Glad to hear on what we said first!
The opposition parties of New Zealand today echo the same voice that The Indian News first raised two weeks ago, advising Jacinda government on the points, to deal with the current Delta crisis. Former Prime Minister Sir John Key went even one step further by calling government’s approach of dealing with pandemic like if we live in a ‘smug hermit kingdom’. While some may not agree with former Prime Minister’s harsh comments, but the fact remains that government shouldn’t be using fear tactics to get people vaccinated and should make the way to ease the lockdown at soonest.
Government needs to speed up the vaccination at much faster pace and to mass vaccinate the maximum number of people. That is the only way forward. Vaccination also needs to be incentivised in certain cases and as Sir John suggested also withdraw the rights of people to go night club or taking a flight if they are not double vaccinated. Shutting doors to the world is not the solution to this problem. This is what Sir John referred to as ‘smug hermit kingdom’. Government needs to have a clear strategy, have a set plan, and a set date to achieve the target by accelerating vaccination and then open the borders to the world. If it’s not done now, then I am afraid New Zealand will be left far behind from rest of the world in controlling the pandemic. Our government did get enough time to make a clear strategy to deal effectively with any repeat of the virus when we had zero cases for around 180 days in a row. Just imposing lockdown is not the only solution to stamp out the virus. This is the outcome of the indecisiveness of the government who didn’t act fast enough to procure the vaccines in time. How would this government justify to not paying $40 million to Pfizer to buy the vaccine but pay over a billion and a half per week to be in level-4 lockdown.
The worst sufferers from these lockdowns are the service industries and retail businesses. Once put under a 5-6 or 7-week lockdown, the economy goes back many years. Its impossible to recoup the losses incurred during that period. Going forward government should look into incentivising the employees and authorising employers to vaccinate its people at workplace, the way they do now for the flu jabs every year. New Zealand Government should also lift the ban from Covid-19 home testing immediately. If our much bigger neighbour Australia can allow people to do home testing to boost people’s confidence and reduce burden on health services, why not us. Its time, people will have to learn to live with this virus or any other coming in future. The very approach of stamping out the virus is not going to work in future. It’s not realistic anymore because of the heavy economic costs involve to it. Government should rather put efforts towards making health infrastructure more robust, increase health workers and doctors and be expeditious enough to go with rest of the world. Countries like India can be a good example to follow, not only they developed two or three of their own vaccines but are also mass vaccinating its population. Just imagine how a country of 1.4 billion is able to make the best usage of its limited resources by vaccinating more than one New Zealand every day. This is absolutely achievable in New Zealand if government decides to do with a firm will.
Anyone here should not take an impression that this government has not done anything good but the approach to tackle the problem certainly lacks the clarity. Its not sensible for any government to keep adding burden of over a billion dollar every week to the exchequer. There will be long term consequences of this government’s actions of today. Eventually, it will be our people only who will pay for it, though some of these people today may the enjoying the benefits of the frequently happening lockdowns.
-Yugal Parashar