Please do not ask for certainty, a pandemic can often offend

Diary of the John Key charm offensive

8.13am

Crikey what's happened to my radio? Some drunk guy has commandeered the microphone, and he's slurring his way through some sort of logic-impaired tosh about the Covid, and they're not cutting him off! 

And Corin is calling him Sir John.

Ah. Right. It's the once and future leadership dream of beige-casual-trousered-middle-New Zealand, Max’s dad John. 

He had his name all up in the byline of identical opinion pieces in most of the country’s newspapers yesterday offering a measured elder statesman’s view of things. 

Or, rather, what a measured elder statesman’s view of things would read like if you gave half a dozen bullet points to someone like Bill Ralston and said can you turn it into something sexy for the papers mate.

Thus did we get the pronouncement that we were living in a smug hermit kingdom and the government was ruling by fear and that we should be getting back to a life where New Zealanders might once again travel overseas knowing they can return when they want to, and we might once again welcome visitors to this country.

Yes! Shame on the government for standing in the way of that, why ever are they doing such a thing for no good reason?

Also there was a list of five action points described by someone on Twitter as what I'd have got from my year 11 class if I'd given them five minutes.

Also there was $25 cash money for any youngun who might be interested in getting a vaccine. This generated large volumes of responses that will be hugely helpful for a reader of Papers Past a hundred years from now wishing to know how very little you could buy for 25 lousy bucks in 2021.

Also there was stuff about incentivising Maori and Pasifika vaccinations. One unimpressed reader described it as rich white man's ideas without actual input from Maori and Pasifika, and Willie Jackson said You can’t buy Maori or Pacifica mana when it comes to offsetting decades of suspicion towards Governments! You work with their community to win them over, you can’t bribe them!

Also there was a wild bit of space hero imagery. Take it away, astrophysicist Catherine:

Leaving aside the wildly fallacious propositions that we have isolated ourselves in a way that only North Korea does - albeit without strapping anyone to an anti aircraft gun yet -  and that providing people with informative data is somehow fear mongering, the remainder of the argument mostly ran along the lines of: 

I too would have driven to Hamilton from Auckland by taking the motorway and expressway and keeping to the left hand side and steering in such a way that at all times we stayed on the road but I would l have somehow done it entirely differently like, I don't know, I would have gone 20kph faster and I’d have taken the Tesla and I would have let the youngsters pick the music.

So you can see why they wanted to get him on the radio. 

Corin wants to know if that hermit kingdom stuff wasn't a bit extreme.

Nah, says Former Mate, it's about right, no bugger can go anywhere and get on with doing any business it’s a crying shame.

Okay, says Corin, so are you saying you would open up right now at 40%? Ol’ smilin’ assassin quickly pivots to the argument beloved of Cindy-detractors that we wouldn't have had to lock down if they had paid $40 million to Pfizer and got us vaccinated sooner, even though that wild assertion has never actually been verified; and even though we were carefully going through an approval process to protect ourselves; and even though doing so would have entailed pushing ahead of countries where people were dying. So, what, shall we go and pick the faces of the people who would have had to die from missing out, John? Come on, show us which ones. 

There's no time to get to addressing that particular bullshit trope this morning because the car is taking us all over the road.

People on Twitter, including me, are asking, has this guy been drinking or what? But the truth is, this is the way Former Mate has always sounded. He was not what you'd call a frequent caller to Morning Report, though, so it's easy to forget all those slurred mangled vowels and the way he pulled that trick of acting like he was the business guy who just got on with it and was above doing politics when in fact every decision he and his crew made was run through the filter of what's best for brave Kiwi business owners just getting on with in God Defend Our Free Land New Zealand. That, my dudes, is politics through and through.

On we go. He says: you’re not going to get vaccination rates up unless you basically put some incentives in the system.

What sophisticated communication research is driving this? Hard to say for sure if experts have been involved, but when he says...

If you want to get the young people who are not being vaccinated, to be vaccinated, take away some of their rights, Rhythm & Vines, nightclubs, bars, Air NZ flights

...well it sounds a whole lot more like it’s come from a focus group of one, called Max.

It is no revelation to say that the higher we can get the vaccination rate the freer our movements can once more be. It is no revelation to say that getting that last mile of vaccination will be harder than the ones that preceded it.

Persuading the remainder will take some careful thought and some skilful communication. It would be very surprising if the people who have been working on this and getting it all up on the whiteboard have not already considered versions of Elder Statesman Key’s action points. 

Also, the concept of the Carrot and Stick will possibly not come as any large revelation to them; although there might be some novelty in the bluntness and crudity of that stuff about what people can be bought for and what it might take to pressure them into doing what's expected of them.

He finds more solid ground when he talks about MIQ. That thing brings frustration and angst without end. But you have to wonder about the preoccupation with running the rationing better, when rationing is more or less intrinsically bound to disappoint and frustrate. This tweet captures it: 

We can save people in a global emergency but not everyone at once.

Ahead of open borders, the only way to treat the headache is to find a higher volume solution that works. Do we have one? Can we figure one out? If old mate John were to come back with a plan for that, that might be a bit more helpful than the stuff that filled the op-ed.

He was always talking in government about being ambitious, but mostly what was delivered was tepid and modest government forever in search of the shortcut and easy option; just add water. In that respect, he's been reliably consistent here.

There's also, maybe, a touch of petulance and resentment on display. He tells Corin,

The Prime Minister gets up at a press conference in a self-congratulatory way. Well, I could put taxes on everyone, Prime Minister, and congratulate myself. Actually, what New Zealanders want is clarity. They want a bit of sense of what is going to happen.

This is the song he’s chosen for this week’s karaoke: we need certainty, we need clarity, we want to know what’s going to happen. Well yeah, but actually, to use a favoured word, they’ve been doing plenty of laying out of next and future steps, they’re just not committing prematurely, for the very good reason that a pandemic keeps you guessing. Please do not ask for certainty, a pandemic can often offend.

The question that remains hanging over this whole strange ride and which everyone is asking is: Why? Why is he sharing this and why now? What's he up to? Is he here to save us? Or is he here to save his party?

Reader Steph Dyhrberg - hi Steph! - has an inspired observation which she has kindly gifted to More Than A Feilding to use at will. It quite possibly captures the machinations, the calculations, the existential angst and the plotting and does it all by using a name very familiar to readers of this newsletter:

Prop-Up Leader