During the first Covid19 lockdown the government cleverly and skilfully used the tactic of inclusion to build support for its initiatives and marginalise its critics. Hence the frequent references to all being in this together as part of the “team of five million.”

In their anxiety and fear of the looming pandemic people quickly brought into this approach and the government reaped strong compliance and substantial political approval for its actions. Consequently, it was easily able to isolate its critics, from anti-vaxxers to the anarchistic rabble that occupied Parliament grounds, as not being part of the “team”, and therefore not worthy of further consideration. By and large, the public agreed.

However, over the following couple of years, aspects of this approach started to grate more and more. First, was the controversy that erupted over the way the MIQ system was operated, with increasing numbers of families affected by its arbitrary and uneven procedures and the seeming indifference of officials to their concerns. Then came the vaccine mandates and the suggestion that the small minority of New Zealanders who misguidedly chose not to be vaccinated, as was their right, should be discriminated against regarding employment and access to government services.

This type of overreach was generally seen as a step too far. It culminated in then Covid19 Minister Hipkins’ short-lived suggestion, that Aucklanders seeking to leave the city for Christmas 2021 should have to apply for permits and be given allocated times to do so. That idea led to New Zealanders starting to push back more actively on the government’s interventions and saw it begin steadily removing restrictions during the first half of 2022.

But while the physical restrictions were steadily removed, a more sinister, intangible aspect remained and now looks as though it might have become a permanent feature. The “you’re either with us, or agin us” sense that the “team of five million” mantra inculcated has permeated wider society. Despite being a country with one of the diverse Parliaments in the world, we have become a far less tolerant society since the pandemic.

Where previously, different views might have been shrugged off as just ill-informed or eccentric, there is now a growing feeling that such views are simply wrong, and therefore dangerous, and should not be promoted, or even held at all.

A good example occurred earlier this week. Maureen Pugh, the list MP National needs like a hole in the head, foolishly said she had seen no evidence of human activities contributing to climate change. Her timing was appalling, not only coming right on the back of the devastation and misery caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, but also upstaging her leader’s response to the Prime Minister’s statement at the start of Parliament for the year.

Unsurprisingly, she backed down within a few hours, relying on the old politician’s excuse of having not been reported accurately. There the matter should have ended with Pugh left to swallow her embarrassment and absorb the wrath of her colleagues who felt completely sideswiped by her unexpected remarks. People could have drawn their own conclusions about the worth of her views, and how seriously to take them.

But, in the new age of intolerance we are now beset by, the argument quickly ceased to be about Pugh’s ill-informed views, and far more about whether as a MP, she even had a right to express views that were clearly out of line with the mainstream of national opinion on an important issue like climate change. It was the old “you’re either with us, or agin us” mentality of the pandemic response all over again.

Now, I have no truck with Pugh’s views. I think she is plain wrong, and I recall that she has also expressed anti-vax sentiments previously. But they are her views, and she has a right to express them, regardless of her status as an MP, or what the rest of us might think.

That is what free speech in an open democracy is all about. Public debate, not community censorship, is the best antidote to views that appear quirky or extreme to the majority, and we should never shy away from that. The last thing we need is the mediocrity and uniformity of a “carbon copy” approach to the expression of public opinion. As Voltaire so famously said, “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” We need to rekindle that principle.

Making judgements about what should be believed and what should not, should never be based on the type of artificial absolute that applied during the extreme circumstances of the pandemic. Doing so poses a more dangerous threat to free speech than the expression of certain views themselves. We do not need to be told what views are acceptable in public discourse and which ones are not – that was exactly the problem the government ran up against in its early efforts to define what constituted hate speech.

Rather, we need to focus afresh on promoting informed debate based on thorough information. The best response to Pugh’s outburst came from her colleague Nicola Willis who said she would be giving Pugh all the relevant reputable data and expected her to be doing a lot of reading. It is the sort of response that would have been the norm before the new absolutism engendered by the pandemic took hold, but which is now becoming threatened. Previously, we would have trusted people to reach their own conclusions.

The irony is that over the years New Zealand has been more diligent than most in calling out threats to the freedom of expression and the rights of minorities in other countries. We have even gone to wars in the past on that clarion call.

We should uphold the principle once more at home.

 

 One of the lessons the government learned early in the Covid19 response was the importance of controlling the narrative. The flow of information was quickly centralised and controlled. The daily 1:00 pm media conference became institutionalised. Information, scientific, medical, or otherwise, that did not come through this channel was both scorned and dismissed.

