I first met Muller at a National Party conference in 1993. He had just completed a stint as President of the Waikato Students Union, and had joined Jim Bolger’s office as an adviser.
Muller was an imposing figure. He stood head and shoulders above most, but would lean in and hold your gaze and speak softly, and listen and engage respectfully even with lowly young trouble-makers. He had an avuncular authority that defied his 25 years. I would not describe it so crudely as charisma, but his ability to make every person he met feel important, made him a person of unmistakable presence.
Muller was always at Bolger’s side, and invariably mistaken for the PM’s bodyguard.
Heh and in Dunedin he acted as one. Off memory (may be fallible) Sue Bradford burst into the church service Bolger was at, and Todd tackled her in the aisle and evicted her. Made him even more popular.
Over the years many those who have known Muller and recognised his leadership material came to write him off. He had bottled his chance to succeed early, they said. He didn’t have the hunger, they said. He had missed his opportunity, they said. When given the chance again, he wouldn’t have the mongrel, they said.
I was one of them, and I was wrong. As events have shown this week, Muller has all those things. The opportunity, a global pandemic that has thrown the New Zealand economy into a spiralling may-day call, has consumed the National Party leadership. And it is the unique set of circumstances that has gifted it to Muller.
Muller has a unique set of attributes. He exudes reassurance at a time when the country is in crisis. He has an optimism and confidence in New Zealand at a time when the public needs hope for the future. Conservative by nature, but not thumpingly so, he has an eye for pragmatism and results.
Todd Muller is no Jacinda Ardern. He does not have her communication polish. But before she was elected leader of the Labour Party, Jacinda Ardern was no Jacinda Ardern.
This election is now game-on. And anyone who writes Muller off now risks making the same mistake that too many of us have over the last five years.
The fact the left are trying to create a controversy over the fact he has US political memorabilia in his office suggests they are keen to try and spike him.
Several California defense attorneys said Friday that they would attempt to overturn criminal convictions that relied upon testimony from Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993, because she may have provided false information under oath.
During testimony in Monterey County court cases in which she was called as an expert on domestic violence, Reade said that she had received a bachelor’s degree from Antioch University, had never taken the bar exam after graduating from law school and had been a legislative assistant in Biden’s office. Those claims have since been documented as false or been called into doubt in stories published since she made her accusation against Biden.
Doesn’t mean she is lying about Biden, but a history of lying definitely harms her credibility.
The review of the cases, which was first reported by the Monterey County Weekly, came as the attorney who had been representing Reade in her claim against Biden said Friday that his firm decided to no longer work with her as a client.
Douglas Wigdor had represented several other plaintiffs during the #MeToo era, including victims who said they were harassed by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and film producer Harvey Weinstein.
“Our firm no longer represents Tara Reade,” Wigdor said in a statement Friday morning.
National’s new leader Todd Muller says if he leads his party to victory this election, he would be the Minister of Small Business as well as the Prime Minister.
He said this would help reinforce the fact that a Government he led would be about helping those people on the ground floor of the economy.
“Those small businesses need an advocate in Wellington and I’ll be their man,” he told the Nation this morning.
This is a smart decision. PMs if they choose a portfolio often choose one they see as critical to NZ’s future. Key chose tourism. Ardern chose Arts and Child Poverty Reduction and Muller, if elected, has said he will choose Small Business.
It is a sign to voters that a Muller Government’s focus would be on rebuilding the economy and small businesses.
It would be fair to say the number of leading doctors, epidemiologists and social scientists questioning the societal impact of the lockdown is starting to increase. At the same time there is an emerging appetite for the media to give these voices room to compete with what has to-date been a predominantly government-led narrative.
Being something of a data junkie, I have approached the topic of accessing the lockdown harm by looking at raw mortality data. Most countries publish this material regularly, the best of which do so weekly. New Zealand does not publish on this frequency, so I have been analysing the UK’s Office of National Statistics weekly mortality records. These are published on a Tuesday night NZT, covering the current year’s weeks ending 10 days prior. So not real-time, but close.
This year’s data includes analysis of deaths that ‘involve Covid19’. In the UK ‘involve’ can mean anything from a 60-year year old, diagnosed with Covid19 and with co-morbidities dying in hospital, through to someone passing away in a rest home with a local GP suspecting Covid19, and without any testing designating it as such on the death certificate.
It is usual to consider the excess mortalities rate (‘EMR’) for this analysis, ie the deaths above some multi-year average. The ONS uses a five year average which includes a particularly lethal 2018-19 flu season. Even so, the UKs EMR currently exceeds the 5-year average by a wide margin. For example, in Week-17 the 5-year average number of mortalities is 10,457. In 2020 Week-17 21,997 people died giving us an EMR of 11,540.
What is surprising however is that removal the loosely attributed and possibly overstated Covid19 deaths reveal a statistically significant excess of UK residents now dying without the virus playing any role in their passing. Week-17 saw 8,237 deaths attributed to Covid19, meaning that there were 3,303 excess deaths not attributable to the virus. So far this year there have been 13,245 excess, non-Covid19 deaths representing around 25% of the overall EMR.
What could be causing this?
Empty hospital beds are a clue, as are the number of people dying at home because they have been asked to delay seeking treatment, or they are unwilling to ‘risk’ going to hospital on account of Covid19.
Social isolation coupled with anxiety resulting from job losses, business failures and loss of retirement savings have a well-documented impact on suicide statistics. Economic downturns impact the quality and availability of healthcare thereby increasing mortality. These factors will persist in contributing to untimely deaths long after Covid19 has become a stable diet of documentaries and of epidemiology case-studies.
New Zealand and the UK have different population densities, different volumes of international visitors, dissimilar use of crowded public transport, different air quality and seasons. These factors will have been a significant in our rather different Covid19 death rates. But the environmental benefits we enjoy in terms of limiting Covid19s spread are of no help limiting the societal and economic consequences of the lockdown. Indeed, the New Zealand lockdown is expected to cause proportionally more economic damage than the UK, with the IMF observing:
New International Monetary Fund projections show the depth of pain New Zealand’s economy will feel due to the coronavirus, forecasting a contraction on 7.2 per cent this year.
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The IMF believes New Zealand will see the biggest fall outside of Europe, except for Venezuela, an economy already in freefall.
On that basis we should expect an EMR profile similar to, or possibly worse than what is occurring in the UK. New Zealand’s population is 7.2% of that of the UK and where the UK is currently experiencing 3303 excess, non-Covid19 deaths each week, New Zealand can proportionally expect to be experiencing 237 excess, non-Covid19 deaths each week. This is simplistic analysis, and there are factors that could suppress or exacerbate this number, but one thing is clear: the number of non-Covid19 deaths in New Zealand will be many orders of magnitude greater than the number who will die of the disease.
At a political level we have seen this government late to apply a brute-force lockdown, then extending it so as appear ‘strong’. This ill-founded strategy will without doubt be killing New Zealanders. A Royal Commission of Enquiry is desperately needed to assess the basis on which critical decisions were made, and to recommend how to prevent another government-led tragedy being visited upon current and future generations.
Air New Zealand staff are “absolutely devastated” by news the airline will cut more than 1300 jobs across all routes it operates, a union says. …
One E tū cabin crew member, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were “absolutely devastated.”
“Having seen first-hand the work done by our union members, and still having this result, is crushing. Air New Zealand values its staff less than its profit and shareholders, which so sad to see unfold.”
What part of of a 90% revenue drop can’t they understand?
