Tomorrow, we get real accountability on COVID.

The Haps

Amongst the noise, ACT fixes what matters. Not everyone wants medical marijuana but it’s a $200 million industry with a huge offshore market, and that means jobs. As reported Friday, David Seymour simplified licensing requirements and exports have doubled in the last year. New Overseas Investment laws came into place, also on Friday. They will make consents for sending money into New Zealand at least five times faster than when Seymour took charge, in fact the new target is fifteen times faster. Brooke van Velden will introduce legislation to the House that will replace the Holidays Act. The Act has been the bane of small business, even Government Departments with all their resources can’t follow it. Where a string of Ministers has given up, Brooke is fixing it. If you support ACT, you are getting it done.

Lest we forget

Most sensible people would rather keep COVID permanently mind-blocked, including here at Free Press. But, there will be another pandemic some day and we can’t afford to make the same mistakes again (really, there is no more money).

The COVID-19 Royal Commission will release its final report this week. This is the real report, not the whitewash that Labour commissioned on itself. At the height of Labour’s arrogance they set the terms of reference for an inquiry into themselves, it’s easy to forget how bad they were.

They wanted a COVID inquiry that looked only at the Government’s effectiveness in suppressing the virus, ignoring the cost of doing so. As Chair, they appointed one of their lockdown characters, an epidemiologist similar to the ones who’d been advising them.

ACT campaigned for a new terms of reference, and Brooke van Velden appointed new commissioners to run the review. The new report will address not just the effectiveness of the Government response, but the cost-effectiveness.

Here’s the top five things Free Press hopes will come from the report, so any future epidemic response won’t repeat the costly mistakes of COVID.

1. Any future response must get cost-benefit analysis right. The average person who died from COVID was already above average life expectancy, but school attendance still hasn’t recovered from the lockdown period, the Government books still haven’t recovered, some women who missed their mammograms under lockdown will tragically never recover. They say you can’t put a value on a life but the Government did, forcing a huge cost for COVID.

2. Any future response must make rules that are risk-based, not arbitrary. Forcing people into crowded supermarkets while shutting butchers was crazy. If the goal is to stop transmission, the rules should be applied according to risk.

3. Any future response should respect civil liberties. We heard stories of the elderly being harassed for taking folding chairs to sit in the park ‘because Jacinda says you can’t have picnics’ even though their knees made it hard for them to sit on the ground. Civil liberties matter even in a crisis, in fact, they matter especially in a crisis when Government tries to take extra powers.

4. Any future response should see technology as a valuable tool, to be used as much as possible. Schools that imported Rapid-Antigen Tests (RATs) had them confiscated by the Government even though the ones they had were approved by the Australian Government. Resisting the uptake to technology meant people were restricted longer and harder at greater cost than they needed to be.

5. Building on points 3 and 2, any future vaccine policy should allow choice. At Free Press we believe the vaccines worked for most people, and saved lives, but we respect they didn’t work for all people while others just disagreed. Had the Government taken ACT’s policy of letting individual schools and workplaces set their own policy, so long as it accepted regular RAT testing as a substitute for vaccination, so much hurt could have been avoided.

Had advice like this been followed at the time, New Zealand could be billions of dollars richer, far less divided, healthier and better educated. Unfortunately the Government’s single-minded and dictatorial approach back then is still costing us.

2026 presents enough troubles of its own, but there have been epidemics as long as there have been humans. The black plague, the Spanish flu, ebola, bird flu, COVID, the epidemics will always be with us.

There’s never been more people or a more globally connected world, and when you add in the possibility of nutters with AI making their own viruses, it makes sense to prepare.

Tomorrow’s release of the COVID Royal Commission report is a gift. It gives us the opportunity to learn from the massive mistakes of the Government’s COVID response. We must not look this gift in the mouth.