I gotta see the candy first, Judith

Diary of the last 26 hours

4.30pm Sunday

Walking up the hill to collect a bucket of poison.

We are topping up bait stations. We belong to a group of volunteers going after the vermin of Takarunga Mt Victoria.  Rats and predators of the maunga, prepare to meet your doom.

It can be a hassle writing down the data for each station so today I’m trialling the Hey Siri method, getting her to put the notes into my phone. Takes a bit of work to get it working right.

Hey Siri, box 11, fifty percent.

I try:  box 8 is 60% 

We’re in business. Once in the early stage of our Artificially Intelligent relationship I had my hands covered in paint so I asked her to find out what time the hardware store closed. 

She said brightly Devonport Optometrists are open until 4 o'clock!

I muttered quietly to myself for fucks sake. Siri, sitting there in my earbuds said in a little hurt voice, I’m only trying to help.

We're all just trying to help, and honestly if you have any interest in having more Tui and Kokako I absolutely recommend you get involved with bait stations and predator eradication.

4.30am Monday 

No dawn chorus yet.But let's not dwell on this, there’s an election date to be revealed.

7.00am 

The radio is full of the pending announcement. Everyone has a date to propose, everyone has an opinion. The deputy prime minister has been writing brinkspersonlike letters. Judith Collins has been saying - oh fill in the gap here, you know what Judith Collins will say. 

7.20am

Hone Harawira is talking sense about the frankly-hard-to-explain number of Aucklanders holed up in their holiday homes. 

Twitter users have been out walking and seeing people being a bit sketchy with their safe practices. 

Hope that people complaining about the catastrophic state of our border are at least doing their own little bit.

Social distancing, say; masks, say; anything say, to contain our spray.

Hell, why not go nuts and join the 1.4 million of us with the Covid Tracing app. Contact tracers a month from now will thank you if it turns out that border control has indeed been catastrophic and calamitous.

Plus which, mask making is the the sourdough of lockdown 2.0 and what's not to like about a bit of creativity? I’m loving it.

8. 25am

Everyone on Twitter has a date to propose, and an opinion. I could wait until ten o'clock but why do that when I have one too?

Someone asks:  Where does one find an air freshener that smells like horse crap?

I say: Swear to god I love the moment it hits you as you come through the gate. Same with A&P shows. Not kidding when I say I'm going to write about it one day.

Readers, I’m delighted if you're enjoying these diaries, and here’s a promise: there’s more horseshit coming. 

9.35am

Reboot the MacBook. Keep meaning to Shazam the start tone to see if it comes up with Sinead O’Connor singing that it's been 7 hours and fifteen days

10.am

The Prime Minister announces a Goldilocks date. The election will be delayed 7 hours and thirty days. Not the original date; but not so much later that we will all go mad waiting for it to be over. 

And suddenly all is calm. Her skill for locating common face-saving ground has delivered us to a spot that seems to work for everyone and/or disables them from further complaint without sounding self-serving.

She offers a line that neatly and comprehensively updates the terms of engagement: we’re in a new condition, everyone - and every campaigner  - has to accept that we have to adapt. 

10.20am

Jermey Greenbook-Held, who has run campaigns for the present prime minister, and stood in the Kumeu electorate against a previous one says:

I'm just going to put this out there: Most people don't like election campaigns - they hate the hoardings in parks, junk mail, and candidates pontificating - and just want to get on with it.

Strong point. The election I enjoyed the most was the 1975 one. I was too young to vote but I was hanging on every word. We got Muldoon. Each succeeding election, I’ve felt a bit less excited. 

Back then Mulddon could fill wool stores with a few thousand people and kept them entertained with zingers and charts that laid out the state of our overseas debt in the same style as greengrocer signs showing the price of spuds.

Today it’s all powerpoint and Facebook memes. We’re not in Wiri now, Toto.

Even without any consideration of social distancing, recent elections have been much more about candidates waving placards to commuters in their cars than flesh-pressing. Don’t take my word for it, read what Auckland University's Professor Jennifer Curtin and Lara Greaves found.

11.00am

Judith Collins takes to Twitter to say :

The Prime Minister has announced that the new election date is 17 October. That is her decision. Right now the focus must be on finding out exactly what failed so catastrophically at the border so we can be sure it won’t happen again.

Thus does the beat of the tub continue.

Thump one:  They're not doing anything to protect us

Thump two:  They’re doing all these things to prepare for another outbreak what are they hiding?

11.30 am

As a kid I was mystified by this warning. Why would anyone bother sharing their sweets with me if they didn’t know me and didn’t have to?

It was first imparted to me at Cubs in the Kimbolton hall. Cubs were great. You learned how to barbecue sausages on a fire beside the Oroua river, you learned how to collect badges to go on your jersey, you learned how to keep your scarf on straight with your woggle.

True story: at a Cubs camp in Taupo I got lost a few streets away from the camp. A man in a car saw me, stopped, opened the door, asked if I was lost. I said, yes, he said get in. I can’t remember any more except that he dropped me off with a kindly smile and I have no recollection of him at any point putting his hand on my woggle. 

Don't know if this has a bearing on anything but I do not  altogether feel I can trust Judith Collins.

1.00pm

A solo audience with the DG of Health, with more evidence pointing to the reassuring  possibility that there is but one cluster. Number of cases today, given the number  of tests, supports this. We still don't know the source. Also still missing from the jigsaw: not all the isolation cases were able to be sequenced. 

So it might have come through quarantine, and it also might not.

Places of interest identified today include  a Guinea pig show at Auckland Cavy Club.

There is blame to be apportioned and Woodward-style journalism about to be done that may or may not be on the trail of an actual Nixon but first, a digression for best wordplay of the year. Someone asked the glorious question last month: why is the name for this creature Capybara and not Guinea Big?

This is second only to calling mashed potato Irish guacamole.

Anyway back to the what-do-you-not-know and when-did-you-not-know it grilling. Question follows question about the quality of testing of border personnel, and whether this constituted a failure or not, and whether the government had been kept in the loop at all.

The proposition is: there's community transmission, it must have got in through the quarantine facilities, we hear you weren't checking all the people working at the border, therefore you let this in and who’s going to come out with their hands in the air?

Or not. If the most exposed people were being tested, while the ones with no direct exposure were being brought into the process as it ramped it up, are we looking at catastrophic failure? 

Even if there are questions to ask about how well the job was done, it seems hard to locate in this an actual duplicitous lying rat of a politician or a duplicitous lying rat of a public servant, which is what the gotcha questions seem to be hunting.  

What might be evident is a system that isn't working the way you would want and maybe needs to be changed, and well blow me down,  what's this? a report from earlier this year saying our health services and workforce are under stress and complex and fragmented and here's a plan for  a better, less fragmented health system with clear lines of accountability.

All we can say so far is: we can't rule out the possibility the virus in this latest outbreak arrived with a person who came through quarantine because we don't have the genome of every case of every person who came through. But it's also possible it came in some other way, because it is a tricky virus. Calling it ‘tricky’ is a bit like calling those criminals in PNG ‘rascals’.

Our priority is surely to keep learning and keep tuning and keep adapting.

Eventually in the press conference, something more useful. Dr Bloomfield says he thinks this outbreak will give us pause for thought about what level one might look like; that in the light of what we've just been through maybe we’d be inclined to consider more physical distancing, possibly use of masks in some settings. He said he sensed New Zealanders would be prepared to adapt behaviours in Level 1 to ensure so we can maintain that really open economy, to go on attending large events, and such. 

Feels altogether more productive than a gotcha chase. Not much point putting out bait if there’s nothing to catch.