Its insane to be complaining about Air NZ valuing its profit and shareholders more.
There is no profit. Even with these staff cuts Air NZ is making a loss in the hundreds of millions.
Shareholders have had the value of their shares drop by 67% or so – from $3 to just over $1. Also they will not be getting any dividends for probably years to come.
Air NZ has burnt through most or all of its cash reserves. It will be literally unable to pay its bills if it doesn’t reduce the number of staff it has. Even the Govt loan of $900 million only gets you so far.
Air NZ spent $2.4 billion in the last six months of 2019. Their six monthly revenue is now probably $300 million so they run out of money in weeks, not months unless they cut staff numbers.
Apart from the fiscal issues, it is also an insanity to have the union insist staff be kept on as employees when there is literally no work for them. There are no international flights and domestic flights are minimal.
Don’t get me wrong. It is devastating for so many great Air NZ employees who are losing their jobs. But to blame Air New Zealand for making decisions that keep it solvent is stupid. Air New Zealand would actually go bankrupt if it doesn’t reduce costs to match revenue.
The Taxpayers’ Union sat down with Todd Muller for a podcast interview just a few days before he announced his leadership bid. He described himself as “broadly socially conservative, and from an economic perspective reasonably liberal”, and discussed his upbringing, career, and the political challenges of bridging the urban-rural divide.
Prior to the NewHub poll which lead to Todd Muller making the sucessful challenge for the National Party Leadership, the Taxpayers’ Union’s Islay Aitchison sat down with Todd to learn about his political philosophy, goals and background as part of the Union’s MP’s in Depth podcast interview series.
New Deputy Leader Nikki Kaye is one of National’s most electable politicians.
She beat Jacinda twice in Auckland Central. There is no other MP who could have won that seat for National in 2008 and held it against Jacinda in 2011 and 2014. Jacinda went off to Mt Albert rather than risk losing to Nikki again in 2017.
Nikki has an enormous work ethic. As an electorate MP she is constantly fighting for her constituents. She takes special pride in her two islands – Waiheke and Great Barrier, and even fought the Auckland Council over keeping the recycling contract for Waiheke with a local company, even though that company was run by the husband of the Green MP trying to take the seat off her. She is hugely ethical.
The Muller/Kaye team is very well balanced in the best traditions of National being a broad church.
Nikki is urban, Todd is rural
Nikki is socially liberal, Todd is socially conservative
Nikki is Generation Y and Todd is Generation X
Nikki is of course female and Todd male
So the choice in September will be between Jacinda Ardern and Kelvin Davis vs Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye. The campaign will basically start next week.
Those who have known Todd Muller for a long time will not be surprised he has become Leader of the National Party. He was talked about as a future leader when he was in his 20s. I even blogged in 2014 that he would be Prime Minister one day, when his candidacy for Bay of Plenty was announced.
Todd, like many Ministers in Labour, was a parliamentary staffer in his 20s. He could have become an MP in his 20s. He was almost literally offered numerous seats in the Waikato Region. Todd had been an extremely popular staffer for the local party, and also a staffer to Jim Bolger.
Bolger was and is incredibly fond of Todd. Todd probably ended up spending more time on the road with Jim than anyone else. I think it would be fair to say he saw Todd as his political protege, so no surprise he endorsed him this week.
But Todd turned them all down. He didn’t want to be someone whose only job had been in politics. He left Wellington and went to work for one of our largest exporters, Zespri.
He had a number of senior roles at Zespri and then took up a role as Chief Executive of Apata, which provides post-harvest services to Zespri. This was a reasonable significant mid sized company with around $30 million turnover. So Todd knows what it means to be in business, to have to provide good services to clients so you can pay the bills. To have positive cashflow. To lead a team.
After a spell as CEO of Apata he was hired by Fonterra and shot up the ranks to become a member of the Executive Team reporting to the CEO. He was reportedly on an $800,000 salary there and took a huge paycut to become an MP.
This is what he brings to the leadership. An extensive background and understanding of business that is lacking in Government. And not just any sector of business but the primary industries sector. Our two major export earners have been agriculture and tourism. Tourism is dead for at least a couple of years, so our export earnings are more reliant that ever before on our primary industries.
I’ve personally known Todd for around 25 years, from when he was President of the Waikato Students Union. Waikato is a pretty lefty campus so it is quite an achievement for a then member of the Young Nationals to be elected President.
Todd was on the Young Nationals Executive with me and as you would expect in the early 90s there was quite a battle between the drys and the wets on economic policy. Todd was always the moderate voice in the middle, so we nicknamed him “Moistie – a little bit dry and a little bit wet” 🙂
Taking over the leadership four months before an election with a 30% deficit in the polls is daunting. His challenge is to connect with New Zealanders and convince them that a Government led by him will be better at providing jobs to New Zealanders than the incumbent Government.
I first met Paula Bennett around 20 years ago when she was Murray McCully’s Electorate Agent. I think it is fair to say that working for Murray takes a special form of endurance and talent. Murray does not tolerate fools, and the fact Paula worked for him says something.
Paula became a List MP in 2005 and in 2008 cracked Labour’s hold on West Auckland and won Waitakere off them. She is probably the best known Westie MP. What I love about Paula is she is so authentically herself.
She was one of National’s best performing Ministers, seeing through welfare reforms that saw a huge decrease in welfare dependency. Her office had some of the best staff around, and her office parties were quite legendary. Paula’s sense of humour was awesome.
When Bill English became PM, she became his Deputy PM and it is a shame she only had a year in the role. I ended up attending a couple of CEO meetings with her and she was one of the few MPs who could take questions over pretty much all of Government. She made a good team with Bill, and I think if they had carried on in 2017 they would have made a real difference with their social investment programme of early interventions.
Paula’s tenure as Deputy Leader of National has finished but I think we should consider how remarkable it is that someone who was a solo mother at age 17 should become the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand. Can’t think of a better example of National’s values in promoting equality of opportunity.
Simon is a good mate of mine. I’ve known him since he was in Young Nationals and used to stay at his place when I was visiting Tauranga. His wife Natalie is one of life’s great people, and they have a great family. He has a great sense of humour, and as is often the case the public don’t get to see the person behind the politician.
Being Opposition Leader in a Government’s first term is tough, yet despite that just three months ago Simon had National polling ahead of Labour and well enough to be able to form Government.
By contrast in February 2002 National was 16% behind Labour and in February 2011 Labour was 18% behind National.
His first six months of leadership saw National outpoll Labour and gain real momentum. Then Jami-Lee Ross went rogue and those gains dropped away. But Simon recovered and in early 2019 National was again competitive.
Then we had the terrible Mosque massacre and the PM’s excellent response to that saw National drop well behind Labour again. But then once again as that faded, National recovered and led Labour in every One News Colmar Brunton poll from June 2019 to February 2020.
But once again events intervened and Simon became a casualty of Covid-19.
This is not to say he has not made errors along the way. Of course he has, as does every opposition leader. But I do think he should get credit for his quite remarkable job of keeping National competitive with Labour for the first two and a half years of opposition.
My hope was Simon would become New Zealand’s first Maori Prime Minister, but it has not happened. I hope Simon enjoys more time with Natalie and the kids as he decides what to do next.
The National Party caucus that will vote on the leadership has just started.
The caucus sets its own rules, but based on previous leadership elections the likely procedure will be:
The Chief Whip takes the Chair and calls for nominations
Both candidates speak (5 minutes each)
The Whips (Barbara Kuriger, Matt Doocey and Tim Van de Molen distribute ballots papers and collect them up.
