NZ 4 years on, Bitter/Sweet – Part 3
This is the third and last post of my recent NZ experience. Again, please note that these are my personal observations and opinions and not those of Kiwiblog.
4 – HEALTH CARE
Since living in the US, it has been interesting to compare the American and NZ health care systems. We are taught in NZ that our universal taxpayer funded hospital system is fairer and more equitable and ensures access to all, rich or poor, versus the costly US system that excludes the poor and those with pre-existing conditions who can’t get coverage. The truth is neither system lives up to the stereotypes. In NZ we ration by waiting list and I know three people who have died on waiting lists and others denied certain treatments due to age and medicines due to cost whereas the US has the world’s best quality healthcare, but it is rationed by price via the clumsy employer funded health insurance model. However, various safety nets for the poor in the US do exist as does government sponsored health insurance for those with pre-existing conditions. The problem is that despite millions spent on health bureaucrats, NZ is not keeping up with other first world countries. This gap was exposed during Covid with NZ having the fewest ICU beds per capita in the OECD at the start of the pandemic. We were told the stringent lockdowns then border closure (that for almost a year enabled NZers to function without restrictions whilst the world struggled with various restrictions to try and slow the spread), was to enable the health system to improve capacity once Covid eventually breached the border wall. Over a year later as Delta then Omicron spread, the health system had not improved capacity in any meaningful way despite the billions spent on the Covid response. The running down of the healthcare system combined with NZ’s overly strict Covid isolation rules has led to large swathes of the population having to isolate at home and with the 10% of the health workforce dismissed due to not being vaccinated, has led to a crisis of capacity and capability in the NZ healthcare system that means at times and in certain places, the quality of healthcare received is bordering on 2nd world quality. My family saw this inability to be able to commit adequate staffing and other resources firsthand with our family member who died in hospital. Whilst none of us blame the system for the death, nonetheless I wondered what the outcome might have been had the greater resources of hospitals in other 1st world countries had been brought to bear.
5 – CRIME
For some time now, NZ’s non-homicide crime statistics have been high. By this I mean burglaries, car thefts and assaults. Yes, most American cities feature much higher levels of gun related homicides, but these crimes are comparatively rare compared to the big 3. If you take out the badly run liberal cities in America like LA, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Baltimore etc. where crime rates across the board are very high, smaller/mid-sized US cities (that approximate the size of NZ’s cities) feature non-homicide crime rates that are significantly lower than NZ. It is a long-held myth that NZ is a safe place with low crime and that the US is a crime ridden nightmare. Aside from the exceptions I mentioned, this has not been the case for decades and this trend has only accelerated in recent years. When you combine the cost-of-living crisis with Labour’s soft-on-crime approach (cancelling 3 strikes, not reigning in gangs and hamstringing the police with PC directives), NZ is seeing an explosion of gang related crime, youth crime being at the most pointy and public end with the explosion of ram raids on dairies and other shops. Only a few miles from where I was having lunch in Auckland, in broad daylight armed thieves robbed a jewelry shop in St Luke’s Mall during shopping hours. This is 3rd world gangster level brazenness. I visited two shops in the Grey Lynn area that advised they were no longer taking any cash payments due to incessant robberies. I suspect this trend will accelerate. In my childhood some American cities WERE dangerous places, whilst growing up in NZ we could go on holiday leaving the house unlocked and I’d often cycle past cars parked by the local dairy or fish and chip shop empty with the engine running. Those days are long gone.
6 – ANTI DEMOCRATIC INSTINCTS
Of all the things to surprise and even shock me the most, it is the rise of so many anti-democratic behaviours in current/recent NZ society. If you asked me five years ago whether there was any functional difference on the ground and in everyday life and society between the Westminster style Parliamentary democracy as found in NZ and the US style Constitutional Republic, I would’ve have said no. Back then I felt that both offered: largely free and fair elections, freedom of speech, freedom to protest peacefully, freedom to worship as you choose, freedom of the press, free movement of citizens and equal opportunity under the law. I no longer believe this to be true because some of these freedoms in New Zealand were abrogated, curtailed and suspended by the NZ government during the pandemic in ways utterly antithetical to the tenets and ideals of freedom we once held dear in what I believed was a free and democratic society. Here are some examples of what I speak.
(i) Scrapping of the DHBs – whatever the drawbacks of New Zealand’s health system (and they are many and varied), the District Health Board model featured elected Boards that were accountable to the local electorate every three years. Major reforms and innovations at the local level had to pass muster at the ballot box and obviously poor performances meant voters could punish Board members by voting them out. That democratic check is now completely gone, and in my opinion, this is a retrograde step by removing an office of a vital service that we used to be able to vote on.
