Level 2 now a farce

Stuff reports:

Act Party leader David Seymour has called on the Government to move to alert level 1 immediately after the Black Lives Matter protests made “a mockery” of Covid-19 distancing restrictions.

On Monday, thousands of Kiwis around the country marched in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in the United States. In one of the largest protests seen in central Auckland for several years, protestors overflowed from Aotea Square into Queen St.

“Scenes of thousands of protesters shoulder to shoulder makes a mockery of the Government’s Covid-19 restrictions and insults every New Zealander who’s followed them,” Seymour said.

Seymour is absolutely correct. If you can have 2,000 people squashed into Aotea Square, then why are we stopping more than 10- people attending a church service?

These are the law-abiding New Zealanders playing their part in the ‘team of five million’s’ effort to beat Covid-19, he said.

“Tonight they’ll see thousands of people shoulder-to-shoulder protesting something that happened 12,000 km away and, thankfully, has no parallel in New Zealand.”

And the Government did nothing to stop them. I don’t mean breaking it up (which would have been stupid) but remaining silent. Why did the PM not explicitly ask people not to join the protest? It must have been apparent large numbers were expected.

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters agreed with Seymour from his Facebook page: “If the authorities allow this to occur then we should be at level 1 tomorrow.”

What hypocrisy. He is the authorities. He is the Deputy Prime Minister. He could force Cabinet to move to Level 1 by saying he’ll support legislation in the House to move to it, if Cabinet doesn’t.

If the Government is serious about Level 2 applying to everyone, they DG of Health would order all those who attended the protests to self-isolate at home for the next two weeks.