If there are only two candidates (as seems likely) then there is only one ballot – you need 28 out of 55 votes.
The Junior Whips (with the Party President in attendance) count the votes and then inform the Chief Whip.
The Chief Whip informs the candidates of the result and then the caucus.
If there is also a ballot for Deputy Leader (and there might not be) the same process is followed.
The result will be announced to the media by the Chief Whip accompanied by the Leader, the Deputy Leader and the Party President
The Party Board will ratify the election (if there is a change) upon which the Leader goes from being the leader of the parliamentary section to the leader of the party. This is routine, and there is never any chance of non-ratification.
I’ll of course blog the result so long as it is before 1.45 pm (I have an appointment from 1.45 to 2.45).
Let’s give the Government the benefit of the doubt. In fact, the benefit of all the many doubts.
Let us agree that the Government relied upon cogent expert advice to reach the well-reasoned decision to suddenly shutdown the country in order to prevent a massive loss of life.
Let us assume that the Government’s Alert Levels were both rational and reasonably applied, with good justification for each and every exception.
Let us accept that both the complete shutdown of our economy and suspension of our personal liabilities was entirely lawful, and that its designation of essential and non-essential services were clear and explicable.
Let us hope that the Government’s drastic action to save all our lives was worth the financial carnage and personal damage that will result, and that the resulting loss of wealth, health and life expectancy that will inevitably follow the coming economic slowdown.
And finally, let us acknowledge that we understood the sacrifices imposed on us by the Government to “eliminate” Covid-19 from New Zealand actually never meant “eradicate”, and that even after victory was declared we recognised the virus will remain among us, albeit at a low but menacing level.
So our team of 5 million can now celebrate our success and a good job well done. While the virus continues to cause significant loss of life and economic damage around the world, all New Zealanders can breath a sigh of relief that we have kept the worst from our shores.
We can now open our economy and begin to return to work, albeit with social distancing. We can socialise again, albeit initially in small numbers. In short, we can return to a new normal and watch the virus ravage other countries from the safety of our national bubble. This Government wants us to know that it cared about us regardless of the cost and merely asked us that we “be kind” to each other in return.
But what next?
For those old enough to remember, we are now like the main character in the 1976 film, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, played by a pre-famous John Travolta. For those a little younger, we are like the unpleasant “Bubble Boy” character featured in Seinfeld. For those younger still, we are like the Jake Gyllenhaal character in the 2001 film of the same name.
All three suffered from an absence of natural immunity so had to be protected from the outside world in a germ-free environment. (The technical term is severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a hereditary disease which dramatically weakens the immune system).
For fear of the fatal virus, New Zealand has now voluntarily retreated into such a bubble. But while we are relieved to have escaped the worst of the virus for now, how long must be hide in fear of becoming infected by the unsanitary world outside?
Obviously we must remain isolated until an effective treatment is identified. Chloroquine anyone? Or better yet, we must isolate until an effective vaccine is developed and becomes available and is administered to enough of the population to reach the required level of artificial herd immunity. And obviously then we must develop a policy on how to deal with the stubborn anti-vaxers?
But no one knows how long that may take, or even if such a treatment or vaccine is ever possible.
It accurately describes the New Zealand approach as “based on the presumption that the virus can be eliminated via a two-pronged strategy: stop importation at borders and ports of entry and reduce domestic outbreaks by stringent containment procedures.”
It continues:
“The public messaging accompanying the elimination model is for absolute safety to avoid exposure at all costs. Acquired immunity is thwarted, and an effective vaccine features prominently as the end-game.”
This approach is contrasted with the approach of Sweden (and a few other countries) in which the virus is accepted as inescapable so is allowed to spread through the population at a slower rate to ensure the medical services are kept busy but not overwhelmed. Rather than being callous, this approach is justified as:
“leading to progressively greater levels of acquired immunity. Since the virus cannot be indefinitely evaded, it is accommodated and gently accepted. It was initially slowing then ultimately halting the spread through herd immunity.”
The rationale is that, once herd immunity is achieved among that population, normal life can resume again. Therefore the different responses raise the crucial question:
Is exposure to be ubiquitously feared and avoided or accepted and even welcomed as a necessary protective measure?
The New Zealand Government has plumped for fear and avoidance – but that response leaves us trapped in our bubble.
From 1945 to 1984 New Zealand lived in another kind of bubble, in almost splendid isolation from the outside world. For better or worse we closed ourselves off to protect our ever weakening economy and idiosyncratic way of life. But eventually we grew tired of this isolation and instead reoriented ourselves to face the world to a remarkable degree – from one extreme to the other.
But absent an effective treatment or available vaccine, we have now chosen to seal ourselves off again indefinitely.
Even if the domestic economy recovers, the ongoing price for that international isolation will be high – virtually nil incoming tourism, risk of infection and then lengthy quarantines for all travellers abroad, permanent distancing from friends, relatives and business contacts throughout the rest of the world. Given the highly contagious nature of this particular virus, only eternal vigilance will protect our bubble. So as the rest of the world begins to recover and trade and travel again, we will become a vulnerable curiosity. If so, then the Government should honestly tell us. If not, then it should explain the long-term exit strategy that does not assume an effective vaccine.
Because eventually our vigilance will falter or our patience will desert us. Or simply the financial and practical cost of watching the world carry on without us will become too high. In either case our bubble will burst and the virus will re-enter to find a population with no immunity – and we will then face up to the unpalatable reality and belatedly expose us to the epidemic. And only then can achieve the herd immunity necessary to rejoin the rest of the world.
A great deal has been made of the return to school and how safe it is being made for the children. The Ministry of Education has made statements about sending hand sanitiser out to schools, and to be fair, they have done so. My wife teaches 24x Year 2 children (6 year olds) and attached is a photo of what her school received, 1 per class. It is a 60ml container (the normal pocket/purse containers are 50ml). Some classes are up to 30 children, and because the maths is easy I’ll point out that is 2ml per child – once.
My wife has been told that once this runs out she can just buy some herself. Generously they’ve said that this can be from the class budget, but that means instead of maths, art or other learning based resources that might otherwise have come out of that budget.
It is also disappointing to see that they have provided a hand sanitiser that is made in Taiwan when there is definitely locally made product available – in sufficient quantities. Although admittedly the alcohol types of sanitiser are generally recognised to be more effective, there are also very good locally made water based alternates available which would be a far more suitable option – particularly for the junior classes. It is a risk vs safety balancing act.
Once again I think we are seeing a Government department broadcasting it’s actions so that it looks like it is doing the right thing but the reality is completely lacking substance.
Part 1 of this series looked at the widespread complacency that was found in not just the Trump White House but with his esteemed medical advisor, the largely hostile MSM and various politicians in New York State and City. Today I will look at China’s role in the origin and spread of the virus. I had intended to cover Taiwan in this post but there is too much juicy material on China that I have decided to do a 4th post of the countries that have exhibited world’s best practice in response to Covid19 and Taiwan is right up there.
Nobody outside of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda office doubts that the Coronavirus or COVID19 originated in Wuhan, Hubai Province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While there is still debate in the West as to the precise beginning of the virus, it is clear this strain of the flu originated from bats. In the early stages of the pandemic, the CCP assured the world that the origin of the virus was a wet market in downtown Wuhan, so called because of the widespread sale of live animals killed on site at the time of sale thus creating blood, animal fluids and water for clean-up. A feature of Chinese wet markets is a bewildering array of exotic and even rare, endangered species that the Chinese have a penchant for eating such as various kinds of birds, mammals like the protected pangolin (a scaly large ant eater like animal) and of course various varieties of bats. The problem of incubated viruses in bats and other animals had been quite well studied because they were the source of the previous outbreaks of infectious diseases tracked to origins in China such as SARS, MERS and the swine flu (H1N1). These previous outbreaks established that the Chinese have prior form with animal borne viruses that jump to humans causing flu outbreaks that are hard to control and begin with no known cure or vaccine.