(ii) 3 Waters – I mentioned 3 Waters earlier in the context of excessive Maori control, but its most insidious anti-democratic provision is removing the control of vital water assets from locally elected Councils to an unelected and unaccountable appointed Board. This is billions of dollars of vital community used assets soon to be run by people no longer accountable to voters. Poor performance concerning this matter did lead to the ousting of elected officials. This will no longer be possible if 3 Waters passes into law.
(iii) Education curriculum – this point is a little more obscure. When I first moved to the US, I thought its system of separate School Districts for each city and town (meaning in large metropolitan areas sometimes over a dozen separate school districts as most major metro areas in the US comprise of one core large city after which it is named but a myriad of smaller separate suburban cities and towns that are each autonomous although contiguous to the metro area – e.g. greater Seattle comprises Seattle, Bellevue, Renton, Everett, Kirkland, Redmond, Kent, Tacoma etc.). Each School District’s Boards are elected and decide on holidays, the grade makeup of schools (some Junior Highs are 7th, 8th and 9th grade others are just 7th and 8th) and the curriculum. This seemed chaotic and a duplication of administration compared to NZ’s single national Department of Education that essentially decides on all major issues of curriculum, school holidays and with NZQA administering a single national qualification. But as we watched the inexorable march of progressive left woke ideologies invade the classrooms of our children with such things as Critical Race Theory (and its attacks on western civilization and promotion of so-called White Supremacism, racism and colonialism) and the wave of bending to aggressive and influential transgender activists allowing teenage boys who identify as girls to compete in girls’ sports despite the obvious physical advantages of entering male puberty and to be allowed to enter and change in girls only spaces, I realized that the American system of local control of school districts and the concept of elected Boards whose progressive and damaging policies could be overturned by the recall of existing board members and the election of new members who better reflect the concerns and views of a majority of parents, actually gave far more power to parents than the NZ system where the only option if a family objects to the new woke progressive curriculum is to home school your kids. Right now, a huge revolution is going on across the US in school district after school district where parents first come to public Board meetings and hold board members accountable and if the worst excesses of the Social Justice Warrior left are not removed, then those who support such policies are being voted out!
(iv) Inhibiting free speech – Few people in New Zealand have much knowledge or a working understanding of the Government’s Public Good Journalism Fund (PGJF). Labour made $55 million available to be paid to media organisations to promote “good journalism”. The problem is that the definition of “good” is very much in the eye of the beholder, in this case the most left leaning Labour government in a generation. Anyone with any familiarity with the profitability (or mostly lack thereof) of NZ media companies will know that turning a profit in the NZ market is hard. If you divide $55 M between the likes of NZME (owner of the NZ Herald), Stuff (formally owned by Fairfax), Media Works and Fairfax, that’s an amount tantamount to profit in a good year. For some media outlets, getting the grant from the PGJF could have meant the difference between profit and loss. At first the influence was to ensure journalists wrote mostly puff pieces about Jacinda but as the pandemic bit, the lockdowns kept dragging on, protests against the Covid regime erupted and people began to fight against the vaccine mandates and tried to report on vaccine injuries, the kind of agreements struck between the PGJF and editors and owners, even if nothing was explicitly stated in writing, the inference was that if the party line on Covid was not stuck to, shame about that PGJF grant. How democratic is for Hipkins, Bloomfield and Ardern to say from the Beehive pulpit that, “we are your one source of truth” and to threaten consequences for spreading “disinformation”. What happened to investigative journalism where the rich and powerful were held to account in a Woodward and Bernstein type Watergate ‘truth to power’ moment? Yes, some opposition to various aspects of Covid policy did seep through. One was the plight of Grounded Kiwis and the ravages of MIQ and in this instance, the media spotlight onto some of the egregious stories of NZers locked out of their own country led to a PR nightmare for the government and soon after, the MIQ regime was largely ended. The media dutifully discharged its obligations under the PGJF by suppressing footage of the Freedom Convoy. Had you not been familiar with alternative social media sites such as Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, Telegram and Gab, you’d be right in thinking all the Freedom Convoy was good for was traffic disruption and yet the ACTUAL footage, posted by hundreds of NZers from Cape Reinga to Bluff, showed extraordinary scenes of multiple towns on SH 1 where, lining both sides of the street, sometime two or more deep from one of end of the town to the other, were protestors and many motorway bridges in Auckland and Wellington were packed with sign waving protestors. A family member who is part of Voices For Freedom manned a spot on the roundabout at the end of the Northern Motorway in Christchurch near the Pegasus subdivision. It took 1 hour and 15 minutes for all the vehicles in the South Island portion of the Freedom Convoy to pass! In a normal era, a protest this large would lead One Network News’ 6pm broadcast and be on the front pages of every newspaper. Finally, Jacinda Ardern’s speech to the United Nations about regulating ‘hate’ speech on the internet was quite widely panned by mainstream conservative media in the US as being an example of the Orwellian controls some on the left are prepared to turn to in an attempt to silence dissent from the progressive liberal world view. Ardern’s government’s instincts in this regard are utterly antithetical to robust discussion of all matters, regardless of how controversial they are, in the public square as they move to introduce their ‘Hate’ Speech legislation later this year. Readers of this blog would do well to follow David’s admonition to join the Free Speech Union to fight these attempts at stifling free speech, one of the great hallmarks of modern democratic societies that NZ is trying to retreat from.
