John MacDonald: The sting in Covid's tail for our politicians

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

Do you think the last government spoiled things for everyone? There’s a question!

Let me clarify that a little bit. Do you think the last government spoiled things for every politician from here on in, with the way it handled the COVID-19 pandemic?

Because if we believe the COVID report which came out yesterday, then Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins etc ruined the party for every other politician - current and future - because of the damage they did when it comes to the public's trust.

It says, if a similar pandemic happened now, the public would have less trust in the Government and there would be less willingness to comply with the rules. And I have no doubt that would be the case.

I think that trust in the government will never be restored to what it might have been before COVID-19. And there are two reasons why I think that. One is connected to how Labour ran things. The other isn’t.

So, yesterday, we knew the report on the first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into New Zealand’s COVID response was being delivered to the Government. What we didn’t know was when it was going to be released to the public.

All the talk ahead of yesterday had been that it was going to be next year before it saw the light of day. But the Government probably assumed that trust was going to feature in the report big time and knew that, if it was going to have a chance of restoring that trust, then sitting on this report for months wasn’t the way to go.

Not that I think that it will do much good on that front. Because there are two reasons why I don’t see trust in government ever getting back to what it used to be.

Let’s start with the one that isn’t related to Labour’s handling of the pandemic. And this is to do with the global political shift we’ve seen in the last few years, where people have said they’ve just had enough of governments telling them how to live their lives. Because they just don’t trust governments and politicians.

The other reason why I think that public trust in the government will never be what it used to be here in New Zealand, is specific to the way Labour handled the pandemic response.

I think most people would agree that, in the early days at least, they trusted Jacinda Ardern’s government to do the right thing in the face of what was significant global uncertainty.

But like most crises, COVID went on and on and on. We had all the different strains of the virus. We had different countries doing things differently. We had people losing patience with all the lockdowns and mask wearing and COVID cards.

So we had all that volatility. But the Labour Government just stuck to the plan it started with in the first place. Delivered with a "we know best” attitude. Which is why people stopped trusting them. And I don’t see public trust in our politicians ever being fully restored.

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