Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion
As we say goodbye to 2021 and welcome in 2022, it's a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views ouraudience loved the most. Today it's the top five from Jane Clifton.
Government's silence on immigration is deafening - May 1
The Government is attempting to reset immigration at a time when labour shortfalls are being felt in critical sectors of the economy. Sometimes the best indication of what a Government is doing is what it's quietly avoiding doing.
When it comes to immigration, it's a blur of inactivity. The Government has had the tremendous alibi of the pandemic to halt the inflow. But indications are the tide is not going to be allowed to come back in once the world is vaccinated. It's no secret there's a policy review under way and that its purpose is not in the spirit of Sir Dave Dobbyn's Welcome Home anthem.
At a recent select committee hearing, Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi demonstrated how one could be a man of action by being a man of inaction. All categories of incomers were on hold indefinitely pending a "reset", he said, doing a good impression of a person who had secretly left the room, having assigned an android on autopilot to deflect further inquiries.
Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi. Photo / Mark Mitchell
As Covid mutates, so does public policy - Govt concedes elimination is over - September 26
As Covid-19 mutates, so does public policy – though often rather grudgingly. The latest variant, produced after painful weeks of denial from the official podium, is that New Zealand is eliminating its elimination strategy. The Government has finally accepted that we will have to live with coronavirus, just like every other country.
The Prime Minister would rather have undergone unanaesthetised root canal surgery than made this concession. It's still possible that someone secretly put something in her almond milk, and she'll wake up tomorrow and resurrect elimination. The strategy was globally regarded as a shining beacon until quite recently, and seems to have become a talisman of leadership for her.
Increasingly this year, however, a more up-to-date scientific consensus has driven a new political momentum behind the reality that this virus is ineradicable. Thanks to the wildly gregarious Delta variant, it has grown nimbler. Its sibling, the Mu variant, is about to join its world tour, and others are expected.
Even the fully vaccinated can still catch and transmit it. The only thing we can realistically now eliminate is Covid's severity. The fully vaccinated are exponentially less likely to die or suffer severe illness, and that, rather than elimination, is the foundation on which restoration of freedom depends.
A health worker at the Free Wesleyan Church Of Tonga pop-up vaccination centre in Favona, Auckland on September 9, 2021. Photo / Michael Craig
The big business thunderbolt that everybody missed - August 21
It wasn't quite up there with the Vatican demanding the ordination of women or Donald Trump conceding the US election, but a pretty big thunderbolt went off here last month.
The Institute of Directors (IoD) formally asked the Government to consider whether public companies should be forced to give equal weight to public-interest issues such as the needs of customers and the environment, alongside the imperative of optimising returns to shareholders.
This should have caused a sensation. It's as though the Vampires' Collective demanded Dracula be made to go vegan several days a week. As the directors more sedately characterised it, the shareholders-first tradition is outdated and irresponsible. Their submission made it clear directors had grown increasingly uneasy about balancing profit-maximising decisions, and social and other factors.
This disquiet was behind so many companies repaying their Covid support money, despite the obligations being a grey area. More topically, a number of electricity company directors will be mortified their profit-optimisation governance imperative caught the sector with its pants around its ankles last week, causing rolling power cuts.
Frustration builds over New Zealand's risk-averse Covid response - July 30
Someone has decided to amalgamate two daredevil reality TV shows, Jackass and MythBusters, and mount a couple of international productions, best known to us as Freedom Day in Britain and the Olympic Games in Japan. These are basically real-time experiments on live humans, who, to be fair, know what the risks are in advance of the experiments they're about to be involved in.
It's unfortunate that most of the participants are not exactly voluntary. Millions of Japanese and Britons are decidedly unkeen and have done everything possible to block these extravaganzas.
A bit selfish, really, because from what happens to them, the rest of the world will find out some useful information about pandemic spread. For instance, that if you send groups of people from all over the world on aeroplanes to one common venue, some vaccinated, some partially vaccinated and some carrying the virus, you create the perfect arena for coronavirus to stage its own variant Olympics. What? We already knew that? Never mind.
In Britain's case, we will see what happens when a country with a population only about 60 per cent fully vaccinated and a statistically significant anti-vax quotient trusts its citizens to go about their business without taking pandemic precautions unless they feel like it, while Covid numbers are on the rise. Okay, we already know how that will work out, too.
People wearing protective masks cross a street in Tokyo, Japan on October 12, 2021. Photo / AP
Delta joins catalogue of issues Govt is struggling with - August 27
As The Hobbit author JRR Tolkien observed, it does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near one. New Zealand, with the extremely live Delta variant of the Covid dragon rampaging next door, is now finding out whether its calculations have been adequate – not least its political reckoning.
It'll be a while before it's known how far Delta has spread from the first case discovered at large in Auckland, but already it has caused a salutary outbreak of hindsight. It always seemed inevitable Delta would get loose, but something changes in the human psyche when near-misses keep happening. There have been several skirmishes with potential Delta sources here, not least the infected crew of a ship that docked at Tauranga, but we appeared to dodge the bullet each time. Academics who study how people respond to mistakes say the more times someone gets away with doing something wrong, the safer they think it is. It isn't any safer, but progressively less care is applied, with predictable and unhappy results.
When even an experienced national and local politician such as Sandra Goudie, Mayor of Thames-Coromandel, where Delta has definitely paid a call, says on day one of the new lockdown that she rarely bothers to scan her Covid phone app, it's clear this sort of magical thinking about the pandemic is common.
So far, voters are likely again to be tolerant of the Government's precautionary stance. That the virus transferred in a quarantine facility just because two people opened neighbouring room doors at the same time has nailed home how virulent this little dragon is. What's less clear is how long people can stand playing "What's the time, Mr Wolf?" if rolling stop-start lockdowns become necessary.
