Throughout the pandemic, the new Vice-Chancellor-of-Otago-University-on-$629,000 per annum-Can-you-believe-it-and-Former-Finance-Minister Grant Robertson repeated the mantra over & over that he saved "lives and livelihoods". As we update how this claim is faring over the course of time, the facts are increasingly speaking differently. NZ now ranks as one of the slowest growing economies in the world, unemployment is rising and inflation has been galloping away for years now, over half of which is home-grown - not from external factors. The country is bogged down in a debt spiral due to on-going structural deficits which have led the new Coalition to cut back on spending, threatening the development of infrastructure, as well as the strength of our health and education systems.
As for NZ's long-run health record, let's update the graphs we first posted nearly two years ago. Economists like to control for factors like geography when working out the true effect of different policies, like New Zealand's one toward the Covid. Maybe much of our claimed "success" was simply due to being an island far away from the rest of the world. Below is the cumulative number of Covid deaths per million for all countries in Oceania, which includes Australia, NZ, Fiji, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuata, Papa New Guinea, Nauru, American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Pitcairn, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna, and the "United States Outlying Islands":
The lines crossed a few months ago - not that it was ever reported in the Main Stream Media - so that now we have more deaths per million than the average of those 26 Oceania countries. As for the total number of cases, which if you believe in Long Covid, is a statistic we should be very concerned about, it looks like the following:
Gosh, we're off the charts worse. What do these graphs tell me? That the line folks like Hipkins & Robertson used that they saved "lives and livelihoods" is political rhetoric. It's not at all clear where the truth lies - in the fullness of time, it may well turn out that our Covid response was an unmitigated disaster for the country, in terms on both health and economic outcomes. What concerns me the most is that somehow out of that response NZ lost its mojo to the extent that a galaxy of the most talented young Kiwis now want to flee abroad.
