Should the Covid Royal Commission be scrapped

Lady Deborah Chambers writes:

The issue now is whether the existing Royal Commission, announced in December 2022 by then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, can be salvaged or whether we are better to start with a clean slate. I suggest the latter, for two reasons.

First, the methodology and related terms of reference are not fit for purpose. Second, the leadership of the Royal Commission is not conducive to a broad, independent inquiry.

I thought the former would be sufficient, but the arguments for scrapping it entirely and starting again are persuasive:

The terms of reference appear to presuppose that the public health response itself was justified and the only lessons we could take forward into the future might be about the effective implementation of that public health response.

In other words, there is no evaluation of Government decision-making. The microscope will be focused on how future governments can legislate and regulate more effectively on their chosen path.

The Government spent tens of billions of dollars on the response, so surely their decisions must be examined.

Decisions like extensive and preventative lockdowns at the later stages of the pandemic, vaccine mandates or closing our borders to Kiwis stuck overseas. These decisions have had painful consequences: sky-rocketing school absences, particularly among our poor, sky-high anxiety, missed cancers and a catastrophic effect on mental health, our economy and crime.

How were these decisions actually made by our Government? What cost-benefit analysis was done to reflect the social and economic burdens that necessarily accompanied life-saving measures? What was the true cost of these measures as it played out and how many lives were indeed saved? Were less invasive measures that didn’t breach our Bill of Rights evaluated? Did the Government deliberately exacerbate a climate of fear to promote compliance with various regulations and to what extent did the media support such an agenda? Was the Government’s additional focus on protecting the health of the Māori and Pacific Islander communities proportionate to outcomes for those communities? What expert advice was the Government receiving – was a broad range of views sought (within reason)? And how accurate was the Government’s statistical information that it based these decisions on?

All great questions, we should get answers for.

Up close, the existing Commission looks like a giant, expensive, rubber stamp to simply approve the last Government’s policy in regard to Covid-19. As constructed, this inquiry will predictably be an expensive exercise in missing the point. The response to Covid-19 was not just a scientific question. It was also a social and economic question and that evaluation, and the independent leadership to undertake that evaluation is glaringly absent.

Whatever mistakes were made at the time, it is imperative that the coalition’s inquiry is an opportunity to learn from them. The Government needs to scrap the current Commission completely and start again. Anything else will be just “lipstick on a pig”.

I am persuaded and agree.

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