This is my photo of the good ship Arahura, on its last voyage in commercial service, linking the North and South Islands in New Zealand. It is coming into Wellington Harbour, after leaving Picton three hours earlier, and I’m standing on the Eastbourne side of the harbour as it approaches the dock in Thorndon, where I used to live. I’ve forgotten which year it was, but it was well before the pandemic.
So this is the last blog post, for what it’s worth. I had intended to end this time last year, but the domain auto-renewed, so I kept it going. The cost goes up each year, and now WordPress expect me to pay tax on a blog that I never earnt any income from. If it had been successful maybe I could have earned a bit, but I didn’t want any advertising on it. And while there seemed to be quite a few page views, especially of the early posts, that didn’t indicate whether people really read it or that it was successful at all. It started off as an outlet for some empirical research, when I was doing a PhD at a university that had claimed to be interested in journalism, if not the study of tax havens, but in the end had no interest in original empirical research at all, let alone how the media reported tax havens and money laundering in New Zealand (or didn’t as the case may be).
In more recent times I have paid tribute to deceased international musicians, and written about the increasingly disastrous Covid policy response in New Zealand. I don’t regret that, despite the fact that anybody who questions the policies of the outgoing government, and Ardern’s authoritarian tendencies, is called a conspiracy theorist. It so happens that other bloggers, now mostly on the Substack platform, have been requesting official information, and highlighting how poorly the Covid policy was formulated and implemented, in spite of the official blockade on criticism, the over-zealous academic experts, and the news media name-callers.
So I may go back to historical research, and try to finalise some old book projects, for a rather smaller audience. Or I might just make a trip back to the South Island, on another ferry, take my old film cameras and drift into semi-retirement. To quote Robert Hunter: “such a long long time to be gone, but a short time to be there” [Grateful Dead, ‘Box of Rain’, American Beauty, 1970].
UPDATE 8/9/25
The domain Shakespeare Bay is about to expire, and won’t be renewed, so the Blog is finally coming to an end. At least, I am not renewing the domain name. I assume that this means that the site will soon disappear, although it also seems to have been a way for WordPress to get me to pay twice. The payment for the Blog site itself runs until December, so it may the case that the site is still live until then.
Thanks to those that continue to read it without any new posts. Good luck in the troubled world we live in.
Ingrid Hipkiss is the relatively new anchor on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report programme. She was recruited from the private sector media agency called Newshub, and was a regular weather presenter, and then briefly anchored their late news programme. Newshub are well known for their sardonic presentation of political news stories, rather than genuine reporting, and frequent use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ to refer to anyone opposing the political consensus on mandatory vaccination.
Morning Report used to be the ‘flagship’ programme for RNZ, and public broadcasting in New Zealand. For many years it was anchored by veteran journalist Geoff Robinson, and a string of co-hosts who went on to become major figures in public and private sector broadcasting. That was quite a while before the Covid pandemic, but Robinson’s authority and impartiality has never been adequately replaced. And since the ascension of Ardern’s brand of authoritarianism, RNZ had been competing with Newshub to be her main cheerleaders. So it was natural for someone like Hipkiss to join RNZ, and continue to battle the so-called misinformation war with the conspiracy theorists, who are never named or make an appearance. In old school journalism the label conspiracy theory was surely not used so often, so lazily.
A particularly egregious example of this lazy approach to to current affairs occurred this morning, as Hipkiss interviewed two political commentators about the current election campaign. Ben Thomas and Shane te Pou are respectively, former National and Labour Party staffers or candidates, who now operate as lobbyists, and simultaneously as independent commentators. Their many appearances on different media always come with a cynical and lazy commentary on smaller political parties, and fringe elements, if not outright cheerleading for their political masters. Anyway, on this occasion in the firing line was Winston Peters, the former deputy Prime Minister (to Ardern), whose party is currently not in Parliament, but is likely to return. Mr Thomas referred to Peters’ comments in a public meeting about the need for compensation for Covid vaccine injuries. Except that Thomas deliberately dissembled, and claimed that Peters wanted compensation for those who missed out on the vaccine. He obviously couldn’t be arsed saying what Peters actually said, and Hipkiss reflexively called it a conspiracy theory.
Even though I don’t listen to RNZ current affairs programmes much, I did listen to it a bit when Ms Hipkiss had just started earlier in the year, to see if she was capable of being impartial and objective. Of course she isn’t, as whenever vaccination comes up she always puts ‘conspiracy theory’ in the same sentence. Even when she was talking to an Emeritus Professor of Medicine about the Covid policy response, and the impending royal commission into it. Des Gorman appeared on 20 April, fronting his report for a right wing think tank called ‘Lifting the Lid’, which was critical of the government response in policy terms. He was able to expand on that view, and mentioned the fact that the initial response was based on fear, with the publication of the modelling of fatalities which was used to scare people into vaccination. He got through this part, but went on to criticise the hubris of the Ardern government, and he claimed that certain facts were made to fit a political narrative. When he mentioned that there had been mistruths knowingly repeated by Ardern, Ms Hipkiss quickly accused him of a conspiracy theory.