(v) Freedom to demonstrate – this freedom has been an integral part of any free and democratic society. How the government handled the February anti-mandate protest at Parliament is another example of anti-democratic sentiments taking hold. Media reporting of the types of people on the grounds of Parliament were a classic case in point. Were there crazy conspiracy theorists there? Absolutely, but they were a tiny minority but the government, the police and the media focused on the actions and comments of a tiny unrepresentative fraction. A good friend is senior with MFAT and commutes by train to central Wellington and so visited the site of the protest every day. He wondered around everywhere and spoke to various of the protestors every day of the protest and formed the view that it was a harmless cross section of provincial NZ with an atmosphere of celebration, cooperation and no sign of violent or malign intent other than to object to the vaccine mandates. He allowed his teenage children who attend central Wellington schools to visit without any fear of being mistreated. David Farrar’s own Curia poll of the types and motivations of the protestors underscored the broad coalition of town and country, vaxxed and unvaxed across the political spectrum. But yet this group was vilified by MPs calling them a “river of filth” and this vilification was amplified by the media. The footage of the eventual police action to clear the site was skewered and biased and when you view the hours of amateur footage posted, the actions of a few likely inserted masked provocateurs who perpetrated the violence and the fires is blatantly obvious. Had the government and police simply spoken to the protestors, a traffic management protocol to avoid disruption could’ve been negotiated and as long as the hygiene and safety of all were maintained (which the self-sufficient protestors and their financial supporters across the country ensured), they could’ve been left alone. With no external provocation by police or nasty vilification from the Prime Minster on down, I’m sure the protest would’ve gradually fizzled out. The final anti-democratic capstone came when the Speaker attempted to ban Winston Peters from Parliament’s precinct for the crime of …… speaking to the protestors!
(vi) MIQ – New Zealand’s Managed Isolation Quarantine regime has been shown to be thoroughly and utterly anti-democratic and anti-freedom. NZ was the only country in the Anglophile and Western European 1st world to prevent its own citizens from entering their own country in direct violation of clause 18 (2) of the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990. At first there were pretty much slots available in MIQ for most people that wanted to come home early on in the pandemic but as time went by, the numbers of offshore kiwis that wanted to emigrate back to NZ or to visit loved ones who were dying or for major family events like weddings and funerals began to rise and the numbers of government sponsored hotel rooms soon could not keep up and so at first people would spend hours refreshing computers in the vain attempt to secure a slot. When people circumvented this by using bots to programme computers to do this work automatically, MBIE came up with the clunky lottery system that shepherded those wishing to obtain a slot in MIQ into a set virtual lobby every 6 weeks when rooms were released and, after a one hour registration window, all who registered for that lottery were issued a random place in the queue and each person was allowed into the booking section of the computer in order. Each lottery registered on average 40,000 participants competing for around 4,000 rooms so you had a 1 in 10 chance of success. Those of us who endured this indignity knew via various Facebook pages set up to help with all things to do with MIQ, that you had to get a number of about 5,000 to stand any chance of getting a room. I tried four times and then gave up but there were about 10 lotteries until it was abolished and most times, you’d get 15,000 or 23,000 or 9,000. I once got 4,300 and actually got in and the only rooms available by then were 3 days later, not enough time to arrange a flight as back them, Air NZ was only flying twice a week and a single flight from just LAX. I was part of the famous Grounded Kiwis Facebook page and the hundreds of heart wrenching stories of kiwis stuck overseas trying to get a humanitarian exemption to attend a funeral was massive. People had sold houses, cancelled leases and quit jobs and actually had a job to go to in NZ but were forced to stay with friends and family and rely on charity of others for months at a time as they were unable to get an MIQ slot. It was one of the most egregious breaches of human rights of the citizens of this country in the history of NZ and it was one that was never ever attempted in the US as it would be found instantly, by any Federal Court regardless of the ideological leaning, to be a breach of the US Bill of Rights. Many other countries drew the same conclusions and allowed their own citizens to return and made isolation slots available … but not New Zealand. A needless authoritarian abuse of governmental power that eventually the High Court found many legal problems with. The government finally scrapped it but only once media publicity on the cases of widespread hardship of stranded kiwis began to grow and grow.
