegedly escaped from quarantine (MIQ) earlier this month was released early from MIQ and sent home without spending a full 14 days in a facility.

And it’s not just him. The Ministry of Health admits quarantine facilities in Auckland aren’t yet following strict new 14-day Delta rules because of capacity constraints. …

Not only was he set free early, but he wasn’t tested.

I’m not sure what is worse – sending him home four days early, or doing it without testing him.

The media have covered at length the Curia poll for the Taxpayers Union on the current political environment. But they seem to have overlooked another Curia poll was also released in the last week.

A poll was done for Hobson’s Pledge on whether people support changing the name of the country to Aotearoa.

Media have reported at length how there is a petition to change the name, yet they have overlooked a scientific poll which ascertains whether or not this does have majority support.

The poll found only 28% support a name change to Aotearoa. Twice as many people are strongly opposed as strongly in favour.

It found even Labour voters were slightly more opposed than supportive. The lowest level of support for a name change came in poor (high deprivation) areas.

Stuff reports:

A judge has questioned the value of a controversial Mongrel Mob-led meth rehab programme, when the gang is responsible for most local meth offending, and it’s not approved by Corrections.

Judge Russell Collins made the remarks when sentencing Mob member Damian Tipu, 28, in Napier District Court on Thursday.

Tipu had sought a discount to his sentence for meth dealing and other offences because he had attended the Kahukura programme run by Mongrel Mob life member Harry Tam’s company H2R Research and Consulting Ltd.

The programme has received $2.75million from the government’s Proceeds of Crime fund, prompting outrage from the Police Association and senior local police officers.

Thanks to the PM, the Mongrel Mob have it so sweet. Here’s how it works.

1. The Mob imports and sells meth all over Hawke’s Bay
2. The PM gives them $2.75 million to rehabilitate their own members and customers from the drugs they sell
3. The Mob members who get caught, go on the Mob run course, and then use that to seek a discount from the Judge for their drug dealing!!

I mean seriously, this is genius from the Mob. The only problem is this judge is less gullible than the PM:

Collins said Tipu’s pre-sentence report noted he had attended the course, but he questioned how much weight he could give it.

“When someone like Sonny Smith is a critical component to the programme… How do I put aside that ‘institutional knowledge’ and come to the conclusion that Mr Smith, as a president in the Mongrel Mob, is able to rehabilitate those afflicted with methamphetamine addiction?” Collins asked Tipu’s lawyer Matt Dixon.

“Every day we see in this court methamphetamine charges and there is one entity which dominates over anyone else as being behind the methamphetamine trade in Hawke’s Bay, and that’s the Mongrel Mob,” the judge said.

Exactly.

Dixon said Tipu had clearly benefited from the course because he had returned negative drug tests while attending it.

The tests were carried out internally. Just one of Tipu’s test results was shared with his probation officer.

“Self-reporting drug-testing?” the judge said.

He said there was no evidence of the training or qualifications of those running the programme, and it was not a programme approved by Corrections.

Note that the tests are done internally, so any claims that participants are now drug free should be treated with extreme skepticism. No doubt they will claim this though when they ask taxpayers for even more money.

The official position of Kiwiblog (ie me) on vaccines is that they’re fucking great and modern science is awesome in that something can be developed so quickly that can save so many people from death or suffering.

But Kiwiblog always has allowed people to disagree with me, and the same goes for vaccines. It is quite legitimate for people to point out that there are some adverse reactions and that over time they are less effective with elderly people (hence why Israel is doing boosters) etc. I do caution that no one should treat anything said here as being health advice. One should get health advice from health professionals.

Analysing vaccine data can be very complex. Look at this post about Israel and see the huge number of steps the author had to take to get to what is the relevant data about effectiveness of the vaccine.

I’ve seen claims that more people have died after taking the vaccine in NZ, than have died from Covid. At first glance this is true, but it misleading. The official data is here and 40 people have died within a couple of weeks of taking the vaccine. But only one death is linked. And they report that actually the 40 deaths recorded is lower than the normally expected number of people who would die in that period. So correlation is not causation.

And the other factor is the denominator. Only 4,000 people in NZ have had Covid-19 while almost three million people have been vaccinated. So even if all the 40 deaths were related to the vaccine (and half have been explicitly ruled out) then 40 out of 3,000,000 is still a lot less than 30 out of 4,000.