Now, in this situation Professor Gorman was allowed to proceed with the interview, and explain one of his points. This seemed to be that a form of spin was involved, which seems pretty obvious even to an Ardern stooge like Hipkiss. However, Gorman never got to state what the ‘mistruths’ were, and how they applied to ongoing Covid policymaking, which of course veered from the draconian measures to there being no effective restriction at all, once Ardern had forced enough people into being injected twice with the Pfizer drug. It would have been at least interesting to know whether the Professor was referring to vaccine efficacy. But Hipkiss knew instinctively to shut that one down with the ‘conspiracy’ button.
Of course RNZ have the most programming involving current affairs, and had many appearances each day from vaccine evangelists like Professor Michael Baker. We remember that academic dissenters on vaccine efficacy were shouted down by their peers, then ostracised on the airwaves. The punishment for a dissent by medical practitioners who publicly criticised the vaccine was even more severe, involving being forced out of the profession, and subject to witchhunts by media organisations like Newshub and the Stuff newspaper group. Even when these medical tribunal hearings were reported, long after the offender had left the profession, the speech crime was deemed too subversive to be published. In this new world of censorship and partisan journalism, a pretty face/voice like Hipkiss’ is just so perfect.
This may look like a meeting of an academic department’s admin committee but it is actually one of the first sessions of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid Response in New Zealand. Note that there is no formal seating arrangement; no one making a formal recording of proceedings; no legal counsel is asking questions; there is no media desk for intrepid reporters; and, of course, no members of the public are observing. This is because the first act of the 3 person Royal Commission was to issue a decree that the initial hearings would be held in effectively private session, meaning no media would be present, no formal evidence would be recorded, and no outsiders would be allowed to observe anything. We only learnt of this meeting because they issued a press release which most of the news media have ignored. But apparently the hoi polloi are allowed to make their own submissions in three months time.
So let’s be clear about this, the Covid commission is not like any previous Royal Commission which was convened by a senior judicial figure or presiding judge. That is a rare event in New Zealand anyway, compared to Australia and the U.K. In the latter country its Royal Commission into Covid 19 is well underway, and it is open to the public, is being reported by the media, and the evidence of expert witnesses is subject to cross examination by legal counsel, or so I believe. New Zealand has had royal commissions into serious policy issues, and into accidents leading to the loss of many lives, such as the Air NZ plane that crashed into Mt Erebus (in Antarctica) in 1979. The Royal Commission of Inquiry then, chaired by Peter Mahon QC, established that Air NZ had engaged in a cover-up, or ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’, as Mahon famously put it. This Royal Commission, which Ardern intended to be an exercise in ‘learning the lessons’ from the Covid response, is simply a chance for the experts who promoted some of the most draconian policies in our history to have their views reinforced, or their excesses excused.
(Dame Jacinda) Ardern wanted to circumscribe the evidence and, more importantly, the policy response timeframe, to only include the period when the death toll was low, up to March 2022. Giving this elitist talk-fest the imprimatur of a Royal Commission is both inappropriate in constitutional terms, and also dubious in legal terms. For instance, the vexed question of imposing vaccine mandates is still being considered before the courts, in a number of examples of the brief policy of forcing certain groups of public sector employees to keep getting injected with the Pfizer drug. Likewise, it is unclear whether civil servants are going to be asked to give some form of evidence, and whether this will be able to become part of the public record, and from when. So far it seems that the priority is academic public health experts, and representatives of interest groups not directly involved in policymaking. The figure in the photo who joined the three commissioners is Dr Colin Tukuitonga, an expert in Pacific health provision, and an associate Dean at Auckland University. He is one of the so-called experts who was regularly commentating on Covid policy responses in the media during the crisis. So it is at least ironic that his opinions on the policy response are now not going to be made public, and are effectively secret.
In previous posts I have offered criticisms of Covid policy, and, in particular, looked at the official Medsafe reports into vaccine safety, which listed the reported injuries and deaths. When the Medsafe reports were ceased in December last year there were a total of 184 deaths, and only four of these cases were referred for a coronial inquiry. I was critical of the authoritarian policies pursued by the then Prime Minister, which seemed to be based on the assumed need for the physical segregation of those that were deemed ‘unvaccinated’, but also assumed that the ‘vaccinated’ could meet in public spaces without being at risk of virus transmission. We now know that Ardern went beyond the policy of mandated vaccination for public health workers, and against the advice of officials, and was much closer to the views of academic experts who wanted to force all citizens (and then children) to get injected. And I detailed how academics like Michael Baker advocated in the media for the forcible removal of the unvaccinated from all public spaces, as well as running an argument for internment of all these recalcitrant former citizens. Certainly, Ardern’s policies looked like the re-constitution of citizenship based on vaccination status.
None of these things are likely going to be properly examined in the Covid royal commission: it seems clear that lockdowns will be seen as very effective; and vaccine mandates being necessary, based on the assumption that the Pfizer drug was safe and effective. Of course, the Pfizer corporation never provided evidence that their vaccine was going to provide lasting immunity, or stop the transmission of the virus; though they did seem to know that it would cause random cases of myocarditis. But what actually happened after Ardern opened the borders up again in March 2022 was that millions of New Zealanders contracted the virus, and thousands of them have died in the last 18 months. The academics continue to say that the Pfizer vaccine is effective because it prevents serious disease and death for people who keep getting ‘booster’ injections. So a significant proportion of those that were told they had the best possible protection, and would not get a severe version of the virus have gone on to die, but without the actual numbers being released. The truth is that the official statistics on the Covid cases are no longer reliable.
