The Fault in our Stars (Patreon)

This has not been a good week for politicians. If you take Sunday as your starting day for weeks, like so many calendars do, then you start with Todd Muller's speech.

He did it in front of an upside down Tino Rangatiratanga flag and flubbed that he'd joined Labour. Sadly for Todd these were the only things that media really picked up on because these sorts of mistakes join a compelling narrative that Todd is a bumbling, fumbling man.

It was suggested that his team had hung the flag themself and got it wrong, but after some digging by the Spinoff it emerged that the flag was hung for him by some locals. Did they do it on purpose to stitch him up? Who knows. Should someone in Todd's team have noticed before making it so obvious to a social media post? Absolutely. 

It neatly tied into the narrative of National being a party of Pākehā so was an easy story to tell.

Then came a string of Covid related disasters. We had two new cases! Panic! We always knew there'd be a high chance of new cases, but we needed to know how and quickly. And we got the how. They were people who travelled into New Zealand. Whew. Except they were then allowed to travel most of the length of the North Island. Oh no! Without having been tested! Oh no no! And they'd met with another person who then went to a gym class. Oh no no no! 

At no stage did any official give a sense that we had this under control. 

The Prime Minister was visibly furious. And rightly so. The Government is in charge of the Government Departments and we seemed to have a litany of failures coming out of the Ministry of Health.

Whether or not the two people lied or not is immaterial. There is no way they should have been allowed to travel from Auckland to Wellington without being tested.

We still would have had two new cases, but those cases would have been in quarantine and without any chance of being spread. 

David Clark has got to go. Yes, he is working under extraordinary circumstances in a situation without a playbook to guide him on, but unfortunately that's the gig. And he's made blunder after blunder, some unforced self-errors like going for a bike ride, or moving house under lockdown, others have happened to him. But that's the nature of the job I'm afraid. 

The Prime Minister needs to concede that they didn't properly have a handle on the quarantining and testing system. It's obvious to everyone. Own it. Then fix it. That's the most important part.

The system we worked so hard on, the "team of five million" coming together to suffer under lockdown, it's all very very fragile. It needs just about everything to go perfectly for it to succeed. Otherwise you're relying on dumb luck. And at the moment we're definitely seeing plenty of the dumb.