Kiwiblog does and will allow people to debate vaccines. But where moderators will step in is if people start pushing conspiracy theories above the data being faked etc etc.

NewstalkZB report:

A rural medical centre that pleaded with the Immigration Minister to help retain their young migrant GP is baffled to see residency reportedly granted to convicted criminals.

Ōtaki GP Dr Harding Richards, originally from Wales, left New Zealand in June after a year waiting in limbo to lodge a residency application.

Because of Covid’s impact on the immigration office, the Government suspended Expressions of Interest (EOI) selections for the skilled migrant category (SMC) last year, closing a pathway to residency for many migrants.

Reeling from the loss of the young doctor – who had 1354 patients registered to him – Ōtaki Medical Practice was forced to close its doors to new patients over a busy winter.

Last week Newshub reported Associate Immigration minister Phil Twyford had granted residency to three convicted criminals – with 10 convictions between them – since December.

An email chain shared with the Herald from the same period shows Ōtaki Medical Centre pleading with Twyford for a chance to make the case for an intervention in person.

The Ōtaki Medical Centre are not the only ones confused.

Obviously there has been a lot of speculation on what National needs to do to improve its appeal to New Zealanders in the light of two polls out this week (one by my company Curia).

I;ll first comment on the polls themselves. The Curia one was done at an unfavourable time for National. During lockdowns the Government is getting unprecedented media coverage, and the Opposition struggles for relevance. Also it had been a messy period with a number of stories that were less than helpful to National. So hopefully it represents a low point, and future polls will be better. The medium term trend is what is important, not one individual poll.

One thing interesting in the Curia poll is National has actually picked up slightly more support from Labour since 2020, than vice-versa. So it isn’t that people are flocking back to the Government. In fact Labour is down 5% or so from the election also.

National has lost support to ACT, and also to undecideds. This partially reflects that there remains uncertainty about National, and it has a weaker brand than in the past.

The poll also showed a huge gender gap between men and women. Looking more closely in this, it was really only with younger men and women. There is less of a differential with over 60s. So a key requirement for National is to increase its appeal to younger women.

There is obviously some speculation around leadership. I would caution against a belief that changing leader is some magic wand that fixes everything. If voters are unsure about National, I’m not sure going from four leaders in four years to five leaders in four years will improve things.

For my 2c what National needs is to focus on the basics. Namely:

• Pick your three or so issues you want to focus on, and relentlessly hammer them. Don’t react to every issue of the day.
• Understand that during a lockdown, Covid-19 is the dominant issue, but be prepared to shift the conversation once (hopefully) NZ is back in Level 1 in a few weeks.
• Announce (at least) a major policy that will make the public tune in and want to hear more. Normally you would not do this so early in the electoral cycle, but circumstances means you can’t afford to wait until late 2022.
• Have a clear strategy and messaging that all MPs are signed up to and repeating.
• Avoid own goals, distractions and the like. The media will generally run at most one story a day on National. It needs to be something positive and pro-active.
• Work out how to differentiate from ACT. When ACT was the 1% party you didn’t need to worry about them. When they are attracting much more support, you need to be able to state clearly the case for why a CR voter should support National, not ACT. This is not to say National should battle ACT for the CR vote rather than target winning voters from Labour. But you do need to be able to articulate the value of supporting National.

The Government has shown a profound inability to actually deliver change or make good on their promises. That means they are potentially vulnerable as by 2023 it is very possible they will have little to show for six years in office. No doubt they will still be promising light rail in just a few more years. But to change the Government you also need to convince people that the alternative is capable of governing well, has exciting policies and ideas, is focused on improving things for families and is unified and competent. That is the challenge.

Barry Soper writes:

And at least the Beehive has finally recognised that the main tool in the kit is to vaccinate – it was as though a light bulb went off in the ministerial offices and the rollout became vitally important.

But it was always important. They were told time and time again that Delta was on its way.

Jacinda Ardern’s Year of the Vaccination became her year of vacillation, that is until her mate ScoMo across the ditch scouted around his buddies abroad and got some additional vials of the stuff.

The Year of Vacillation – I like it.

Useful data from Newsroom.

• 95.9% of those hospitalised with Covid were unvaccinated (as in not had one shot two weeks prior to infection)
• 4.1% of those hospitalised had one shot, but not a second shot (two weeks or more prior to infection)
• 0.0% of those hospitalised with Covid were fully vaccinated two weeks prior to infection

So if you get fully vaccinated and wait two weeks, then your chances of getting Covid-19 badly enough to hospitalise you is close to zero.

