From Saint to Sinner
Perspective Magazine, February 2022
It was a standard Facebook post: pictures from a small farewell party in London. An evening of dancing, mild drunkenness and high frivolity, with certain guests rolling about on the carpet. Nothing Dionysus and his maenads would object to, but neither would it have shifted Caligula’s needle.
The first likes trickled in from UK friends; even a few hearts were lovingly tossed from those tagged in the post. But by the time the sun rose on the other side of the globe, a certain sanctimony had seeped into the comments. Ah, the dawn chorus from New Zealand – the country to which I was due to return – where the wine had mostly definitely soured.
Not again?!? Should you be travelling? How many tours have you done? asked one snarky friend, who hadn’t been able to leave in years. Gruelling.
Gruelling indeed. A word more accurately reflecting the ordeal I was about to face on arrival in New Zealand: an extended stay in one of the country’s military-managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities. A hard landing perhaps? Ironically, a blessing. On day two of my incarceration, the government suspended all further allocations, making it impossible to enter the country.
Initially, the MIQ system was introduced by Jacinda Ardern’s government in April 2020 as a temporary measure to limit the risk of importing Covid-19. It seemed a sound idea. Shortly after, a secondary market arose that saw profiteers and their army of bots scooping up limited quarantine slots and selling them on at a profit to stranded Kiwis, desperate to get home. It also failed to address the needs of the elderly, the disabled, basically anyone who lacked the lightning-fast reactions needed to grab slots whenever the government saw fit to release them.
Now entering its second year, the system underwent a major redesign in mid-2021. Touted as more equitable and invulnerable to fraudsters, the “improved” online allocation process employed a randomised approach whereby lucky recipients would be picked from a holding pen of hopefuls.
In essence “a lottery of human misery”, MIQ is now the subject of a judicial review filed in the High Court by advocacy group Grounded Kiwis, alleging Ardern’s government acted unreasonably and unlawfully in the design of a cruel system that breaches the Bill of Rights.
They needn’t look further than me for living proof of an unreasonable system. Even before the January suspension, it was an acknowledged impossibility to obtain a slot in MIQ. And yet I’d hit the jackpot three times in six months. If only I were entering a lottery with a prize pool, we’d have been necking Cristal at the London bacchanal.
Not a week later, a story surfaced in the international press telling of a heavily pregnant Kiwi journalist stranded in Afghanistan who, when her repeated appeals for an emergency MIQ slot were rejected, was left with no alternative but to seek help from the Taliban. The Taliban! The “brutal irony” as Charlotte Bellis spelt it out, was that, having questioned this oppressive regime about their treatment of women, she now found herself asking the same thing of her own liberal government.
Largely Covid-free, New Zealand has been viewed as a paradise for much of the last two years. Jacinda Ardern, already considered by many the Mother Teresa of the Antipodes, excelled in the early stages, acting decisively and with compassion. Appealing to the population to act as one, her “Team of Five Million” approach did wonders for national unity at a time when most other leaders were floundering and failing. No wonder I voted for her – twice.
But times have changed. Once saintly, Jacinda now appears merely silly, having led New Zealand to a place that looks more like a smug cul-de-sac than a nation wholly reliant on overseas tourism and trade. Then again, long-term strategic thinking was never a feature of her government’s Covid response, with “elimination” taking precedence over vaccination for much of 2021.
Not that anyone in New Zealand is really focusing on what she got wrong. Ardern’s $55 million (£27m) sweetener in the form of the Public Interest Journalism Fund has enabled her government to exert tremendous influence over private sector media outlets, as well as tightly control-messaging through state media channels. So much so that any coverage critical of Ardern now originates from pundits in Australia or Britain. Most recently, opposition leader David Seymour had to turn to the Daily Mail to get an opinion piece printed. This is when silly starts looking sinister.
If democracy is built on the ability to question those in power and hold them to account, then the Kiwi media are wholly complicit in Ardern’s swing from immaculate heart to autocrat. The major opposition party National have only made their job easier by offering nothing more headline-grabbing than leadership squabbles. Then again, the opposition’s perceived infighting might just be the PM’s grand media bribe in action. Gosh, she’s good!