It is not just the numbers of Covid related deaths that are unknown, after officials changed the definition of it being a death occurring within 28 days of contracting the virus. Even under the new definition, which involves someone deciding on cause of death, the toll is still in the thousands in the last year. But there also should be some questioning of the published numbers of patients with Covid in the intensive care units in the hospitals. When these figures are released they seem very low, and suggest that not many of the people with severe disease are actually getting a ventilator. Of course, in other countries there is much greater scrutiny and media access to hospitals, but secrecy is part of media practice in New Zealand. And there are still thousands of cases weekly, involving hundreds of people in hospital, and death rates are still in double figures. However, the government announced this week that the last mandated policies are coming to an end: this means that the mandatory 7 day isolation period for positive cases no longer applies; and there won’t be any requirement for mask-wearing in medical facilities and pharmacies. Of course, these thing weren’t actually mandatory, in the sense that they could be, or were being enforced, they were effectively voluntary anyway. Yet we have the usual suspects once more appearing in the media outlets claiming that some form of mandate is necessary even when it is now pointless, since no one has to comply. It’s about as pointless as having a commission of inquiry where no one is compelled to account for their mandated policies, and everything is secret anyway.
It’s been a hard few weeks for rock music fans, and the shock announcement of Robbie Robertson’s death is not an easy one to bear just now. It happened during a summer day in L.A., but here it was the coldest day of the year so far, nowhere near as cold as a Canadian winter though. It’s easy to forget that Robbie and most of the Band members were Canadian, when their music is so rooted in American traditions.
The first solo album by Robbie Robertson was one of the few contemporary LPs that I bought in the 1980s, and that was after the reissue of Music from Big Pink. Robertson was part of the rock elite, I suppose, while the others were still trying to tour using the Band name, in what was then a minor league of rock music nostalgia. Although Robertson had shunned the Band he still got most of the royalties from their songs, having been the main songwriter. This was the main cause of the bitterness from his former colleagues, especially Levon Helm.
But there I was last night with a little Wild Turkey bourbon, warm next to the logburner, listening to the eponymous Band LP. What I great listen it is, 12 songs full of vignettes of quirky characters, honest men living off the land, with the odd thief or layabout for company, rollicking along in some tunes, but also glimpsing characters who are plumbing the depths of loneliness and despair, all moving across the great divides of the USA. It is a bit trite to say that nobody was writing about this kind of stuff in 1969, the biggest year in rock music, when the Band were still outsiders. All credit to Robbie for his charming cast of characters and depth of writing, but it was the voices of Richard, Rick and Levon who had brought it all to life, not just as a history lesson, or a pastiche of past musical forms.
Of course, all the tributes in the media mention the most obvious songs, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and The Weight (from the first album). But the former could only have been sung by Levon Helm, as the genuine Southern man in the group, and name-checking a Confederate leader was something that was anomalous at the time, if not jarring with the group ethos. Robbie Robertson’s writing at this stage was all about anonymous figures, battling away at precarious jobs and lifestyles, or just contemplating the end, like the old sailor from ol’ Virginny (Rocking Chair). It’s hard to think of any song remotely like The Unfaithful Servant, in terms of subject matter (being sent away) or the narrative of the friend (“it’s much too cold for me to stay”). While one might assume it is a young woman being dismissed the gender role is not clear, it might have been about a man. Rick Danko did a magnificent job with the vocal, and with empathy he ends “we’re still one in the same, just you and me.”
The Band LP ends with a moment of small time triumph, King Harvest (Has Surely Come), which I still think is Robbie’s best song. Richard Manuel is cast as the small time sharecropper who joins a union to try and secure an income for the season, after nearly losing everything. The desperation in Richard’s voice brings the character to life, and is something that was so well suited to his singing. Yet it is the simplicity and structure of the song that makes it work, and something that is distinctive to the Band’s best work, with the group vocal refrain which sets the scene for the tale being told: beginning with
“Corn in the field/Listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water/King harvest has surely come
then after the first verse
“The smell of the leaves/from the Magnolia trees in the meadow/King harvest has surely come
then after the second verse
“Scarecrow and a yellow moon/and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town/King harvest has surely come
And after the third verse, the cycle is complete
“Corn in the field/Listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water/ King harvest has surely come.”
And Robbie ends the song, and the album, with a little trademark guitar solo, probably his best work.
This is a miscellany of items from two separate auction purchases recently. The political campaign buttons were a small part of a mixed collection, which were mostly from volunteer organisations, and one-off buttons for school reunions, for what seemed to be very small country schools. It seemed a little odd to find the very political campaigning buttons with them, but that was why I bought the whole lot.