Also data from the UK shows that of the 50,000 deaths only 59 (0.1%) were of people fully vaccinated who didn’t have serious health conditions.

I can’t wait for my second jab later this month.

Radio NZ report:

A rare piece of art-history furniture featuring elephant ivory inlays could be destroyed because its paperwork arrived in New Zealand late.

Known as the ‘Pompeiian Cabinet’, the sideboard was made by Johann Levien for the 1862 Exhibition in South Kensington, London. 

The cabinet was purchased by emerging Auckland collector Patrick Soanes, but it was seized by NZ customs because of incomplete paperwork when he had it shipped to New Zealand. 

Furniture historian William Cottrell claims Soanes had done all the paperwork, but it all came down to a missing rubber stamp on the British end.

“What had originally happened was that Patrick had declared there was ivory in it, but a paperwork problem at the shipping end in London meant that that document wasn’t completed.”

He says the paperwork got sent to an empty warehouse and then returned to London, but by the time the cabinet turned up, the document had expired.

“The cabinet was shipped out here and the paperwork arrived after lockdown had started, so it never got delivered to the warehouse with the cabinet, and then that paperwork got returned, it had expired, even though it was incomplete and British customs had cleared the cabinet for export anyways.”

However, Department of Conservation (DOC) national compliance manager Marta Lang argues that is not quite what happened.

She acknowledges Soanes had a permit but claims he didn’t present it to border officials when it left the UK.

“So regrettably, this cabinet was illegally exported from the UK. His permit also had to be physically presented when the Cabinet arrived to New Zealand in March last year and it wasn’t, so it was also illegally imported into New Zealand.”

So he emailed NZ officials to let them know the cabinet was en route but without its permit and it hadn’t been endorsed, she says.

“We said get the original permit to New Zealand as soon as possible. He sent it by royal mail instead of international courier and the cabinet a month later … the permit had not arrived.”

DOC says it has seized the cabinet in the interests of protecting endangered species, under the Trade in Endangered Species CITES agreement.

This is madness. So the permit was sent by mail instead of courier. Who cares. The cabinet is 150 years old. The elephants involved have been dead for 150 years. Moving a historic cabinet from London to NZ is not encouraging people to kill elephants.

This is a classic bureaucratic madness. Someone in Government should use some discretion rather than waste more time on this.

Some interesting data in the latest vaccination rates. As of 14 September we had 30% of the population full vaccinated and 58% partially vaccinated.

The full vaccination rates by ethnicity differ greatly:

1. Asians 41%
2. Europeans 37%
3. Pacific 31%
4. Maori 23%

It would be worth looking at why the Asian vaccination rate is so high, and how that can be emulated rather than blaming racism on any differences.

But what is interesting in looking at the low rates for Maori and Pacific is it is younger Maori and Pasifika only. The rates compared to the non-Maori non-Pasifika population is:

• Maori 65+: 1.01
• Maori 50 to 64: 0.98
• Pasifika 65+ 0.92
• Pasifika 50 to 64: 1.25

So this strongly suggests there is not a systematic barrier to Maori and Pasifika getting vaccinated as those aged 50+ are doing so at the same rates as non Maori and Pasifika. The lag is with those aged under 50. So rather than cry racism, the real question should be why are older Maori and Pasifika vaccinating, but not younger ones?

National’s Covid-19 spokesperson offered an op ed to the Herald and Stuff on what is now NZ’s longest lockdown. You might have thought that with the PM getting up to an hour a day of unfiltered coverage, that they would be keen to provide some balance. But it seems not.

So as a public service, here is the op ed they declined:

Lockdowns are incredibly expensive: it has been estimated a countrywide Level 4 lockdown costs the economy around $1.5 billion per week. That’s before you count the social cost: kids not at school, families split apart, the mental health impacts of being cooped up at home for days on end. I think almost everyone thinks we should be doing all we can to avoid them.

Sadly, it’s become clear in the government’s response to the recent delta outbreak that while Kiwis have done all they’ve been asked to do – the government hasn’t been playing its part. The “team of five million” has been let down.

Two things have become clear. First, we had no alternative but to lockdown because of our woefully low vaccination rates. Second, despite claims to the contrary, the government had done very little planning at all around how to respond to a further outbreak, particularly of delta, since the first COVID lockdown last year.