The then Prime Minister even went so far as to say, “we will continue to be your single source of truth … unless you hear it from us it is not the truth”. George Orwell’s “1984” could not have parodied centralised control of information better than the reality New Zealanders faced in 2020-21. Yet, because of the urgency of the situation, and the widespread fear of the pandemic and its potential effects, the government’s strategy worked, and New Zealanders by and large complied.

While those extraordinary days seem far off now, and while New Zealanders are perhaps more cynical and wary about the blanket exercise of government power than they were then, elements of the Hipkins’ government’s response to Cyclone Gabrielle look like direct lifts from the Covid19 response playbook.

Following the bumbling response of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown to the year’s first cyclone, Cyclone Hale, in January, the government has been looking for a way it can get more directly involved in managing the response to disasters of this scale. Normally, the power to declare a state of emergency rests with the affected local authority. But when Cyclone Gabrielle struck the government moved quickly to declare a national state of emergency. In part this was due to the sheer scale of the event and the damage it was causing, and in part to government frustration that it had been largely shut out of any role in the response to Cyclone Hale until it was too late.

This is not at all unreasonable and follows the pattern set by the Covid19 outbreak and the Christchurch earthquakes, the only two previous occasions when a national state of emergency has been declared.

However, one of the more unsavoury aspects of the Covid19 response, and the determination to centrally manage the dissemination of information to the public, was the suspension of Parliament for several weeks, despite the availability of communication systems that would have enabled it to continue meeting on a virtual basis. The intention then was to shut down any avenue for critical scrutiny of the government’s actions, lest the exercise of that accountability expose cracks in both the veracity and substance of the “single source of truth”.

It was a state of control of public discourse unmatched since the emergency regulations promulgated during the 1951 Waterfront lockout, which made it illegal at that time to publish material critical of the government’s actions, or supportive of the locked-out watersiders.

Parliament was due to resume this week, but in an eerie reminder of what happened in 2020, the government quickly deferred that until next week, curiously with the support of the National Party this time. It means, as in 2020, for the critical period of the initial response to the crisis, the government will escape the scrutiny of Parliament for its actions. And, as in 2020, without Parliament sitting, the Opposition has been deprived of its best forum to hold the government to account for what is happening.

By the time Parliament does resume next week, the immediacy of the current crisis will have passed. In the meantime, though, the government, through monotonous, regular media conferences and interviews, will have been able to establish the legitimacy of its narrative as the one true version of events. And any divergence from that line from any of the local authorities, emergency agencies, or the thousands of directly affected citizens will be able to be dismissed as mischievous and inaccurate.

But the right of Parliament to meet is a fundamental part of being a parliamentary democracy, dating back to the days of King Charles I, nearly 400 years ago. The New Zealand Parliament has previously met in dark days – throughout World War II, for example, and Britain’s House of Commons even continued meeting while it was being bombed during the Blitz in 1940. Governments then would never have dreamt of suspending Parliament in a crisis, however inconvenient full scrutiny and accountability might have been at the time.

It was wrong for the government to suspend Parliament in 2020, and it was wrong for it to do so again this week, especially when, as it turned out, most MPs, including the Prime Minister, were in Wellington. There was no threat to public health or safety, as could have been argued in 2020, and therefore no compelling argument why Parliament could not have met.

This smacks of the government seeking to control the flow of public information and limit its own exposure to criticism and accountability, just as it did in 2020. Unfortunately, that detracts from other positive aspects of the response to Cyclone Gabrielle, notably the unflinching, brave, and selfless work of the fire, emergency and urban search and rescue services.

However, it is not acceptable that in two of the three national states of emergency declared in our history, both times under Labour-led governments, Parliament has been so quickly pushed to one side as the response has unfolded. There needs to be urgent agreement between all the political parties that in future states of national emergency Parliament will not be suspended for the sake of the government’s convenience.

Hipkins was a senior Minister during the 2020 Covid19 response. He was frequently alongside the former Prime Minster at the “podium of truth” and directly knows the power of controlling the flow of information and the political dividend it can pay. He well remembers that in 2020 the government was teetering on the brink of defeat until Covid19 came along, and that skilful management of the response produced a landslide election win. Aspects of his response to Cyclone Gabrielle suggest he has his eye on producing a similar effect for this year’s election.               