The two matchboxes were from a mixed lot of cigarette related collectables, including one particularly nice silver cigarette case. Most of the matches were promotions for accommodation, indicating that the original collector had done some international travel, especially in Australia and Southern USA. It also seems that the person was based in the Manawatu or Rangitikei area of the North Island, or spent a lot of time in a small settlement called Bulls, and one motel in particular. Massey University is based in Palmerston North, at least, the main campus is across the Manawatu River from the town. It is hard to believe that the university administration approved of commissioning their own matchbox, let alone one with a woman in a bath on the back. Perhaps this was done by the student association in the 1970s, but of course the university has gone ‘woke’ since then. I happened to visit the campus a lot, while trying to do postgraduate study, but the social science tower there is probably going to become almost empty after recent cutbacks. I was supervised in the History department because there was no actual Politics programme, only a code for thesis work, and so I think I was the first MA graduate in Politics.
The Social Credit matchbox was a interesting find. The ‘only alternative’ refers to a philosophy based on an alternative monetary theory, that first emerged in Canada, I think, during the 1930s. It was influential among heavily indebted farmers at the time, and this helped get some rural seats won for the Labour Party in the 1935 election. Social Credit did not actually become a political party until the 1950s, and then always struggled to win an electorate under the old electoral system. They had some success in the late 1970s when their then leader, Bruce Beetham, won the Rangitikei electorate seat and held on to it for a while. They later won two urban seats in relatively affluent areas in Auckland, but mostly campaigned for electoral reform at the time, and even though that eventually came in, it was too late for the party. It seemed to be permanently split between those still faithful to the original monetary reform ideas, and those who were more pragmatic and pushed other policies. Both sides lost in electoral terms, but the remnants of the organisation still exists, and remains the only monetary alternative on offer.
Why have these two people become a Knight and Dame for doing well-remunerated jobs poorly?
So not long after Dr Ashley Bloomfield receives his gong from the Governor-General, we have the public holiday for the King’s Birthday. It isn’t actually his birthday, but this is the second honours round for the year. And his new Queen Camilla actually gets the highest honour, just because she is the new Queen. And she has actually been here a few times on paid holiday. If that were not a farce we then have the spectacle of Jacinda Ardern being given her own special status of Damehood, fit for a narcissist.
Of course it is de rigueur for the former Prime Minister to be given a knighthood. It certainly was for John Key, who had reinstated the colonial honours system so he could then receive one. As it happened, Helen Clark had actually tried to abolish the colonial titles, and instigate a local version, but one of Key’s major achievements was to restore the status quo. Now, most of the gongs are given to people of celebrity status, sports stars, or high income earners who are mostly employed by the State. Obviously the generous salary is not enough, but further down the list come the ordinary people who volunteer.
Do I need to rehearse the double-act routine of Bloomfield and Ardern, in their daily press conferences during the lockdowns which did so much damage to the society they were apparently saving. In fact, the key decision was to close the border early, and then force returning citizens into a lengthy quarantine. Once the borders had re-opened, and the Covid death toll rose exponentially, there were no more press conferences for the duo. And the fawning media never did ask Ardern why her favourite drug, that she pushed on her nationwide tours of vaccine clinics, wasn’t saving the vulnerable people she had promised it would. Bloomfield had already resigned before the death toll got too high. Then his bureaucratic successors decided to change the definition of a Covid fatality, to reduce the numbers, even though the media never ran the story anymore, at least in the main TV news bulletins it was not to be highlighted.
So what of the Ardern legacy? On the Covid front she promised a Royal Commission into the policy setting: just as long as it was limited to the glorious period of the press conference double-act, and before the phase when there was reliance on the Pfizer drug known as Cominarty. Apparently the pandemic was over by March 2022, when everyone was fully vaccinated, apart from the recalcitrants who had held out despite being disenfranchised. It seems doubtful that this Royal Commission will ever take place now, but since it was to be chaired by an academic epidemiologist, rather than a High Court judge, it would have had no significant legal status. Ardern appears to have been captured by these so-called experts, and agreed that the ‘unvaccinated’ had to be physically segregated to the maximum degree possible, although she just repeated their obsession with controlling who used public space.
The main public space in the country, the precinct of Parliament, was occupied by protestors in February 2022, and in March they were removed by force, with much damage done to the grounds. If not Ardern’s celebrity. Indeed, it still seems that, even if she was surprised by the occupation, she manipulated the narrative for short term political advantage. By refusing to negotiate with the deplorable people, or concede that any of them were protesting actual vaccine injuries, it appears to have been a classic divide and rule strategy. She came down hard on those that had disobeyed her, when she was only trying to save the citizenry from disease, and proved they were a threat to public safety. She also constructed a narrative in which all the dissent from her actions was irrational, and evidence of conspiracy theories.
In truth, Ardern created a little celebrity bubble for herself and her cheerleaders in the female dominated media. All her public events were carefully controlled, and she only took questions from officially recognised media. Her televised press conferences were orchestrated to take questions from the TV media celebrities first, and then the hacks from the other press outlets after the TV audience was gone. All of the initial questions would be from female political editors. Outside of Parliament she would call off any press conference that attracted someone who wasn’t accredited, even if they were a qualified journalist.
