How to explain the All Blacks’ disappointing performance in Dublin overnight?

Was it brought about by a defective game plan or a lack of skill or effort?

No – there was a much more obvious factor at work. The players were simply exhausted.

Consider the past three or four months. The All Blacks have spent months away from home – initially in Australia, because of covid – playing Bledisloe Cup and Rugby Championship matches on successive weekends against the southern hemisphere’s top teams.

They then travelled, via a stopover in the USA to play a money-making match against the Eagles, to the northern hemisphere where they have played and are to play matches against the top teams in that neck of the woods; even the win against Italy, comfortable though it was, was energy-sapping, as was the match against Wales, impressive though that performance was.

Throughout this period the All Blacks were away from home, with the emotional strain that that brings and putting up with the wearying toll that travel and constantly moving accommodation can take. Little wonder that by the time they got to Dublin, they were running on empty.

The Irish defeat, in other words, can be laid at the door, not of the players or even the coaches, but of those who sanctioned the killing schedule they have had to endure. And there is still another new country and another top team to take on next week!

Barry Soper in today’s Herald is in “top” form. Who would have thought that the Prime Minister’s trip to Auckland could arouse such hostility? His piece so reeks of snide bile that it is almost impossible to read. Why does the Herald publish such ill-tempered, and bitter and twisted, bilge? To ask the question is to provide the answer.

Bryan Gould
11 November 2021

Richard Prebble is described in the Herald as “a former leader of the Act Party and former member of the Labour Party”.

It might be thought that, with a track record like that, it might be difficult to predict what might come out of his mouth at any particular moment or on any particular subject. He is nevertheless engaged by the Herald as one of those contributors who can be relied on to take pot shots at the government on one topic or another.

In today’s Herald, however, he highlights an issue that deserves attention. He points to the fact that our criminal courts are totally clogged up with cases, with the result that many of those charged – and many of them young people – are spending time in jail, on remand, without ever having been convicted of any crime.

The damage caused by this state of affairs is incalculable. Many of those caught in this bind are young Maori, and many of them are charged with minor drug-related offences which are offences only because we (that is, the general populace) refused to decriminalise the use of cannabis.

The last thing these young offenders need – and, for that matter, the last thing we as a society needs – is that this particular section of society should quite unnecessarily and unjustifiably spend time in jail. There could be no surer recipe for ensuring that they are introduced to a life of crime from which they will never escape.

Like so many of the problems that government has to deal with, the congestion in our courts system no doubt has more complex causes than is immediately apparent. But the issue identified by Richard Prebble on this occasion certainly demands immediate attention.

Bryan Gould
10 November 2021

How did we come to this? A country that has always prided itself on its ability and willingness to work together has fractured.

Bill Ralston in yesterday’s Herald proclaimed that the country has been divided by the delta outbreak, and he might seem therefore to have been making my point for me. But he is referring to the various and differential ways in which the pandemic and its consequences have impacted on us – geographically, for example, and in our readiness or otherwise to get vaccinated.

I am talking about a different phenomenon – the increasingly obvious tendency in some parts of society to allow political convictions to dictate attitudes to the pandemic in a very particular way.

The people I have in mind are those who do not merely allow their political preferences to determine their approval or otherwise of the government’s response to the pandemic (though that is all too obviously true in many cases).

No, I am drawing attention to something more unexpected and, for that reason, noteworthy. There has, sadly, emerged a body of opinion which – asked to choose whether they would wish to see the government succeed in its attempt to bring the pandemic under control – would rather see the delta variant continue to prosper amongst us.

Surely not, you may say. Surely everyone would have as a top priority that the pandemic should stop wreaking its havoc amongst us. Surely, we would wish to see the vulnerable protected, and life return to normal.

For the people I have in mind, however, such a normally desirable outcome would be bought at too high a price, if the consequence was that the government should earn some kudos. They would, it seems, prefer that the pandemic should proceed unchecked, rather than that the government should be able to claim that it has navigated a way through the crisis.

Some of those people would go even further. They would actively try to frustrate the government’s efforts by, for example, refusing vaccination or the wearing of masks or scanning. These attitudes, and the priority accorded to political goals rather than the general welfare, demonstrate just how extreme are the views of this part of society. How sad that the government is having to fight not just the virus but some of our own fellow-citizens as well.

Bryan Gould
8 November 2021

The saddest aspect of the current public debate about the response to the delta pandemic is the extent to which politics has imposed itself on the public policy issues. For many people, it seems, the issue is not a public health one but a political one – and, to the extent that the politics and public health issues are at odds with each other, they have no difficulty in giving priority to the politics.

Even worse, some of them have decided that they do not have to engage with the politics of the situation by conventional means or at all. Fearful that they might lose the political argument, they have decided that they do not have to get into it – they do not have to develop a rational argument or string two thoughts together but have seen that they can take on the government through their actions, rather than through words or discussion.

Rather than offer any rational ground for opposing the government’s pandemic strategy, they have decided that they can make their opposition clear and effective through what they do, rather than what they say.

Accordingly, they have resorted to public demonstrations in the name of “freedom”, and in defiance of lockdown rules. They have encouraged and made common cause with “anti-vaxxers”, they have refused to wear masks or to scan, they have breached boundaries that would limit the spread the virus, and they have – when possible – ignored MIQ or self-isolation requirements. They equate defeating the virus with surrendering to a view of society and of how it might function that they reject.

All of these tactics and behaviours serve a dual purpose – first, to recruit new sympathisers to a far-right, so-called “libertarian” – that is, individual first – view of how society should operate, and secondly, to undermine the government’s strategy for dealing with the pandemic and to damage the chances that it might succeed.

Both the immediate and long-term consequences of these activities and attitudes are damaging to our social fabric. Unless they are resisted, we will become like so many other societies worldwide – unable to work together for a common cause, and always jostling to “get ahead” and putting self first. What is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of “the New Zealand way” will have been lost.

Bryan Gould
1 November 2021