Let us now dive a little deeper into other clues as to the true source of the virus. Two seminal pieces on the origins of the virus were published by Jim Geraghty of National Review: first in an article entitled “The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s Covid-19 Lies” published on 23 March 2020 and then “The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs” published on 3 April. I will be summarizing Jim’s timeline as the material is so important and consequential to this issue as to warrant it being retold in some detail – I just wanted to be clear on attribution. Some of the material also sources from the research of former China based documentary filmmaker Matthew Tye who published his research in a You Tube short documentary entitled “I Found the Source of the Coronavirus” on 1 April 2020.
TIMELINE OF CRUCIAL EVENTS
This timeline begins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a Level 4 research lab. Level 4 is the highest designation of any research lab and they deal in the most highly infectious and dangerous diseases requiring the strictest of staff PPE protocols and on site security of stored material. The story begins with Dr. Shi Zhengli, lead researcher at the WIV who is famous for her bat studies so much that she was nicknamed Batwoman. 2 years ago she had published two articles demonstrating how bats can transmit coronaviruses to humans. She tested over 200 local villagers in southern China and found high susceptibility for humans to become infected from local bats.
19th November 2019
WIV posts a job opening seeking scientists to research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats to work with Dr Zhengli.
1st December
Date of so called patient zero or the first identified patient in Wuhan with a corona type virus according to a study in the esteemed British medical journal Lancet and 5 days later his wife was admitted to intensive care in hospital – she had never had any contact with the Seafood Market.
21st December
Wuhan doctors notice a cluster of pneumonia like infected patients and eight Wuhan doctors publish their findings that were posted on the Chinese CDC’s website.
24th December
A new job posting at the WIV is phrased in such a way that states in essence ‘we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus and we need to hire people to come and help deal with it’ as the Lab appears to have made a discovery of human transmissibility of this new virus
Huang Yan Ling was the original researcher and early contractor of the virus and all her biographical material and photos were removed from the WIV website. No one has seen her despite government assurances that she is alive and well with no proof. There has been a massive search for her on the Chinese internet with most articles getting quickly scrubbed by Chinese government censors.
25th December (not a public holiday in China)
Local Wuhan doctor Zhong Nashan gives notice of the outbreak to local schools after observing mushrooming infections amongst medical staff.
30th December
A local ophthalmologist (eye doctor) Dr Li Wenliang sends an alert via a medical intranet to local doctors about the spread of a SARS like pneumonia respiratory infection.
31st December
1 – The provincial government health agency, the Wuhan Municipal Health Department (WMHD), declares in one of its regular public health briefings that there is no human to human transmission of the virus despite evidence to the contrary. Please note that all links to the WMHD’s website for all of its briefings and virus related material that were published by Jim Geraghty and others are now broken.
2 – China officially informs the World Health Organisation (WHO) of an unknown new pneumonia disease infecting 44 patients in Wuhan.
3 – Dr Tao Lina, a public-health expert and former official with Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, tells the South China Morning Post, “I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase” and she repeats the party line that the Wuhan seafood market is the source of the virus.
1st January 2020
1 – Dr Wenliang is summoned to the local police HQ and accused of spreading rumours and 2 days later, he signs a ‘confession’ of his misdemeanor. Seven other people are arrested on similar charges over dissemination of virus related information and likely are dealt with the same as Dr Wenliang.
3 – The New York Times (NYT) uses cell phone tracking data to estimate that 120,000 leave Wuhan that day and note that there are 21 international destinations where there are non-stop flights from Wuhan.
2nd January
1 – Another Lancet study confirms spread of the virus by people not associated with any Wuhan markets
2 – WIV announce they have also mapped the genome of the virus, but the Chinese government keeps that news under wraps for a whole week.
3rd January
The Chinese government’s coverup of the virus begins with 2 crucial actions:
1 – China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them (see the Straits Times link above)
2 – Of even more significance in terms of what would later be promulgated to the world, the WMHD released another statement, repeating, “As of now, preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections.”
3 – ONE WHOLE MONTH after the first outbreaks in Wuhan, Robert Redfield, Director of the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is first informed of the outbreak via Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar
5th January
Hospital emergency departments in Wuhan are being inundated and by January 10th, the respiratory wards are full of patients all suffering from the same virus. Staff are not issued protective equipment until 17th January and on 20th January, a local reporter publishes his findings and alerts local schools and yet simultaneously the WMHD advise updated numbers but repeat the lie, “preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections”. The lie was duly reported the next day by Dr Wang Lingfa, an emerging infectious diseases expert at Duke Global Health Institute and reported on in the New York Times‘ first article on the virus. Even then, Dr Lingfa was expressing frustration at the lack of real information and the fact that his Chinese colleagues in Wuhan were being silenced.
6th January
CDC advises of Alert Level 1 (lowest of 3) and offers to send a team to China to help. The Chinese government DECLINE THE OFFER thus enabling them to continue to lie and dissemble about the true nature of the virus, its infectiousness and how lethal it can be.
2 – In probably one of the most consequential acts of contributory negligence in this entire affair, the WHO issues a statement effectively parroting the CCP’s line of no community spread with this announcement, “Preliminary identification of a novel virus in a short period of time is a notable achievement and demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks . . . “. The WHO makes no mention of the infectiousness, the rapid spread, the deaths and does little more than kiss up to China by praising its efforts. No travel bans were suggested indeed the WHO specifically counsel AGAINST any such bans all the while and tens of thousands of asymptomatic residents of Wuhan pour out of the city across China and to the 21 international destinations that are linked by non-stop flights from Wuhan!
10th January
1 – Dr Wenliang contracts the virus after unwittingly treating a patient who was infected and 2 days later, he was admitted to intensive care. At the same time that Chinese doctors are finding and reporting increasing cases, the NYT duly reports the WMHD line of no human to human transmission and repeat the lies about the virus stemming from the wet market even as the crisis mounts inside Wuhan’s hospitals as the first death is officially announced. The WMHD report the same drivel the next day claiming there had been no new cases since January 3.
2 – The political leaders of the Wuhan Province begin four days of meetings and the virus is never mentioned once.
13th January
Thai authorities report the first foreign case of the virus in a 61 year old women who had flown from Wuhan to Bangkok and fell ill on January 5th. The pervasiveness of official Chinese pronouncements is evident in the Thai doctors who maintain that the virus was caught at a wet market.
The Japanese Health Ministry announce the first Japanese case and crucially, publicly state the patient had no contact with wet markets. This forces the WMHD to slightly modify its latest statement still denying human to human spread but not absolutely ruling it out and classifying the risk of spread as low. “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” The very next day they backtrack, likely under pressure from Beijing and say, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
17th January
The CDC announces medical checks on any passengers originating from Wuhan arriving at San Francisco, LAX and JFK (New York) airports. The WMHD daily announcement of numbers still denies community spreading.
18th January
President Trump is first advised of the virus. Wuhan City authorities allow a huge city-wide Lunar New Year banquet of some 40,000 residents to go ahead with no announcement of the virus or encouragements of contact caution despite the local doctors knowing how infectious the virus is.