Ardern got stuck with the narrative in which everyone from outside the bubble, or the public profile elite, was either a follower of her or a conspiracy theorist. The media still use the term for every form of dissent, not just that concerning Covid vaccination. But a lot of the dissent came from people who had either been on the receiving end of her harsh quarantine policies, or who had been harmed by the Pfizer vaccine. She chose never to acknowledge these people’s existence; and when she said that she had made mistakes, in her valedictory speech when leaving Parliament, she never stated what the mistakes were. Even if she had been the great saviour she thinks she is, along the way she decided to ignore the legal rights of citizens, flout established constitutional conventions, and make the Parliamentary process a ‘rubber stamp’ for the Executive. She won a rare parliamentary majority under the MMP system, and decided not to make reforms to the tax system which would involve the richest citizens paying some form of wealth tax: she could impose a lockdown on all citizens, but not ask the wealthiest to pay a fair share. Her successor has only just closed a loophole which had a lower tax rate on those with trusts.
So Ardern goes off to her new role as an international celebrity, while she leaves her Labour Party about to lose in a landslide to the National Party. Some problems she left behind include: rampant inflation; a public health system in crisis; schools that are half empty; universities and polytechnics with large declines in students; a youth crime wave; a spate of murders and violence; and a country prone to extreme weather related damage. Of course she couldn’t really do anything about the weather either.
Back to the honours list, the two major parties have always rewarded their loyalists and donors. But there is also a sense in which the right sort of people are to be recognised, not those engaged in dissent. This makes the example of Nicky Hager interesting, who was honoured for his service to ‘investigative journalism’, as an independent writer. He has mainly been a researcher into defence and spying issues, but has also embarrassed both Labour and National Governments with scandals exposed during election campaigns. Maybe he doesn’t have anything up his sleeve this time. But everything he did write was always dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ by John Key. The habit of calling critics a conspiracy theorist has magnified greatly after Ardern’s reign in office, and so there is certainly some continuity there. But you have to see the irony in Labour rewarding the most effective conspiracy theorist of them all.
Chris Hipkins, the boy from Lower Hutt who has assumed Ardern’s legacy of identity politics
I was going to write something on May Day, which still provides a focus on trade union and labour mobilisation around the world. Not just the full on confrontation with the State that we see in France. It is a living tradition in many countries, irrespective of political systems, from Cuba to Australia. Actually the mass event in Cuba was cancelled due to a fuel shortage. But it is also a non-event in New Zealand despite, or because of, the fact that the Labour Party holds a parliamentary majority – what seems a very significant position belies a labour movement that is emasculated, moribund, and can’t organise politically.
This is the legacy of Jacinda Ardern. But rather than indulge in more name-calling, which is what her media cheerleaders still do, I want to be a bit more analytical. There were at least two dominant forces within Ardern’s electoral coalition that can mobilise: the first is the Maori sovereignty activists; and the second are the LGBQT activists. Both these strands are very active, but aren’t necessarily still attached to Labour, as opposed to Ardern. The Maori sovereignty activists can find representation in the Maori Party, which is also present in the Parliament. While the sexual politics activists also lean towards the Green Party. As we saw when someone named Posie Parker tried to visit New Zealand, both of these strands can mobilise, if not become mobs, when the politicians suggest their rights are under threat.
Not so much the labour or trade union movement. It’s not that they don’t get policy gains from having the Labour Party in power, and that they can mobilise when right wing parties return to government and threaten these so-called gains. Unfortunately, the labour movement does not retain its own identity and have the ability to mobilise those that identify with it, in the same way that Maori sovereignty and the transgender activists are able to march in the streets. Ardern was happy to be with them when she was in opposition, and could count on their votes, but her electoral coalition is about to splinter. And her successor, Chris Hipkins, can do nothing about it, even if he had personal charisma or a similar media savvy approach to political management. Neither of these two things would save Ardern’s premiership.
Ardern always retained something of a head girl/prefect sort of persona, along with the goofy grins that made her look like a teenager at times. I don’t think that she was a student politician, but many of her male lieutenants were, including national student presidents like Grant Robertson and Andrew Little; and the other student politicians were James Shaw and Chris Hipkins at Victoria University in Wellington. I was a contemporary of James Shaw in 1993, though older and a postgraduate student by then. While Chris Hipkins was the VUWSA president in 2000-1, and went on to work in Prime Minister Helen Clark’s office not long after that, along with long term allies Robertson and Ardern. Hipkins had also been Head Boy at a small secondary school in Lower Hutt, before it was closed in the 1990s. I happened to go to the main secondary school out there – Hutt Valley High School – and my brother was head boy.
Most of the head pupils and prefects go on to bigger and brighter things, and perhaps some fall by the wayside like me. I hated almost every second of being a student politician and wished I had never done it. This was less political at that point, and more about my experience as a postgrad student and the way that academics conducted themselves. Playing favourites is about the best way to put it, and if you did not do what they wanted, within their ideological positioning, they wouldn’t bother to help. Unless you were well connected they did not feel any need to actively supervise a thesis, but did want to keep the fees already paid. This experience was very different to that of most undergraduate students who tend to be deferential to academics, just repeating what they are told, and the undergraduates becoming student politicians had a similar approach to dealing with the university administrators.
So the lesson for student politicians was to make connections for their own career, and most were open about that being the reason why they went into it. But prior to the 1990s the student presidents and national leaders often appeared in the media, presumably because they represented a movement. I tried to have that debate in 1993, when we needed to strongly oppose the introduction of the student loan scheme, but that battle had already been lost. So in that sense student politicians lost significance, and only remained relevant when the media decided to focus on specific aspects of student hardship, but not policy. But behind all that was the fact that policymaking had become more elitest, and most significant aspects had to be beyond the reach of all ordinary elected politicians, especially in regard to economics.
