Richard Prebble in today’s Herald rehearses his familiar charge sheet under the guise of trying to find something to commend in the government’s handling of the pandemic.

What he, and other critics, fail to recognise is that the coronavirus pandemic provides a series of manifold and varied challenges that – typically – offer a series of choices between two alternatives. Should the government help hard-pressed businesses with financial assistance and accept the risk of higher inflation? Or should they tell business-owners that they are on their own because the government can’t find the money to help them? Is lockdown the answer to the spread of the virus or should we take our chances on vaccination to stop the spread?

It is in the nature of things that, whatever answer the government gives to these conundrums, the way is open for critics to lambast them for the downside that inevitably attends whatever choice they make. How easy it must be to sit on the sidelines and intervene with a stinging criticism of a decision which is, in the end, inevitably a choice between two unattractive alternatives offered by a once-in-a-generation crisis!

And there is a further puzzle in the Prebble analysis. If the government has made so many mis-steps, how is it that our rates of infections, hospitalisations and deaths are so much better than those of other countries, and why is our mid-pandemic economy doing so much better than those elsewhere?

The government must have been making quite a few good decisions and doing a lot of things right. It would be good if this could occasionally be recognised.

Mike Hosking in today’s Herald treats us to yet another re-run of his familiar anti-government bile and vitriol. No surprise there, you may say, but we may nevertheless marvel that his rant is unsupported by any evidence. The evidence, if he were to care to consult it, shows conclusively that our government has produced a response to the pandemic that is the envy of the rest of the world.

There is not a sniff of a recognition in the Hosking diatribe that we have achieved levels of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths that are – on a per-population basis – better than those of any other country, and that our economy is in a remarkably strong and buoyant state. Our government must have done something right – and that is the message shown by the polls – and particularly by the most important poll of all, the vaccination totals.

Even Hosking’s “politician of the year” has lost his gloss. Freed from any responsibility to actually do anything other than criticise, David Seymour has now been relegated to his true status as irritant and gadfly – able to pick and choose when and on what issue to snipe on the sidelines, but never called to account for any actual consequences of the advice he so readily offers.

Times must be tough for the Herald, Hosking and Seymour when they can offer nothing more than running around on their tired old treadmill. The real world must be for them such an annoying place!

When the Herald has exhausted even its ample resources of in-house journalists and columnists who can be relied on to represent the National party interest, it is seemingly able to call on a selection of guest contributors to carry the banner.

The latest of these appears in today’s edition. As with all his predecessors, Andrew Barnes is described as a “businessman” which is offered as an apparently all-purpose qualification to comment on whatever aspect of government policy attracts his attention. The Herald no doubt sees a pleasing opportunity, given that the new leader of the National party is or was a businessman, to try to point up a correlation of some sort between business experience and political expertise.

Readers of the Herald, however, might well plead “Give us a break!’

The Curia poll that has been trumpeted as a big step forward for the National party should be given closer scrutiny than the headlines allow.

The novelty factor will always mean a boost for a new party leader – Judith Collins received a similar boost when she became leader. And the rise in the potential National vote has come at the expense of Act, with the result that the left/right balance has seen an increase in the advantage enjoyed by the centre/left parties.

Perhaps the greatest significance of the poll is that support for the Prime Minister is increasing – and that suggests that the public are now seeing the pandemic wood rather than the trees. Despite the constant publicity accorded by the media to those who see themselves as disadvantaged in some way or another by some aspect of the pandemic, New Zealanders seem to be recognising that the bigger picture reveals just how well we as a country (under our current leadership) have fared by comparison with the dire straits so many other countries have found themselves in.

The U.S., Australia, the U.K., and virtually the whole of Europe are struggling with case numbers, deaths, economic damage and social unrest whose like we can only imagine here in Godzone. Kiwi good sense tells us that, despite the constant stream of nit-picking criticism, we are facing up to and dealing with an unprecedented crisis in remarkably good shape. We can expect the polls to continue to reflect that level of good sense.

It should have come as no surprise that President Joe Biden recently hosted an online gathering of world leaders to consider the present state of democracy worldwide; our own Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, made a significant contribution to the discussion, proclaiming that democracy was an essential element in New Zealand’s identity.

President Biden’s initiative came at a time when it cannot be denied that democracy across the globe is under threat – a threat that is most obvious, not just in those countries where it has never really existed, but also where it has been long established.

It was Winston Churchill who said “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” Like so many of Churchill’s aphorisms, it encapsulates an important truth; democracy is not, and cannot be, perfect, but – with all its failings and imperfections – it still offers us the best option available. The most persuasive witnesses to that truth are those who are denied democracy.

But why did President Biden choose this moment to ask his question? What did he see that gave him grounds for concern?

The most obvious answer to that question is that his own country is arguably the leading example of one whose democracy has suffered, and continues to suffer, a significant challenge to both its efficacy and legitimacy. President Donald Trump’s term of office witnessed many instances of the undemocratic exercise of power, culminating in what (as has now become obvious) was a serious attempt to negate the outcome of a democratic election and to retain power by means of a coup.

The worrying aspect of this sad episode is not the monomania of an elected President but the emergence of a large body of American voters who saw and continue to see nothing wrong in his attempt to subvert the constitution and to defy the popular will.

Even more worrying is the readiness of voters in other democratic countries (including New Zealand) to be similarly cavalier in their disregard of democratic norms. The origins of this malaise can be readily located in Trump’s America, but its manifestations in other countries – while owing much to the American model – are undoubtedly home-grown.

The worldwide growth in undemocratic and anti-democratic sentiment is characterised by a number of shared features. There is a sense of outrage that power can be exercised by those with whom the objectors disagree; there is an emphasis on the rights (some say “sovereignty”) of the individual and a distrust of public “authority”, whatever form it takes; there is a denial (echoing Margaret Thatcher), that “there is any such thing as society”; there is a claim to the priority of one’s own rights over those of others, and a hostility to those whose views, values, characteristics allow them to be identified as “different”; there is the appropriation of terms like “libertarian” so that what would otherwise be seen as anti-minority prejudice can be cast in a more favourable light; at its simplest, it is merely a power grab by one group which feels itself to have been wrongly disempowered by another body of opinion.

It is relatively easy to characterise these attitudes as “right-wing” (and, in their most extreme form, as “fascist); the justification for doing so is that they are marked by an attachment to traditional right-wing values like authority, discipline, order, “knowing one’s place” and status, all enhanced by the typically fascist sense of victimisation and loss of power.

What President Biden was presumably trying to do was to alert other democratic leaders to the challenges that democracy now faces, even in countries where democracy has been well and long established. He was right to do so.