2 – The WHO updates its statement, declaring, “Not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, the clinical features of the disease, the extent to which it has spread, or its source, which remains unknown”, completely and utterly contradicting the evidence on the ground.
20th January
The WMHD maintains its fiction of no community transmission outside of those infected at markets for the last time as the first case outside of Wuhan but still in China is announced in Guangdong province. Local Wuhan media finally mention the virus almost TWO MONTHS after the first case of human to human infection of people not associated with either the labs or markets is known about.
21st January
The CDC announces the first US case in Snohomish County in WA. By now over 1 million people have left Wuhan for traditional Chinese New Year celebrations across China and the world.
22nd January
WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus parrots the CCP’s lies and continued to praise China’s handling of the outbreak. “I was very impressed by the detail and depth of China’s presentation. I also appreciate the cooperation of China’s Minister of Health, who I have spoken with directly during the last few days and weeks. His leadership and the intervention of President Xi and Premier Li have been invaluable, and all the measures they have taken to respond to the outbreak.”
23rd January
1 – Wuhan authorities finally begin the first stages of an eventually strict lockdown many weeks after willingly allowing millions of potentially infected residents to travel all around China and the world and weeks after knowing that the virus was spreading communally and spreading fast and with a mortality rate approaching that of SARS.
2 – Vietnam and Singapore announce cases and the next day, 5 new cases in the US are announced.
1st February
Dr Wenliang tests positive for coronavirus.
6th February
Local Wuhan research scientist Professor Xiao Botao knew researchers at the WIV who were infected and all staff at the lab who came down with the virus and he suspected that it came from bats and stated the source of the virus was the lab about 300 yards from the Wuhan Seafood Market and said it was not a natural infection. He gave a detailed timeline AND (significantly) said that researchers were splashed with urine and blood samples known to be from coronavirus infected bats. (see Matthew Tye YT link)
7th February
Dr Wenliang succumbs to the virus and dies. As one of the first to try to announce to the world the dangers of coronavirus, he dies an unsung hero, silenced by a secretive and repressive regime.
15th February
The WIV denies that Huang Yanling was patient zero addressing “fake information” as to her whereabouts and yet she has disappeared from public view.
17th February
Zhen Shuji, a Hong Kong correspondent from the French public-radio service Radio France Internationale, reported: “when a reporter from the Beijing News of the Mainland asked the institute [WIV] for rumors about patient zero, the institute first denied that there was a researcher Huang Yanling, but after learning that the name of the person on the Internet did exist, acknowledged that the person had worked at the firm but has now left the office and is unaccounted for.” Also, French media reports backing up Prof. Batao’s claim of the bat urine and blood being splashed around the lab.
Later in February
Prof. Botao posted a research paper onto ResearchGate.net, “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus.” He is listed as one author, along with Lei Xiao from Tian You Hospital, who is affiliated with the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. Dr Xiao confirmed that the type of bat being researched was not native to Wuhan coming from a region some 900 kms to the south. In his study he said “they were only 280 meters from the seafood market. The WMHD is also adjacent to the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic”. The money quote, “In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”. The paper was removed a short time after it was posted, but archived images of its pages can be found here and here.
13th March
South China Post reports “according to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.”
Geraghty postulates:
“Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being? … But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.”
CHINA’S BEHAVIOUR DURING/SINCE THIS TIMELINE
1 – China’s attempt at global propaganda concerning its role to do with the virus
China’s attempts to avoid blame and deflect attention to other countries has been widespread, global and systemic. Anyone who has any knowledge of Chinese culture or has done business in China (I traveled twice to China in 2011 and 2012 seeking funding for some energy projects and met with a number of high level business people some with the highest, Politburo level of political connections in Shanghai and Beijing) will tell you that saving or preserving face is paramount in Chinese culture. When this is married to a Chinese supreme sense of self-importance, the built in assumption of the superiority of its culture, political system and way of approaching the world, it is easy to see why China is doing everything in its power to deny responsibility for originating or spreading Covid19.
The CCP has instructed all ambassadors and expat Chinese Nationals of reasonable influence in any country to officially deny any culpability in originating or spreading the virus and to concentrate on trying to propagate the line that China heroically defeated the virus internally due to swift and bold action and that if anyone is to blame, it is the nefarious US military who allowed operatives in China to release the virus it incubated in US military virology labs. This line was most noticeably peddled on Twitter by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhioa Lijian. Chinese government representatives have been extremely aggressive and forthright in media across the world trying to defend China’s conduct in an orchestrated global campaign of misinformation designed to deflect blame.
2 – Publishing highly suspect statistics
As the numbers of infected people and deaths began to mushroom first in Europe then the US hotspot like New York, the official numbers coming out of China seemed to back the CCP’s contention that they had brought the virus under control. But as time went on, the official numbers of infections and deaths from the world’s most populous country began to look increasingly suspect and only those intent on believing as gospel truth anything said by the CCP actually believe these figures to be real. Skepticism concerning China’s true figures is not the preserve of the paranoid anti-Chinese few but has become a mainstream belief amongst well regarded and less partisan figures in Washington.
Over time, anecdotal evidence began to emerge as to the likely true numbers. It was reported that the crematoriums in Wuhan were working full time day and night for over three weeks. Since the Chinese National Health Authority ruled that all coronavirus deceased must be cremated from 1 February, a crematorium worker claimed that the 49 crematoriums in Wuhan had been burning bodies 24/7 for 17 days and at 100 bodies per day that could mean 50,000 or more dead even factoring out deaths due to other causes. When the work of cremation was over, Wuhan authorities ordered families to come to the funeral homes to collect their loved ones ashes over multiple days. Some funeral homes reported 3,500 urns stacked up in a process of collection that took many hours. Add up this number of urns across multiple funeral homes and you have yet another data point that indicates the real death toll is likely more than ten times the official death toll
Various sources confirmed a CCP order for 1 million body bags, another pointer to a substantially higher national death toll than the official number of 4,634.
All this anecdotal reporting points to a more likely death toll in just Wuhan in the many tens of thousands rather than the official death toll of around 3,000. This was revised upwards on May 7 to 4,512 for the whole of Hubei Province of which Wuhan is the capital. This revision highlights how bogus the reporting of Covid deaths out of China has become. If the reported figures of total Chinese deaths nationwide of 4,637 is correct, that means that only 125 fatalities occurred amongst the remaining 1.38 billion people in the rest of China outside Hubei Province!
3 – Banning/disappearing of people
The CCP have continued and accelerated their long standing practice of harassing, banning, arresting, and incarcerating anyone who speaks out against the regime. Party functionaries had to move into overdrive to handle all the various medical staff and citizen journalists who began to speak out about the coronavirus and these activists have all suffered various forms of repression at the hands of Chinese authorities.
Three Chinese internet activists have disappeared and are believed to have been detained by police. They have reportedly been charged with preserving articles that were removed by China’s online censors.
Beijing police formally arrested retired professor Chen Zhaozhi for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” in a speech about the pandemic. The former Beijing University of Science and Technology professor had posted comments online, including that “Wuhan pneumonia is not a Chinese virus but Chinese Communist Party virus”.
Frances Eve, deputy director of research at the Hong Kong-based watchdog group, Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said of the arrested dissidents, “Everyone who has disappeared is at very high risk of torture – most likely to try to force them to confess that their activities were criminal or harmful to society. Then, as we’ve seen in previous cases, people who have been disappeared will be brought out and forced to confess on Chinese state television”.
Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan, has also been missing since February. “I’m scared, I have the virus in front of me and behind me China’s law enforcement”, Chen said in a video dated January 30. “But I will keep my spirits up, as long as I’m alive and in this city I will continue my reports. I’m not afraid of dying. Why should I be afraid of you, Communist Party?”
4 – China’s global acquisition of PPE then selling it back to desperate countries
One of the most perverse and devious actions of the many undertaken by the CCP was the instructions given to many thousands of Chinese owned companies and well-heeled expat Chinese citizens located in 1st world countries to troll local websites and medical equipment companies ordering as much in the way of masks, gloves, hazmat suits, hand sanitizer, ventilators and emergency equipment as possible and to have them all shipped back to China. It is estimated that China stockpiled almost 2 BILLION (yes that’s with a B) surgical masks.
China of course kept its massive stockpile a secret and managed to elicit sympathy in the early days of the pandemic from Sinophile countries who, in a fit of misguided altruism, sent supplies of emergency equipment to China only to have the Chinese sell back some of the same equipment to the very countries like Canada, Spain and Italy who had so generously donated to China in the early days of the virus’ spread. It’s hard to find a modern equivalent of such venal and duplicitous conduct.
To add further insult to injury, even Chinese medical supplies paid for by desperate European countries swamped by exploding virus numbers, a number of countries received such poor quality or faulty equipment that they had to send the equipment back as unusable. France, Spain and the Netherlands were the worst affected by this, but several other countries were similarly affected.
5 – China’s subversion of the WHO
Some of this was covered in the timeline earlier with the most obsequious actions previously linked to. It is instructive to understand the full scope of the WHO’s subservience to China’s interests when one examines the history of the current WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Having been a senior Minister in the Ethiopian government, Tedros (as he known) not only aggressively pushed for Chinese Belt and Road infrastructure projects in his country such as the modernisation of Addis Abba’s airport and the expansion of Ethiopian airlines into Africa’s fourth largest airline, Tedros was happy to turn a blind eye to any Chinese cover up of a botched response to a health emergency because, as Minister of Health in Ethiopia, he had presided over a cover up of a cholera outbreak that resulted in a catastrophic local epidemic that needlessly took thousands of lives.
China’s subversion of the WHO is doubly dangerous as it has used its influence to keep Taiwan not only out of the WHO but unable to attend vital meetings as an observer. Furthermore, early warnings from Taiwan’s excellent epidemiologists about the emergence of a new potentially virulent pneumonia type virus, sent to the WHO as early as December, were dutifully ignored. The extent to which China has corrupted the WHO in its favour and against Taiwan is perfectly demonstrated in this interview between a Hong Kong journalist and WHO Senior Advisor (and former Assistant Director General) Canadian Bruce Aylward specifically about the virus and the differing Chinese and Taiwanese responses. China is lauded and praised and when Taiwan’s crucial attempted contribution is raised, Aylward first ignores the question and again praises China and then when pressed on Taiwan, simply hangs up!
The WHO’s complicity in Chinese misinformation and coverup over Covid19 led the Trump Administration to put a freeze on the $800 million funding the US gives annually to the WHO pending an investigation as to the extent of Chinese influence on its inaccurate disseminations and delays in announcing a formal global pandemic. On May 18, Trump articulated the case of his Administration and its decision to suspend the funding with a devastating breakdown of the WHO’s negligence putting it on 30 days’ notice to prove that it has made changes that negate Chinese’s out sized influence (it only contributed $80 million last year) or the suspension will be permanent and the US may exit the WHO altogether.
6 – Aggressive tactics against perceived adversaries in the West
As part and parcel of China’s attempts at intimidation of foreign countries who are calling them out for its disastrous handling of the virus, China uses every bullying tactic in its tool chest. For those countries up to their neck in Belt and Road infrastructure debt to China, China uses debt default as a weapon of eventual control of key assets by requiring Chinese majority ownership of local companies or agencies controlling and running the projects built exclusively with Chinese labour and by Chinese companies. The threat of seizure of ports, pipelines, motorways, and airports is a tactic China uses to buy the silence of the mostly 3rd world countries that have gotten into bed with Belt and Road. China has made Belt and Road inroads into even first world countries such as Italy.
In the case of the US, China has ramped up aggressive rhetoric and has gone so far as to threaten travel bans and sanctions on key US legislators who have been the most vocal critics of China in general and have called specifically for investigations into China’s negligence over the coronavirus, sponsored proposed legislation rescinding China’s sovereign immunity from lawsuits, supported any legislative repatriation of critical US companies medical equipment and pharmaceutical production to the US and increased trade sanctions such as the microchip ban on Huawei and other large Chinese electronics and telecommunication companies.
These threats were issued via Chinese government spokespeople in the Global Times, an official CCP organ, “Republicans who have been groundlessly accusing China and inflaming the ‘holding China accountable’ political farce will face severe consequences, sources said, noting that the aftermath will also impact the upcoming November elections, while business and trade between Missouri and China will be further soured”. US Senators Tom Cotton (R – AR), Josh Hawley (R – IA), Marsha Blackburn (R – TN), Martha McSally (R – AZ) and Rick Scott (R – FL) and US House Representatives Dan Crenshaw (R – TX 2nd), Chris Smith (R – NJ 4th ) and Lance Goodan (R – TX 5th), New Jersey State Senator Jim Holzapfel, NJ House Reps Greg McGuckin and John Catalano (both Republicans) and Missouri’s Republican State Attorney General Eric Schmitt (who filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state of Missouri for damages related to Covod19), have all been specifically threatened by China.
Closer to home, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call for a global inquiry into the origins of the virus has been met with swift and stern Chinese rebukes backed more recently with threats to ban exports of meat from certain key Australian abattoirs as well as embargoes and tariffs on Australian barley. China assumes that the threat of a full scale trade war with Australia may intimidate other western nations from supporting such calls. This tactic seems to have backfired with 62 other nations including the UK, Japan, India and Russia also calling for an investigation. This Guardian article explores a number of China’s global attempts at influencing foreign nations to shield China from blame for the spread of the virus
CONCLUSION
With China being New Zealand’s No. 1 trading partner and so much of our GDP dependent on the smooth flow of trade with a giant country like China, it is much easier to not look askance at China’s human rights abuses, its intellectual property theft, its mercantilist trade policies, its increasing regional military aggression, its use of AI to monitor its people and manipulate behaviour via its social credit system but over time, China’s views on the world, on trade, its aggressive expansion into smaller weaker nations via Belt and Road, it is easy for the Fonterras and the Carter Holt Harveys of this world to look the other way and continue to ship milk powder and logs to China. But China has, by its secretive, punishment-driven, repressive society made it extremely difficult to be open with the world (or even internally) about the spread of virulent diseases that source from its weird predilection for exotic animals and by its less than world’s best practice security at labs handling toxic biological agents and when these forces in their culture combine in a perfect storm to allow millions of infected citizens to seed this virus all over the globe, the utter lack of accountability of its communist system means its leaders will never pay the kind of steep domestic political price for this monumental cock up then cover up (because it is a cock up rather than an initial deliberate release of a biological weapon) that would befall any leader of a major first world democracy like Germany, Canada or the UK had the source of this pandemic began on their incompetent watch.