In previous posts I have effectively referred to a kind of policy tyranny over Covid vaccination, in which everybody had to be deferential and ‘follow the science’ – i.e. the academic experts – even when they advocated removing fundamental civil rights. Despite the data for vaccine efficacy being weak the public health experts wanted citizens to be forced into vaccination, and this was facilitated by politicians like Ardern and Hipkins. Ardern thought she was making the correct ‘captain’s call’ based on the science, but was really just deferring to an academic agenda, and Hipkins followed suit. Indeed, the experts also want every policy situation to be framed in this way, and to impose their agenda directly into policy.
A clearer version of this can be seen in economic matters, especially with monetary policy, where the sanctity of the central bank requires that it has to have constitutional independence. This means that it is meant to focus on inflation, narrowly defined by a statistical index, irrespective of any other economic consequences, and the effect on public finance. There are still some questions about the accountability of having an all powerful central bank governor, but the end result is all that matters, and politicians have no influence. Of course, in New Zealand we have seen that the central bank engaged in untargeted ‘quantitative easing’, with an influx of liquidity in the banking system during Covid lockdowns. The result was domestic inflation, to go with rising oil prices due to war, and this meant the central bank was obliged to hike the rate of discount for the banks. But the cash rate in New Zealand is much higher than in other countries, and the governor literally wants to engineer a recession in what is an election year.
This proves that macroeconomic policy is actually determined by the central bank governor, as the independent expert, just like it is in London. The result of hiking base interest rates is a massive re-distribution of income from mortgage holders to the banking system, and in New Zealand this means mostly foreign-owned banks. All of this is apparently necessary to keep domestic inflation below 3%. But the policy is actually based on an economic theory that denies the fact of there being a fiat currency which the government should manage, with appropriate parliamentary accountability. Ardern, Robertson and Hipkins were powerless to control the ‘magic money tree’ all along. Just like, as student politicians, they were powerless to influence the education policies or practices that affected tertiary students. All they learnt was to be deferential to those who had power and expertise, and just try to occupy empty positions of power. Remember the first thing that Ardern did when she had won the landslide 2020 election: she said that there would never be a wealth tax while she was in power. So much for actually being in office, she wasn’t really in power at all, and Hipkins makes this more obvious every day now.
This is the Ministry of Health in central Wellington, just up from the Parliament, and commanding a position above the urban motorway. It used to be the scene of press conferences on Covid and presumably the centre for the response. But, it now seems that the academic experts were always leading the more aggressive aspects of the Covid restrictions. As the so-called experts like Michael Baker announce that there is now a fourth wave of Covid, based on health statistics, not only are the statistics in question. But so are the underlying basis for the recommendations to vaccinate again.
A lot has changed over the last little while. Ardern and her histrionics have gone, and so have many of her failed policies. But still we have Baker and co appearing in the media, and are given an unmediated opportunity to pursue more restrictions that the new Hipkins ministry doesn’t really have the stomach for. Certainly not anything that seems coercive. Ardern may have gone but the legal cases resulting from her vaccine mandates continue. This doesn’t matter to the likes of Baker, he always thought that that the recalcitrant anti-vaxxers should have been injected by force. But this would have been a breach of the Bill of Rights, and the right not to accept specific medical treatments, even if it was recommended.
Of course, it has always been assumed that the Ministry of Health had explicitly approved of the use of the Pfizer drug, Comirnaty, and that it should be classed as a vaccine. But new research into the legal cases by blogger Thomas Cranmer (a pseudonym), indicates that the Ministry officials were less than forthcoming about their actual views on vaccine safety and efficacy from the beginning. Cranmer argues that the expert evidence of Dr Bloomfield, and colleague Ian Town, was essentially misrepresented. In fact, the Ministry of Health and Medsafe only ever gave a provisional approval to the use of the Covid vaccine, and this was due to the lack of statistical data coming from Pfizer, about safety and efficacy.
It is worth quoting the key paragraph from Cranmer’s recent blog post which claims that Bloomfield and Town never gave a clear risk assessment of the vaccine. This had four aspects: a) that the duration of the vaccine protection had not been established beyond 2 months; b) that there was limited evidence of protection against severe disease; c) that there was no long term safety follow-up information; and d) vaccine prevention of asymptomatic infection and disease transmission has not been established.
Given the extraordinary nature of these arguments, and the legal impact of fudging them, let’s look at each in turn. The fourth one is not in doubt, it is perfectly obvious that the vaccine has not stopped the transmission of the virus, and people know it. That is why around 1.5 million doses have recently expired, in spite of the expert advice, because ordinary people know it is not working. The third point is extremely important, because officials were aware from the start that Comirnaty could cause serious heart disease like myocarditis, especially in younger people. This explains why the Medsafe safety reports were made weekly to begin with, although the reporting has now ceased completely. Meantime, the second point is also incredibly significant, since it makes clear that the efficacy of the vaccine was always in doubt, and required evidence that it prevented severe disease. Of course the academic experts have always claimed that the vaccine provided the best possible prevention of severe disease, and they produce the studies to prove it, when the actual evidence has been that thousands of boosted people have died in the last year. But the real insight is in the first point, that the officials knew that the vaccine was only worth 2 months ‘protection’, at best, and it obviously doesn’t provide life-long immunity.