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is aiming to pull off a change of government within a government. He hopes this will stave off any need for that to happen at this year's election. To succeed, his policy reset had to do more than just take presently unpopular items off the government's agenda. It had also to reassure wavering voters that Hipkins is leading a genuinely different government from that which preceded it. 

To achieve that, Hipkins had to convince voters his reset was a genuine, substantive policy shift, not just shifting some difficult issues off the immediate agenda, and that they will not resurface after the election, albeit under different guises.

 

Hipkins’ biggest problem remains convincing a sceptical public that the same Ministers who have promoted the government’s unpopular policies, can now be trusted to not only withdraw them, but also not to restore them, in the event they win the election. After all, these are the same Ministers who championed and staunchly defended the government’s unpopular policies, many of which were their pet projects, until he became Prime Minister. They are also the Ministers who airily dismissed public criticism of what they were doing as simply ill-informed.

 

The Prime Minister announced the first, and by his own admission, the most significant parts of the reset yesterday. Some unpopular policies have been dropped, but most have merely been deferred to another day.

 

The biggest casualty is the outright scrapping of the proposed RNZ/TVNZ merger. This has been a key feature of Labour’s programme since 2017, consistently and increasingly ferociously promoted by Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson. Without it, he and the former Prime Minister frequently argued, Radio New Zealand would struggle to survive. To the general public, the policy was never a core issue, with criticism limited largely to media and academic circles. Therefore, dropping it was a low-cost option for the government, with minimal immediate public impact. But it has severely dented Jackson’s credibility. To soften the blow and appease Labour’s influential Maori caucus, Jackson was, incredibly, promoted by Hipkins to the government's front bench in last week's reshuffle.

 

The deferral of the proposed income insurance scheme came as no great surprise. The ambitious and fundamentally worthy plan was first announced in February 2022. But its design and development was taking considerably longer than originally envisaged, and its original 2025 implementation date was looking more and more unlikely. Increasingly strong opposition from  business interests and the National Party has left its future was looking very uncertain, even if the government is re-elected. Deferring it at this stage “until economic conditions improve” was therefore a logical decision.

 

The decision to kick proposed hate speech legislation - even the watered down version announced late last year - off to the Law Commission makes sense, on the face of it. But the government's proposals, including the original highly controversial plans promoted by former Justice Minister Fa'foi in 2021 are already under consideration by the Law Commission, so it is hard to see what is new here. The government simply seems to have at last recognised the deep unpopularity of its plans and found a convenient receptacle in which to park them.

 

Hipkins has always said his prime focus is on the reducing the cost-of-living burden on New Zealand households. He says the reset was about giving the government the space to do so. For the foreseeable future, though, the canning of the RNZ/TVNZ merger, the indefinite postponement of income insurance, and the sideways shift of hate speech law will have no discernible impact on household budgets, although they do remove some awkward items from the government’s political agenda.

 

The cancellation of the biofuels mandate, which required the promotion of biofuels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and would have led to increased fuel prices for consumers will have a more direct impact on households. Like the extension of the fuel excise tax reduction, it will keep fuel prices lower for longer, but at the expense of the environment. With dramatic, damaging adverse weather events due to climate change becoming more frequent, these moves will be seen by many as inconsistent with the government’s long-term climate change mitigation strategy. In the present circumstances, it will  increase cynicism about the sincerity of Labour’s climate change commitment. Auckland voters, cleaning out their flooded houses and properties at present, may well be scratching their heads about how seriously the government now takes climate change.

 

By far the most controversial issue facing the government at present is Three Waters. Many were hoping the Prime Minister, having dropped Nanaia Mahuta as Local Government Minister, would have dropped Three Waters altogether. While that was never going to happen, Hipkins’ announcements regarding Three Waters’ future were vague and ambivalent. Yes, it needed changes, he said, but things could not go on as they are, so he has asked the new Minister of Local Government to look at ways Three Waters could be modified, and further announcements could be expected later on. That is hardly likely to satisfy Three Waters’ most vehement critics. Nor will it persuade more moderate doubters that the government really understands, or is even interested in, the strength of local feeling there is in preserving local control of water assets.

 

Hipkins has said there will be more policy refinements over coming weeks, but that this tranche represents the most significant ones. Given that, yesterday’s announcements are more a tinkering of existing policies than a bold reset. With the exception of the RNZ/TVNZ merger, most seem to set to resurface if Labour is re-elected in October. Hipkins’ assurances that dropping them gives the government the space it needs to address the cost-of-living pressures New Zealand households are facing currently is all very well. But in the absence of specific policies to do so, that claim is just a convenient excuse.