(vii) Vaccine mandates and passports. My family were willingly vaccinated with all the major childhood vaccines partly because they had proven to be effective and safe but also because we’d lost a great grandfather to tetanus and a grandmother crippled by polio in the pre-vaccine era. Yes, there has been a tiny rump of anti vax activists for years but we were never one of them. But alarms bells rung when I saw many people I know in the US who contracted Covid but who were able to obtain Ivermectin from Mexico or a few doctors and whose symptoms were largely gone within days and yet the medical establishment across the world, in conjunction with government officials and backed by the media, vilified a drug that had been awarded a Nobel prize for Chemistry in favour of the only preferred treatment for Covid – a vaccine that had been rushed to market with minimal clinical trials. I took hydroxychloroquine when I had Covid (which was the Delta strain and was like a flu that took one additional week to get over) and my taste and smell returned within 24 hours. This was another treatment banned in many countries including New Zealand. Suspicion heightened when the efforts to get people vaccinated took on Orwellian proportions with massive multi million dollar advertising campaigns, a full court press against alternatives and in favour of an experimental mRNA treatment (only the Johnson and Johnson Covid shot was a true vaccine – the Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca shots are classified as gene therapies). Next thing governments were introducing mandates to force people to be vaccinated on pain of job loss and electronic passes were being introduced to prevent the unvaccinated from going anywhere except essential visits to supermarkets and medical facilities. The Nuremberg Code, adopted by all democratic countries post World Wat 2 as a response to the horrific forced medical experiments conducted by the Nazis, enshrined freedom of choice for medical treatments. Jacinda Ardern even explicitly promised there would be no mandates and yet there we were in the latter part of 2021 with people across NZ being fired because they preferred medical freedom and a pernicious system of medical apartheid was set up across the country backed by hefty fines on employers who would not comply. Yes, such mandates were attempted in the US but they soon run up against America’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom to choose and so were progressively peeled back. I watched in horror from across the Pacific at the dystopian nightmare of medical tyranny unfolding in NZ and heard from the ground what life was like for the unvaccinated. You can support a vaccine like the C19 shots and still be appalled at the abrogation of freedoms that were unleashed across many countries. I thought, surely NZ’s Bill of Rights that enshrines medical freedom would protect this overreach by the government but no, the Courts proved largely toothless on the fundamental question which was, does the government’s emergency Covid legislation override the BORA 1990. Whilst some aspects of mandates were pegged back (e.g., the military), on this fundamental issue of whether this legislation protected NZers from a power-hungry government, the answer in New Zealand’s case was sadly no.
CONCLUSION
It has been incredibly difficult to write this last post. Some may object and say, just stay in the US. Most expat kiwis are asked by friends and family when they visit, “are you ever going to come back to live in NZ?”. For those of us currently happy in their new country of domicile, we usually say things like, “maybe, but right now I’m happy where I am but I love NZ and it will always be home”. On this trip when I was finally asked, I paused and reflected on many of the things I’ve discussed in these posts and I became a bit emotional because of the tragedy of what I was obliged to say which was, “I will never live in this country because the protections of freedom and liberty that I thought were present proved to be not worth the paper they were written on to protect from the medical tyranny that prevailed in NZ whilst in the US, the Constitution lived up to its promise and actually did protect us from the same attempts at medical tyranny”. Needless to say, those gathered were shocked but sadly, it is the truth. As I ponder on that response and whether it was intemperate or I got carried away in the heat of the moment, I thought about the sad reality that is modern NZ. Millions of my fellow countrymen went along with this regime of medical apartheid and mocked and criticised on public forums those who disagreed. The major opposition party 100% backed the regime and probably would have administered it more efficiently than Labour. Libertarian darling David Seymour and his freedom-oriented party went along with it. The media supported it. All the elites of society at every turn supported it. And whilst the worst aspects of the regime have been dropped, the freedom constraining anti-democratic legislation remains on the books and were a fresh pandemic to sweep the world, governments in NZ at least would be legally empowered to repeat the coercion and we now know the courts won’t stop them and most of the country won’t care. This is how a democracy dies.