Of course, the Ministry of Health officials have authorised advertising which claims that the vaccine does provide life-long immunity, at least for young children. And there has now been a long list of distortions and manipulation of statistics, which now mean that the Ministry’s data cannot be relied upon. When the death toll rose rapidly last year, from around 50 in January to over 2000 in July, the Ministry changed the definition of a death with Covid, to thereafter be counted officially for deaths from Covid. This implied that the Ministry officials could determine cause of death without a formal medical examination. Strangely, for the reports of death caused by the vaccine, assumed to be mostly heart disease, officials like Bloomfield have never accepted causation. The reported deaths remain at 184, as of November 2022, and only 4 of the ‘likely’ cases have been referred to the Coroner. A key part of Cranmer’s blog post is the evidence from Dr Town which highlights the risk of myocarditis from having repeated injections. This is what actually led to the decision to have 6 month intervals for boosting.
It is still hard to reconcile the nature of this advice with the resulting policies, including the coercive mandates and the general assumption of vaccine safety and efficacy that have never been conclusively established in scientific evidence. Yet we were continually told that the policymakers were following the science at all times. It is now clear that they were following particular scientists with an agenda, and doubts over the veracity of the scientific evidence only had a small role in moderating policy; while so-called experts, who have never admitted any safety issues, continue to advocate for mandatory policy.
The situation in New Zealand was even more extreme that in Australia, it would seem. It turns out that the officials there had been aware of the likelihood of vaccine injuries, and they appear to have a process for individuals to make claims (for those that have survived serious heart disease). This was discussed briefly on Sky News Australia, on the Sharri programme, when Sharri Markson was talking to a former official Dr Nick Coatsworth. Although it seems that Coatsworth is far more moderate than his trans-Tasman extremist experts, he still made the extraordinary claim that, despite a few thousand vaccine ‘injuries’, the vaccine is still ‘safe’. Really? How many have to die from vaccine injury, or the virus, before evidence would be there for vaccine failure. Using a utilitarian argument for continued vaccine boosters, which don’t stop the transmission, has problematic ethical implications. So it doesn’t matter if a few thousand die along the way, as long as the vaccine is seen as being better than nothing.
In the dramatic second episode of Survivors the engineer Greg encounters the aristocratic Anne, who has shacked up with the unfortunate Vic Thatcher. Vic has had an accident with a tractor and his legs were pinned, before Greg got him out. But that is the extent of his knowledge, as neither Anne nor Greg have any medical training. Greg tries to make splints, and Anne eventually decides to abandon crippled Vic.
Besides being one of the most compelling storylines in the original Survivors TV series, it also shows what it is like to live without the implicit assurance of a public health system, and faith in an ambulance being available. In fact, it is mostly about the moral bonds between people, as opposed to the mercenary behaviour that characters under pressure can resort to. Indeed, the callous Anne is actually a complex character: when she was alone she very much needed Vic, but once he became a liability that was it, eventually. Yet, in the TV programme, it was actually Greg that made it clear he was leaving them alone.
Anyway this is all about injuries and the expectation of others, either as family or as health professionals. While Vic broke both legs in the fictional version, in real life, two months ago, I broke both arms when falling off a bicycle. Well, strictly speaking, a fractured wrist on one side; and on the other, broken ribs and a fractured clavicle (collar bone). This is a very common form of injury in road cycling, as seen in races on TV, but professional cyclists have doctors on hand immediately and then go off to hospital. It turns out that this does not happen in the New Zealand public health system anymore.
So I had the accident on an early Sunday afternoon. A motorist had stopped and called for an ambulance. I did not hear the conversation, but I gathered that it was not serious enough to send an ambulance, especially since a hospital is some distance away, in another city. Then another stranger took me to a local medical clinic, that masquerades as the local emergency centre. Anyone who has had a broken collar bone will know how painful it is, especially to take off clothing. I was at the medical clinic all afternoon, but, while it was not busy, it took hours to get X-rays taken. By then the pills they gave me had worn off, so no morphine from this clinic. They had to cut me out of some garments, and then I had a makeshift sling for my broken collar bone arm, and a makeshift cast for my right forearm. It was actually two bits of some old packaging, or so it seemed, stuck together, and pressed close up to my fingers so that I was barely able to use my hand. I was meant to go into the hospital later the next day.
But that never happened. On the next day I was in pain early in the morning, unable to change out of my lycra shorts, and had cold feet. I tried for the ambulance again to take me to the ED in the nearest city. They did send an ambulance this time, but when they got there the paramedics refused to offer any treatment. They also wouldn’t give me any pain relief, and claimed they didn’t have any, an obvious lie. I was lectured about the need to wear loose clothing, rather than lycra, and had to beg for help to change into other clothing, and get some socks on. They then told me to get a taxi back to same clinic again.
