Throughout the pandemic, the new Vice-Chancellor-of-Otago-University-on-$629,000 per annum-Can-you-believe-it-and-Former-Finance-Minister Grant Robertson repeated the mantra over & over that he saved "lives and livelihoods".
As we update how this claim is faring over the course of time, the facts are increasingly speaking differently. NZ now ranks as one of the slowest growing economies in the world, unemployment is rising and inflation has been galloping away for years now, over half of which is home-grown - not from external factors. The country is bogged down in a debt spiral due to on-going structural deficits which have led the new Coalition to cut back on spending, threatening the development of infrastructure, as well as the strength of our health and education systems.
As for NZ's long-run health record, let's update the graphs we first posted nearly two years ago. Economists like to control for factors like geography when working out the true effect of different policies, like New Zealand's policy toward the Covid. Maybe much of our claimed "success" was simply due to being an island far away from the rest of the world.
Below is the cumulative number of Covid deaths per million for all countries in Oceania, which includes Australia, NZ, Fiji, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuata, Papa New Guinea, Nauru, American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Pitcairn, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna, and the "United States Outlying Islands":
The lines crossed a few months ago - not that it was ever reported in the Main Stream Media - so that now we have more deaths per million than the average of those 26 Oceania countries. As for the total number of cases, which if you believe in Long Covid, is a statistic we should be very concerned about, it looks like the following:
Gosh, we're off the charts worse. What do these graphs tell me? That the line folks like Hipkins & Robertson used that they saved "lives and livelihoods" is political rhetoric.
It's not at all clear where the truth lies - in the fullness of time, it may well turn out that our Covid response was an unmitigated disaster for the country, in terms of both health and economic outcomes. What concerns me the most is that somehow out of that response NZ lost its mojo to the extent that a galaxy of the most talented young Kiwis now want to flee abroad.
Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. Rob blogs at Down To Earth Kiwi
I am aware that two swallows don't make a summer but my wife and I (75, 77) have had six COVID jabs since this pandemic arrived - yes, SIX.
We have a large family and all the adults have had COVID some more than once. So have most of the g'kids (10 of them.) We live in the same town and visit each other almost daily. We nursed them when it was needed. Many were slow at getting vaccinated. We ran a business which involved close contact with the community. We let folks come to our place of work whether they had been vaccinated or not.
We know how to read scientific papers and we have doctors in our wider…
I'd like to see a graph of 1000 of those vaccinated then 1000 of those not on the x axis and their individual IQs marked on the y axis. Hmmm!
And what has changed since Oct 14 2023? Nothing. The jab is still being promoted, advertised, coerced in some cases. Along with the flu jab (mRNA technology also) and all manner of bogusly-named 'vaccines.'. And the sheeple go along with it.
Thanks Robert,
Robertson may not be financial flavour of the month however his cohort in Government at the time may need to be made accountable for something quite criminal - if it is true.
I have posted a link below that I got from RCR.
It is from Rumble via Twitter because none of these sites are 'censored'. It is very interesting and a bit challenging, but worth a listen.
Personally I accepted the initial two jabs as a dutiful community minded citizen, but then the divisive mandates came, and then I noticed a lot of people I know who have continued to have the jabs have pretty much all got 'Covid' anyway. I haven't ever tested positive for i…
I understand the initial response to the covid outbreak.
And fair dos, because none of us at that time knew what we were dealing with. BUT.
It soon became very apparent that the government used covid as an excuse to enable them to shoehorn through deeply unpopular decisions and policy , using fear as a cloak, and the crowning moment in this whole sorry mess is that we were promised two of the most outrageous pulpit driven truths that would eventually be found to be a stain and a deliberate carefully orchestrated attack displayed by a country on its own cizitens.
" there will be no mandates ".
Suddenly, there were two classes of people. And the yip yipping a…