Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern makes her opening address at the APEC CEO Summit in Wellington. Photo / Getty Images
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 our audience loved the most. Today it's the top five from Matthew Hooton.
The Prime Minister's communication skills have again successfully delivered a lockdown. With luck, events will unfold in a similar way to last autumn. In a month, we'll move out of level 4 before spending a fortnight in level 3, and get back to normal by November.
But then what?
Jacinda Ardern's top Covid adviser, Sir David Skegg, laments that New Zealand has been let down by our allies. Presumably he mainly means Australia but his point applies to almost the whole world, except a few other remote islands.
No other country has achieved lockdowns as tough as New Zealand's, and thereby executed an elimination strategy. Especially with the Delta strain, almost everyone else has accepted that Covid is here to stay.
Read the full article: Covid response can't look past lockdown
Younger people and Māori are least willing to deal with health authorities and the state — more so if they know they have methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA or cannabis in their blood. Yet anyone who uses drugs in New Zealand is connected with and known to the criminal gangs, whether they are aware of it or not.
With Ardern's inexplicable decision to liberalise restrictions just as cases are rising, prominent scientists and modellers fear that New Zealand is heading to a Victoria-style outbreak. If that happens, current or greater restrictions will continue until at least the end of November and perhaps into next year.
Sickeningly, it is the criminal gangs who know best about distribution to the hardest-to-reach parts of the 20-34 age group, and persuading them to stick things up their noses and into their arms.
The Wellington bureaucracy will always fail to get those groups to comply. The gangs have better methods of persuasion.
Read the full article: Gangs hold our Covid freedom in their hands
Since Jacinda Ardern abandoned elimination on October 4 by announcing Auckland's move to level 3 the next day, a remorseless logic has been driving her decisions.
To her credit, Ardern is boldly going with the flow: abandoning her levels and steps in favour of the new traffic lights; introducing domestic vaccine passports; expanding compulsory vaccination to at least 40 per cent and perhaps the whole workforce; expanding the types of vaccines New Zealand recognises; planning to open all schools in two weeks; fast-tracking the approval and purchase of Pfizer's paediatric and booster vaccines plus Merck's new antiviral pill; moving yesterday towards abolishing managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ); and on track to abandon her own vaccination targets and internal borders by Christmas if that doesn't happen automatically under current policy.
The Prime Minister has no real choice. The conceit that we alone would beat Delta was just another manifestation of our naive national myth of Kiwi exceptionalism. Our Covid journey will ultimately follow roughly the same path as everywhere else.
Read the full article: The remorseless logic driving Ardern's decisions
It's not impossible for major parties to completely dissolve. In 1993, Canada's 50-year-old Progressive Conservatives collapsed from 169 seats to just two. The party was wound up in 2003.
Nevertheless, MMP should save National, as it did Labour in the mid-1990s and 2010s.
The question party members keep asking is how far along its recovery is it compared with Labour from 2008 to 2017.
Read the full article: National's woes go right to the top
Judith Collins' entry into the politics of race doesn't seem as well planned or even coherent.
One of Collins' first moves as National Party leader was to distance herself from its 17-year policy to boycott and abolish the Māori seats. Instead, she asked party president Peter Goodfellow to find candidates to stand in them. Goodfellow felt proximity to the election made that impractical.
Just this week, National has asked its members whether to put Te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Treaty of Waitangi into the party's constitution, and reserve one seat on its board for a Māori director.
In part, this was prompted by private discussions with Northland iwi leaders with whom National has historically had good relations, including the late, great Sir Graham Latimer being National's Māori vice-president from 1981 to 1992. Dame Whina Cooper also had close National Party links.
Unless Collins' objective is to undermine her own party's review, recent events don't seem like a strong foundation on which to attack Andrew Little's planned Māori Health Authority (MHA), warning that it puts us on track towards separate education and justice systems.
Read the full article: Judith Collins takes aim at the wrong target