The economic devastation of this pandemic will be the subject of another post but in time, China will pay and pay dearly for its role in this catastrophe. Even with all the favours it can call on and financial manipulation it can and will pull all over the globe, its reputation as an honest fair partner who can be trusted is shattered. The US (and a number of other major western economies) will very quickly draw back to their home countries production of essential medical supplies and equipment and key pharmaceuticals. Over time, corporate America (and SOME but not as many) of their European and Anglophile counterparts, will begin to migrate their supply chains, some back to the home country but others to more friendly jurisdictions like India and less venal and globally threatening places like Vietnam and Indonesia. I don’t know what will happen at a deeper and more granular level in NZ (and other US allies) but the days of China’s almost free reign to corrupt university faculties, infiltrate research institutions, spy on military installations and rob intellectual property blind will be over in the US. The US will implement a post 9/11 revamp of all of its military, academic and industrial intelligence capabilities to shut China out. The sons and daughters of China’s elite will not get student visas with as much ease, the back door ways that China acquired US companies will be abruptly shut down, the Confucius Institutes on campuses will be gradually closed and Chinese academic exchanges will be rigorously scrutinised. When you multiply the supply chain readjustments across many large companies across the globe, add any punitive tariffs the US may now impose and the compulsory repatriation of medical/pharmaceutical production to the cascade of law suits from US States that will rain down on China, they are in for a world of hurt economically.
The Chinese middle class, faced with collapsing income, will not be able to buy as much NZ produce and sadly, the downturn in China will affect NZ far more than the US whose own domestic manufacturing base will be boosted by the changes that will come. Doing this right actually was not that hard. In early January, China could’ve told the WHO and CDC everything and invited the world’s best virologists and epidemiologists to examine the genome sequences and work with China inside China on a vaccine AND China could’ve closed its borders externally so the virus was isolated in Wuhan with strict protocols enacted to keep it there until a vaccine was found. That simple act of consideration and transparency would have saved the world hundreds of thousands of lives and the global economy trillions of dollars in lost activity. Mao’s communism via the forced starvation of the Great Leap Forward in the 1960’s cost upwards of 50 million Chinese lives. The impact of this global pandemic, because of Chinese communism’s hubris and arrogance, is simply incalculable. When media the world over want to exhibit another bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome and somehow blame Trump for America’s misery, this timeline is a reminder as to what REALLY happened.
Science, politics and the media are institutions that rely on a certain culture of contrarianism in order to have value: MPs, researchers and journalists who assume that bureaucrats, established experts and/or the government are always right and always trustworthy are not very useful. We’re currently experiencing a moment of national unity, and this is mostly a good thing, but there’s always a certain amount of conformity and intolerance towards dissent built into nationalist sentiment, so we’re seeing politicians and journalists who critique or question the government come under sustained attack from the government’s supporters and the public. The fiercest backlash has been directed towards Simon Bridges – which I get: I too find him hard to like – but whose job title is, literally, Leader of the Opposition, and the parliamentary press gallery, who’ve dared to ask impertinent and disrespectful questions of the prime minister and her officials.
There are always cranky, conspiratorial anti-government critiques circulating online, and there are always supporters of the government-of-the-day screaming that the media are a fifth column and dissent is treason. But both of these phenomena seem very intense right now. Probably because we’re all stuck stuck at home, and anxious and bored, and watching the livestreamed press conferences and select committees and either feeling patriotic and supportive of the state, or oppressed and tyrannised by it. And media-bashing is every lazy pseudo-intellectual’s favourite pastime (as an aside, it’s been very revealing to see how many of our media and political experts – both self-appointed and those who have advanced degrees in these subjects, comment on them and even teach them at tertiary level – have revealed that they’ve never actually seen a political press conference before, and have no idea how the news is made, or understand why we have an adversarial political system or the rule of law.)
I trust the prime minister a lot more than her critics do. But I also believe that a lot of her cabinet ministers are incompetent, and others are highly unscrupulous, and that this government makes operational and policy blunders on a scale we haven’t seen in our last few decades of technocratic centrism (as I was writing this the news broke that the entire lockdown may have been illegal). And they’re currently making huge decisions based on incomplete information because there is no expert consensus or reliable data available.
So I think there’s value to disrespectful questions and politicised critiques, and even some of the contrarianism, even if a lot of it is misguided or in bad faith, or simply wrong. And I think we need a space for those critiques in our mainstream politics and media instead of shouting it down and leaving it to circulate on the shadowy fringes of the internet. Because the experts are not always right and the government is not always trustworthy. If contrarians warn about the danger to our freedom in this moment, and it makes us more vigilant and we remain free, does it mean the contrarians were wrong?
There’s been a lot of articles I’ve seen very critical of the code. I’m not a coder so can’t judge.
It has become commonplace among financial forecasters, the Treasury, climate scientists, and epidemiologists to cite the output of mathematical models as if it was “evidence”. The proper use of models is to test theories of complex systems against facts. If instead we are going to use models for forecasting and policy, we must be able to check that they are accurate, particularly when they drive life and death decisions. This has not been the case with the Imperial College model.
This is key. A model is merely a set of assumptions. When the Government says our decisions have saved 140,000 jobs all they mean is that is what a model projects. How often do we check back against what really happened?
It is not as if Ferguson’s track record is good. In 2001 the Imperial College team’s modelling led to the culling of 6 million livestock and was criticised by epidemiological experts as severely flawed. In various years in the early 2000s Ferguson predicted up to 136,000 deaths from mad cow disease, 200 million from bird flu and 65,000 from swine flu. The final death toll in each case was in the hundreds.
A history of projecting huge death tolls.
In this case, when a Swedish team applied the modified model that Imperial put into the public domain to Sweden’s strategy, it predicted 40,000 deaths by May 1 – 15 times too high.
Sweden is a fascinating country to study. At this stage their death rate is relatively high compared to other European countries (yet lower than UK France, Spain, Italy and Belgium) but their decision not to introduce a lockdown allows us to see how accurate the model (based on no lockdown) is. Their death toll is 1/15th of what the model projected.
That doesn’t mean the Swedish approach is the best one. But it does mean we should remember models are often wrong.
The Great Lockdown of 2020 is foisting on New Zealand a new economic consensus. Unemployment and poverty threaten a chilling redefinition of our national story and that of countries across the world.
The unity Jacinda Ardern has inspired to defeat COVID-19 will be tested as debate rages on how such threats to social cohesion are averted. How will the livelihoods of those without a job be rebuilt? How will workplaces be configured? What is the future of public health? How much of our national income will be spent by Government rather than consumers? What will the prospects be of those born into an era knowing unemployment and limited opportunities?
In a matter of weeks markets have been replaced as the distributors of capital. Most businesses will be financed by government or a financial system supported more heavily than ever by central banks. This is not a reversion to the nationalisation of the post-war years, but a regeneration of state coercion in economies unseen since that time, and embraced by conservative and left-wing governments across the world. Viewed from afar, New Zealand stands out for its response, but it also stands out for the level to which the state is prepared to intervene.
In New Zealand, 1.6 million New Zealanders have accessed the Government’s wage subsidy as double-digit unemployment is forecast for this year and an economic contraction of 7.2%. A substantial portion of the economy is effectively owned by the Government with public debt being estimated by some economists to reach 50% of GDP by the time the crisis is over.
A society defined by kindness cannot be built on one that is jobless and facing down a decade of discontent caused by a lethargic economic recovery.
While much discussion has focused on the lockdown until now, much less attention has been paid to the extent of far-reaching economic restructuring that will take place as a result of last week’s Budget. Grant Robertson’s economic prescription of returning public debt to above 50% of GDP thus begins the era of Robbonomics.