It gives me no pleasure as the Opposition spokesperson for COVID-19 to say that New Zealand’s vaccination rates, by world standards, are hopeless. For most of this year we had the world’s slowest vaccine roll-out. Chris Hipkins said at the end of 2020 we would be “at the front of the queue” but the reality is we are at the back of the pack. This is not the “year of the vaccine” we were promised by the Prime Minister.

The vaccines are safe, they work, and the data is very clear: the higher our vaccination rates, the less need there is of lockdowns. Every single person that goes and gets vaccinated brings us closer to freedom: freedom from lockdowns, and freedom to travel. That’s why the government’s ineptitude over vaccine supply matters. The government simply failed in its most important job: to get a supply of vaccines as early as possible and make sure as many people were vaccinated as possible as early as possible.

The government’s incompetence is astonishing. We were one of the last developed countries to sign contracts with vaccine manufacturers in 2020. We were then slow to approve the Pfizer vaccine. Hundreds of millions of jabs had been given by the time we approved it. We were then slow to actually order our doses, not doing it until January 29 this year. And we didn’t even bother to ask Pfizer if we could pay more to get earlier delivery of the vaccines, as other countries did. Compare the cost of paying a bit more to the cost of lockdowns, and do the maths. It’s a no brainer.

Incredibly, the government has claimed at various points it would be “unethical” or immoral to have a faster vaccine roll-out, because other countries need the vaccines more than we do. Leaving aside the internal inconsistency in this argument (other countries need them now too, but you don’t see the government giving ours up do you?), the New Zealand government’s first responsibility is to the people of New Zealand – and that means rolling out the vaccine as quick as they could. They failed.

The second failure by the government is their failure to plan for delta. The Prime Minister claimed on television this morning that delta only emerged in MIQ in June. That is completely incorrect. The first case of delta turned up in early April in MIQ and it has been raging across the world for most of this year. The government has sat ensconced behind the barriers of Fortress New Zealand and smugly looked at Australia, but they weren’t doing the work behind the scenes to prepare for when delta turned up here.

A smart government would have done an audit of all our MIQ facilities in light of delta to make sure infection control practices were up to scratch. Instead, a public walkway was allowed to share the same air as an exercise yard at the Crowne Plaza in Auckland and there was a vaccination centre right next to the Crowne Plaza. COVID positive people are still allowed to exercise in an underground car park in Wellington. Only now is the government reviewing MIQ facilities in light of delta.

A smart government would have had a plan in place for more quarantine facilities beyond the Jet Park. Instead the government had to scramble to get more quarantine facilities going like the Novotel Ellerslie – and then a COVID positive man escaped from it, putting us all at risk. It has taken over 24 hours to move many people from the community into quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, because the coordination plan between health officials and MIQ wasn’t in place.

Some of our current problems date back to the response to the first outbreak last year. Contract tracing has been an ever-present issue. There have been four expert reviews of contact tracing since April 2020. All have found it wanting but little has been done by the government. In this outbreak, it took six days for the government to second public servants from other departments to start contract tracing. By its own admission the government will fail to meet the contact tracing target metrics designed by Dr Ayesha Verrall, ironically enough now Associate Minister of Health. In this latest outbreak there are still 5000 contacts who have not even had a single phone call from a contact tracer!

A smart government would have had a plan in place around testing. Other countries use saliva tests and rapid antigen tests that return results in 15 minutes. Speed of testing with delta is critical, because the virus moves so far. But the government insists on using expensive and time consuming nasal PCR tests as our main testing technique. The result has been people who are told to get tested waiting 10-12 hours for a test or giving up and going home – or even worse, not even bothering. We should be using saliva testing much more widely – recommended to the government a year ago – as well as rapid antigen tests. Incredibly, these tests are banned in New Zealand.

There’s more I could mention. The failure to use Bluetooth tracing even though we’ve all been told for months to turn it on. The refusal to build purpose-built quarantine. The lack of preparation in our hospitals for a delta outbreak – no new ICU bed spaces have been provisioned over the five months.

The government borrowed $62 billion last year on the COVID Response Fund.  Did they spend this on contact tracing, testing capacity, and extra ICU capacity? That would have been sensible. Instead it was used as a slush fund. Instead the fund was spent on art therapy clinics, cameras on fishing boats, horse racing, public interest journalism, and school lunches. Yes, I’m serious.

Auckland is in lockdown – again – because the government failed to vaccinate quickly enough and the government failed to plan for delta.