 

What is now clear is that this reset was really about giving the new Prime Minister an excuse to push some of the government’s more unpopular policies away into the back room until later.

 

Since 2017 the Labour government has consistently been better at selling its plans than achieving them. Nothing much seems to have changed so far under Hipkins. Like so much of the government’s programme, his policy reset promised far more than it delivered.

 

 

 

 

 While Auckland was being devastated by flooding last weekend, a potentially more serious threat to life was playing out off Wellington’s south coast. The interisland ferry Kaitaki had lost power and was drifting in heavy swells towards the coastline. In the event, power was restored and the Kaitaki, escorted by two tugs and other vessels, was able to make it to its berth under its own power, without further incident.

An inquiry into what happened is now underway and the vessel has been withdrawn from service while all its systems are thoroughly checked. Predictably and on cue, Transport Minister Wood, fresh from issuing orders to all and sundry about what should be done in Auckland, blamed the previous government for not investing in new ferries.

Inevitably, the Kaitaki drama drew comparisons with the Wahine disaster of 1968 when the ferry capsized just inside Wellington Harbour, with the loss of more than 50 lives, during one of the most severe storm to batter the city. The Kaitaki is considerably larger than the Wahine (22,365 tonnes and 181 metres in length compared to Wahine’s 8,115 tonnes and 149 metres) and there were more people on board – 880 passengers and crew on the Kaitaki, and 734 passengers and crew on the Wahine.

The 1968 Jamieson Commission of Inquiry into the loss of the Wahine drew attention, amongst other matters, to tug services in Wellington, provided at the time by two old steam tugs operated by the Union Steam Ship Company. It recommended “immediate consideration (be given) to the question of a salvage and deep-water tug for Wellington.”

In the wake of Jamieson’s report, the then Wellington Harbour Board commissioned the construction of two new tugs, with far greater towing power and the capacity to handle the transition from conventional cargo vessels to big container ships that took place in the early 1970s. These tugs, joined later by a third tug, were state-of-the art at the time. The arrival of more and larger ships led to their replacement from 2008 by new tugs with nearly three times more towing power. The assumption was that both sets of tugs were well equipped to deal successfully with a Wahine-type situation.

A 2006 Wellington Harbour Navigational Risk Assessment prepared for the Greater Wellington Regional Council rated a ferry grounding at or near the harbour entrance as the top likely risk. The assessment raised concerns "given the rapidly changing weather conditions at Wellington” about the adequacy of the tug fleet of the time, and influenced the decision to replace the 1970s tug fleet.

However, despite the Jamieson Commission’s report, it is not clear to what extent its recommendation of “a salvage and deep-water tug for Wellington” has been met. In recent days there have been suggestions that the present tugs were not equipped to tow to safety, let along salvage, the Kaitaki as it drifted over the weekend. Given the 2006 Navigational Risk Assessment, this raises important questions for the inquiry now underway to consider.

Wellington Harbour has a shallow draft and narrow width at its entrance at the best of times. With more container vessels and cruise ships, considerably larger than the Kaitaki, using it in all conditions, the adequacy of towing and salvage services becomes an even more pressing question. The 2006 risk assessment did note that while a ferry grounding was the top risk, that was still within the “As Low as Reasonably Practical” level of risk.

The problem with that is that adverse events, like the Kaitaki stranding, are inherently random and unpredictable. But when they occur, the impact can be significant, and the expectation is that emergency and rescue services will be able to cope. The question the inquiry into the Kaitaki’s loss of power will need to consider is whether authorities had the best resources available to meet the circumstances that arose.

Nevertheless, unlike the chaotic response to Auckland’s floods, authorities in Wellington, led by the harbourmaster, Grant Nalder, responded much more decisively and admirably to the Kaitaki situation. The tugs and pilot launch were quickly mobilised, a civilian rescue fleet was put on standby, and emergency services deployed to the south coast. There was no indecision about who should be doing what, nor were there any mixed or confusing messages. Despite the potential gravity of the situation, there was a clear sense of everything possible being done to protect the safety of those on board the ferry.

During a surreal weekend, the contrast between the handling of significant emergencies in Wellington and Auckland could not have been more pronounced. Something Wayne Brown may wish to ponder, before he next sounds off to his tennis colleagues.