Even prior to the crisis, Labour was laying the groundwork of considerable reform possibly banking on a Labour-Green coalition emerging from the election later this year to drive it. It has substantially increased social spending, sought to reverse Tomorrow’s Schools, rewire the public service, and pledge substantial infrastructure spending. Discussion has ignited around a universal basic income and a ‘Ministry of Works’.
A robust conversation about the economic reality of the lockdown and the pandemic was inevitable. After the longest period of global growth and innovation in history, there was a growing sense of unease across the political divide about its effects. There was, and remains, concern for social dislocation, the state of mental health issues and rates of depression and the full impact of technological change on society and national security beyond the economic efficiencies it yields. Markets once seen as liberators and enablers are now being framed as driving gaps and excess. Not because these institutions have failed, but because advocates of a much larger role for government, who have long felt shut out of this world, are seizing upon the vacuum left by marketeers who have better arguments but who no longer inspire in the way they once did.
At this juncture it would be all too predictable to cry foul at a return to Fortress New Zealand. But this would be to miss a point: Policy settings in New Zealand, regardless, must change.
Election after election, for the past 30 years has produced governments that have largely managed public life rather than led it. They have often prioritised the maintenance of office over comprehensive structural reform. Worse still, proponents of reform – irrespective of their political tribe – have been derided as ideological, zealous and dogmatic. Change can be unsettling and dangerous, but it can also be exciting and positive.
While Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) has provided for greater diversity and inclusion it has not led to more coherent government. MMP for years provided a mechanism by which polarising or extreme politics was diluted through diffuse governing arrangements. The transactional cost of its introduction is that while it bridled power, it also bridled reform on core issues, be it reforming the Resource Management Act or tackling climate change. The way this could be tested however is if a single party majority government emerges at the next election.
As with every pre-reform period in our history, it is now crisis catalysing change. It is in these times that new, often young political figures emerge challenging the status quo and who secure the political support to strike off in a new direction.
The last major reform of the economy, also led by new much younger generation of politicians, utterly revamped public institutions. It was unprecedented and controversial but politics made an impact. Public assets were privatised, our public service was reformed, farm subsidies were slashed, income taxes were cut and the welfare state was redesigned.
Crown debt fell to 20% in the mid 1990s and New Zealand had the highest rate of job creation in the OECD. The dramatic state interventions made by the Savage Labour Government in the 1930s too, were also advanced by politicians with a mission not so much fixated on their own political survival as their own nation’s survival.
Resentful that its main legacy has not been an increased role of the state, but a free market revolution, some in Labour will be determined to rewrite that narrative. Equally risky for the party is that whereas it came to office at the end of the Great Depression it is now in office at the start of the largest downturn since that time. It has possibly the most popular leader in its history and the biggest crisis it must steer the country through in living memory.
National too is challenged by the need to offer a more compelling reason to be in government than simply claiming the mantle of competence. As it considers its leadership, it must also contemplate the optimistic vision of the future it is duty bound to inspiring New Zealanders behind. ‘Economic management’ and ‘stability’ are not beliefs or values, and they do not inspire anyone to get out of bed every day. Nor is the suggestion of having an economic “plan” – something you would not encourage from a party properly versed in the values of enterprise. Leadership is not a slogan, it is a method, action and style of governing that persuades and inspires. It is a failure to inspire behind a story or set of values that has seen National often undersell its attributes as politically nimble and practical.
The preference for risk aversion and stability that has defined New Zealand politics for nearly thirty years, only to end in yet more instability and risk, can be replaced by something bolder as we face our greatest challenge since the Second World War. But offering an alternative economic program is by itself not sufficient. That it works, that it inspires, must be self-evident in its capacity to endure and survive long-term. Markets and the welfare state have been enduring institutions in their own right for the past century. What shapes them is open for debate once again.
I like the label Robbonomics because that is literally what the Government is doing – robbing the next generation of all their savings by borrowing $85,000 per household.
It is astonishing how quickly key foundations of education and society can become twisted or subverted. A genuine proponent of education advocates important foundations; question everything, critique everything, suggest and evaluate counter scenarios (and other “experts”), ask who gains and who loses from particular actions, attack the argument and not the person. Children, youth and indeed all citizens need to apply these principles to current events and what appears to be deep moral confusion.
Everyone dies. It is maybe the least digestible fact of life but the rate of death in every generation is 100%. I complained about this to my mother once and she placated me by saying that it wouldn’t happen to me. I was 8 years old and, at that stage accepted my immortality. In NZ in 2018 33,225 human-beings died. That is a little over 91 people per day. Apart from reporting on road deaths and murders these deaths, by and large, pass unnoticed except for those close enough to attend the funeral.
In 2020 we have suddenly decided, as a society taking part in a global emergency, that these lives are more important than ever before. We have decided this to the extent that we have destroyed significant sections of the economy, drastically restricted human rights, and allowed a very small sector of government to create edicts without due process or challenge.
New Zealand is a tiny country and if we were a US State we would rank approximately 24th by population – making all comparisons of Ardern’s job to that of Trump fatuous at best. Her role is closer akin to a small State governor. We are highly disconnected geographically and uniquely placed to make our own decisions. We are resource rich and relatively well educated. We should be looking at the big health picture and not being dragged into an international bunfight to prove that we can deprive citizens of their rights better than any other for very little relative gain.
As at the 8th of May this year 21 NZers have died from Covid-19. It could be argued that without actions it could be more. You could argue the same if you chose not to have a speed limit enforcement or mental health services for their relevant statistics. If 2020 is reasonably typical we will see around 670 people die from suicide (2.5 men per each woman – and disproportionately Maori). We will see approximately 70 homicide deaths. If this year is typical around 200,000 of us will get influenza (even with the vaccine being widely available) and between 400 and 500 will die either “with” or “because of” this virus.
Around 30% of our premature deaths will involve cancer and many of those will have associations with lack of early detection, alcohol and an unwillingness to seek help. At the other end of life we have thousands of babies born each year with foetal alcohol syndrome; suffering that we could surely ameliorate with the right spending and education for pregnant women.
Bearing in mind that, as indicated in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth” (UN Convention of the Rights of the Child – which NZ is a signatory to). In New Zealand, where we have suddenly decided that every life is of incredible value and yet we ignore this declaration by the United Nations and recently Andrew Little looked uncommonly gleeful when changing the abortion law and telling Kiwis that they did not deserve a say through a referendum. There were 13,282 unborn children who lost their lives in 2018 in our life-valuing nation. It is also more that ironic that in this year’s elections – when we are desperate to save every life – that we are voting on euthanasia.
In terms of suicide alone. A very high credibility US study has concluded that the correlation between unemployment and suicide is that for every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 21 per 100,000 increase in suicides. In New Zealand brilliant mental well-being campaigners like Mike King and Paul Whatuira have struggled to get a sideways (excuse the pun) glance from government to support their wonderful work. Valuing life as we now have chosen to these two men – and others like them – should never have to ask again. We are all touched by suicide (by birth dad’s choice of exit was a shot-gun to the head) – it is time to do ALL that we can.
John Donne was brilliantly right:
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
I miss my parents and so many others. We are right to take a strong stand to value life and be against premature death. What we should now ask of our leaders is that they be consistent and value the risks for all people – physically and mentally – equally. One of the important roles of teachers in a crisis situation is to hear students’ questions and concerns with an open mind and allow them to work their way through things. Squashing this can only lead to conformity for the sake of it and a deep sense of helplessness.