Some suggest that Ardern’s government is seeking to restrict entry into New Zealand for another twelve months, thereby disabling the one million expat voters effectively locked out of next year’s election after an absence of three years. Only time will tell if this sort of conspiracy theory offers an accurate representation of the depths our leader will plumb in order to maintain power. In the meantime, New Zealanders will continue to look across the ditch at our Aussie neighbours and act smug.
Australia’s hard line on borders may have been thrown into stark relief for most Britons with the recent Novak Djokovic debacle, but the tragedies have been piling up for years. Or rather washing up on their shores. Remember John Howard’s disgraceful handling of the Tampa affair? When over 400 rescued Afghan boat people were held aboard a Norwegian container ship in conditions no better than a nineteenth-century prison hulk, denied basic hygiene, medical care and entry into Australian waters? And while we’re robbing people of their human dignity, look no further than Australia’s shocking treatment of detainees on Manus Island, where many preferred to take their own lives rather than suffer the psychological misery of open-ended incarceration.
For years New Zealanders have sniggered about Australia’s current oafish leader. But maybe the joke’s on us. At least you can hear Scott Morrison’s stolid footfall as he sweeps aside refugees, asylum seekers and tennis stars. Our PM’s talent for stealthy manoeuvres against her own people makes her far more dangerous.
Nobody can see the silent assassin at work next door; nor the mental health crisis her government’s Covid response has unleashed on New Zealand, where youth suicide rates are already the highest in the developed world. It certainly doesn’t fit the image of the leader I voted for – the young woman breastfeeding her new born at the UN General Assembly, the compassionate leader who offered succour to survivors of 2019’s Christchurch massacre. Here was a rare thing! A leader who understood both grand gestures and nuance.
Of course, there is nothing nuanced about Ardern’s shameless Covid scare tactics. They’ve worked a treat, keeping the public vehemently opposed to opening the country’s borders, and compliant in the face of tyrannical restrictions even as the rest of the world is emerging from crisis. Especially when combined with the bread of endlessly extended wage subsidies; and circuses in the form of a parade of overseas DJs, sports teams and stage shows that have breezed in without needing to enter the dreaded MIQ lottery.
Had Omicron not happened, she might not have managed to keep it up. In the event, the threat of a new variant provided a perfect cattle prod to corral the highly vaccinated but docile population back into submission at the end of an idyllic summer.
Her latest diversion has worked. Terrifying the Team of Five Million, and focusing their fear and loathing on outsiders importing pestilence into paradise, is a highly effective strategy – if a little lacking in originality. Despots for thousands of years have deployed such methods to distract their subjects from something infinitely more damaging to long-term wellbeing – an unchallenged leader.
Ardern’s lack of transparency runs deep. One example, the He Puapua report currently before her Cabinet, was hidden from former coalition partner, New Zealand First. Finally outed as a result of an Official Information Act request, the report recommends a raft of co-governance structures along racial lines. Critics now claim the government is advancing a separatist agenda under the guise of social justice without public consultation. So much for the Team of Five Million, some might say; meanwhile the media downplay such wild suggestions and gleefully report on the Covid chaos in every country in the world but our own.
So if it’s paranoia, what should we make of the law sneaked through one Saturday in November that granted iwi (tribes) permission to block public highways at will – a law the government wouldn’t admit existed, until several weeks later? Or the government’s farcical consultative process for their Three Waters plan, which totally ignored the vehement and unanimous opposition from local councils to the seizure and centralising of their infrastructure water assets to be 50% controlled by 17% of the population? Already, we are witnessing the corrosive impact of these policies and plans on national unity; and yet these issues and many others are being decided behind closed doors, with no regard for democratic process. Governments do this all the time, right? At least, oppressive regimes do.
What’s particularly galling for me is the mind control Ardern has exerted over the population. Coming back here, I’m shocked at how few have lost their faith, and baffled by the self-congratulatory mood that pervades the country. After two years of sermonising from Ardern and nowhere to drink other than from the government fountainhead, New Zealanders have turned into a nation of self-congratulatory, cavorting maenads.
Mea culpa. In voting for Mother Teresa, I unwittingly ushered Caligula into office. The parallels are there: noble and moderate for a period, admired all over the world “from the rising to the setting sun”. Our esteemed leader has become self-absorbed, cruel and dangerous. Where’s it all leading? I’d love to know, but getting to the truth in New Zealand is a tricky business nowadays. I prefer my chances at the London bacchanal – there at least I can be assured in vino veritas!