Articles in ‘Opinion’

For the first time this century, the numbers of people living in absolute poverty are rising. The World Food Programme estimates that another 130 million people could be brought to the brink of starvation, leading to a new combined total of 265 million people in that dire predicament. Rates of childhood vaccination and prenatal care are precipitously declining in a number of countries, and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and…

In the middle of May, the Government announced its Budget for the next financial year. New Zealand has never seen anything remotely like it. It made clear the Government’s intention to spend vast sums of money in an attempt to protect New Zealanders from the economic shock caused by the coronavirus and the Government’s draconian measures to deal with it. Last month, I suggested that the Government had over-reacted to the virus, stampeded by a…

No one can say with confidence what our COVID-9 world is going to look like over the next 12 to 24 months. The rules and models of the old world no longer hold. It is this uncertainty itself that adds great stress, overlaying the fear of specific scenarios. Times like these can bring out true leaders but also false prophets. Trying to distinguish between them is much easier in retrospect than at the time. · All great leaders instil confidence…

It’s safe to assume most New Zealanders understood this as meaning we have the potential for the virus to be gone, out of here, see you later, because elimination generally implies “the complete removal or destruction of something”. Also, the Covid-19 website says: “Our goal is to eliminate Covid-19 from New Zealand, so that we can live and work free from this disease.” However, during Monday’s announcement about the move to alert level three,…

I had a crappy day the other day, quite literally. The macerator pump for our toilet and greywater system chose Saturday morning to put itself into Coronavirus lockdown, so I spent the day lying on my belly in a two-and-a-half-footby-Very-Long tunnel under the building, headlight torch on, up to my elbows in the stuff that toilet macerator pumps deal with. I felt like one of my Welsh coal mining ancestors, and, having grown up with septic…

Perhaps it is dangerous to write about such a fast-moving situation as the Covid-19 pandemic when what I write may not be published for 10 days or more, but at time of writing my strong impression is that the public believe that the Government has done a remarkably good job of suppressing, perhaps even eliminating, the spread of Covid-19 in New Zealand, and that they deserve warm applause. I believe the public has been conned. · To begin with,…

The Government’s state of emergency has created a dangerous political vacuum. Decisions that profoundly affect everyone’s lives are being undertaken in an autocratic fashion without any attempt at democratic involvement. · Even the typically reserved Law Society has raised concerns about the lack of transparency and consultation associated with the lockdown: “As far as possible, there should be an ongoing attempt to replicate the normal policy…

Since January, I have been following international coverage and debate about Covid-19 closely. Looking back over almost three months now, what seems extraordinary is how flat footed the international response has been. An exception to that has been that of the much-maligned World Health Organisation (WHO), which from the outset has endeavoured to provide information and advice as soon as it could. That is not easy in contexts where not all…

The Health Ministry must be more transparent with the information it's giving to the public. · Like all journalists in New Zealand right now, I've been covering stories day after day, all of which relate to our current coronavirus crisis. · It's the longest-running, bulletin dominating story I've ever known and is impacting every single Kiwi, young and old. · Given the ongoing significance of this epidemic, we as journalists need swift,…

It’s hard to believe that when I signed off my article for the March edition of Elocal, on 11 February, I didn’t mention the words ‘pandemic’, ‘coronavirus’, or ‘Covid-19’. In the four or five weeks since, the media – and I mean all the media – have talked about almost nothing else. What I write now, for publication at the beginning of April, could also be totally blind-sided by events over the next two weeks. At the moment, it appears as if…