I was actually given an appointment for an outpatients service at Kenepuru Hospital, which was 9 days after the accident. The Accident Compensation Corporation arranged for private contractors to drive me there and back; and they eventually provided 3 hours of home help per week. So it took 10 days to get help in the shower, and avoid getting my cast wet. Of course, the authorities knew that I live alone, but did not speed up the process. You may ask why my family did not help. Well, they did, a bit, but my elderly mother was already in Kenepuru hospital, where she stayed for weeks waiting for surgery. I also complained about my initial treatment, but the Health & Disability Commissioner would not accept the complaint. I now face many more months of physiotherapy, mostly in the private sector at considerable cost.
So, there we are, like so many in New Zealand I have been failed by the public health system, and instead of nine hours in an ED to get a competent cast and sling, I had to wait nine days. So I have lost faith in the system, and now rather tire of how the health professionals claim to be so conscientious, but terribly underpaid. Paramedics moan about wanting to help people, but are not getting enough money to be bothered, at least for the deserving patients, not the silly old fools who fall off bikes and ladders.
One has to ask why there is such a shortage of medical professionals around the world, when they are so pious about wanting to help people. Indeed, they are usually paid much better than the average university graduate. Yes doctors have to study for a long time, and often get into a lot of student loan debt. But it takes much longer for other students to become doctors in their specialism, given that most must get three degrees before they can begin a PhD. And medical graduates know they will have a choice of jobs, and can work anywhere they like, when some of us failures with large debts end up working for the minimum wage. And one more thing for anyone reading this in the UK. The medical clinic I talked about had a male Scottish doctor, a female Irish doctor, and a Geordie nurse on staff. As with physiotherapists working in New Zealand, many have come from the NHS in the mother country.
Professor Peter Openshaw told the BBC’s global audience yesterday (at 10am British time) that the mRNA vaccines have not caused serious cases of myocarditis. This appeared to be in response to an earlier interview on BBC News, that only their domestic audience saw, which must have based on evidence from those with serious side effects after being injected, which is not that uncommon at all.
So from what I saw, which was at 11pm New Zealand time, Openshaw was asked to clarify the comments made about ordinary patients who had a medical event after an injection. As a so-called expert on Covid 19, Openshaw, like so many other epidemiologists, decided he had to negate the anecdotal evidence just broadcast to cast aspersions on it, which turned out to be from an English cardiologist . He did this by referring to an apparently broad-based survey found in some academic literature. Then he made a number of dubious claims based on its findings. These included: that only 7 people per million of those injected had got myocarditis; these people were all male aged between 12 and 15; and this only happened after the second dose. And, of course, he did not acknowledge that there had been any deaths.
Now, in Australia and New Zealand there is official data on Covid vaccine safety, and reports of serious disease, including myocarditis and pericarditis, as well as other serious conditions. These reports are released by health officials, even though they are trying to maintain the line that the Pfizer vaccine is still safe, despite the thousands of reports from medical practitioners, as well as members of the public. I have referred to New Zealand cases before, the most recent is in the 46th report, released in mid-December, for the period ending 30 November 2022. In fact, this may be the last report because so few people now get injected with the Pfizer vaccine, given that it is obvious it does not provide any immunity and thousands of fully vaccinated people have died in the last year.
So in the most recent ‘safety report’, the cases of myocarditis and pericarditis have now almost reached 1000, and the majority are considered serious. Almost all of these cases are in people older than 15, and, of course, there are women as well as men getting the heart disease. A significant number of myocarditis cases are reported after the first dose of Comirnaty, as was the case with Rory Nairn, the 26 year old who died as a result of the injection. Medsafe have now decided to refer a fourth case of myocarditis related death to the Coroner, although this is a reconsideration of an historical case, which may not be made public. That brings the total number of reported deaths from the Pfizer vaccine to 184 in New Zealand.
Now, the so-called academic experts in New Zealand are never asked about vaccine safety, and they just repeat the mantra that it is completely safely and totally effective, if you keep getting boosted. They usually don’t refer to immunity, but say that the vaccine is the ‘best protection’ against serious disease and death. Nonetheless, in the last year, and since the border has been reopened, thousands of people have died with Covid 19. The death toll was around 50 at the beginning of 2022; when it reached 2000 in the middle of the year, the health officials decided to revise the death toll, and release statistics based on people who died from the virus, not all those who had the virus when they passed. This meant that the officials were making judgments about cause of death without doing actual medical examinations; and this was inconsistent with their practice on vaccine safety, where they never accept causation until the coroner makes a decision. This makes for constant revisions, and rather unreliable statistics, but we know that thousands of older New Zealanders are dying, and most have actually been boosted twice.
Ironically perhaps, the reports of serious disease caused by the vaccine are more reliable,since they are made by doctors who are under incredible pressure to maintain that the vaccine is safe for everyone. By contrast, academics like Openshaw, and the strident vaccine evangelists that occupy the ivory towers in New Zealand, can say anything they like and claim that it has statistical backing. Indeed, it is amazing how these commentators always have a new academic study on hand to back up their opinions. In the old days scholarly research took ages to publish, because it had to be peer reviewed, and scientific theories had to be ‘falsifiable’, in other words, it had to have an empirical basis to be credible. Saying that only teenage boys get myocarditis from vaccines is empirical false, and Openshaw is a shameless liar.
Shakespeare Bay 