Mike's Minute: Royal Commission into Covid?

It's the impossible inquiry isn't it?

Do we want a Royal Commission into Covid? Of course we do.

Are there aspects we found to be wanting, if not completely cocked up? Of course there were.

But are they going to look at them in the sort of detail we want or need? Is the Government really going to learn anything?

Remember it won’t be 'this Government' and in that is the crux of all of this.

Would a different Government have handled the same thing differently? Yes they would.

How much of what we got out of this pandemic was specific to the Labour Government and its inability to deliver anything, far less a major health response?

MIQ is widely seen as being needlessly cruel, the lockdowns, although not unique, were at the extreme end of the spectrum and the vaccine roll out was abysmal.

Others would have done it differently.

Can a commission ever come up with a blueprint that involves any form of specifics? How do they deal with the dishonesty?

In my mind there is not a shadow of a doubt that we were, at times, misled and at other times straight up and down lied to. How does a commission tackle that, if they tackle it at all?

The pulpit of truth, the political sermons that went on for 20 minutes before we got a shred of actual detail, are they in the commissions purview?

Do we see the paperwork on the Pfizer deal and why it was so slow?

Ashley Bloomfield is long gone but does the boss of health play a critical role? Yes they do.

So how dependent are we on who that person just happens to be next time a pandemic arrives? In other words, how much of it is luck?

How is it possible that the Reserve bank is not included in this?

Covid and its fallout goes on, businesses are still falling over to this day, mental health is still an issue, access to health is still an issue and the job market is a mess because of all this.

That surely is as much Covid as the case numbers and percentage of people that got jabbed.

This looks to me like an exercise, if not in futility, certainly in disappointment.

The thing I will remember about the Covid response here was the maniacal and dictatorial approach from a Government that revelled in the fear and power, mixed with their ineptitude.

There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that we could have done a hell of a lot better, and I don't need a Royal Commission to tell me that.

And if you are as bereft of talent as this Government is, no Royal Commission is going to be able to fix that.

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