Did John Key get more headlines this week than the current variant of the National Party leadership? He certainly did. Do most people on social media still think that his name is John Keys? They certainly do. And did he rain on the National Party’s parade of their own pandemic policy? He certainly did. James Elliott answers some of his own questions about what happened in the news this week.
As we’ve been learning for the last however many days it’s been since I last shaved, because growing a beard is a reliably tangible way to record the passing of time, it’s not just the standard virus you have to look out for, it’s the more virulent variant that’s coming to get you.
For the time being it’s the Delta variant, the variant that has had such a significant impact on Australian music, changing forever our perspective on songstress Delta Goodrem, rock band The Delta Riggs, and the opening lines of the Helen Reddy classic, “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?”
However, variants, Delta or otherwise, aren’t unique to virology – they’re everywhere. For example, there’s a political contagion that surfaced in the 1960s that is commonly referred to by the acronym “MEDI”, short for “make ‘em deny it”. MEDI’s patient zero was US President Lyndon Johnson, who spread a rumour that a political opponent had a proclivity for passion with pigs. He knew this tidbit of porcine prattle wasn’t true, but that wasn’t the point. As he said, he just wanted to “make ‘em deny it”.
Most of us can see that the Government is having a hard time with the break-up with elimination and is still in the denial phase of the grief cycle.
This week we saw the Key variant of the MEDI contagion, the allegation by John Key that the Government could have paid $40m for earlier access to the Pfizer vaccine. It’s an allegation that was denied by both the Government and Pfizer, often in 14-point font headlines. So, did he “make ‘em deny it”? He certainly did. And, despite the denials, does it leave an aftertaste that maybe the Government did miss a trick because it’s a political perennial that the left aren’t as commercially savvy as the right? Maybe. If so, is that the point of making ‘em deny it? It certainly is.
In fact, did John Key get more headlines this week than the current variant of the National Party leadership? He certainly did. Do most people on social media still think that his name is John Keys? They certainly do. And did he rain on the National Party’s parade of their own pandemic policy? He certainly did.
National’s pandemic policy feels like the Bunnings variant – whatever the Government’s targeted numbers are, National will better them by 15 percent. Vaccination target to lose lockdowns? We’ll lower that by 15 percent. Vaccination target to open borders? We’ll lower that too, say 15 percent. MIQ capacity? That one we’ll increase, by at least 15 percent.
The key question however is whether the Government can spin a new variant of the elimination strategy or whether they accept that it’s the elimination strategy itself that has to be eliminated. Most of us can see that the Government is having a hard time with the break-up with elimination and is still in the denial phase of the grief cycle.
National’s alternative to the elimination strategy is “vigorous suppression”, which sounds like a variant on the strategy that Judith Collins is using to keep her caucus in line.
National’s alternative to the elimination strategy is “vigorous suppression”, which sounds like a variant on the strategy that Judith Collins is using to keep her caucus in line. She is the fourth variant of the National Party leadership since John Key, but with preferred PM polling this week of just 5 percent some modellers have run the numbers and are predicting elimination by the formation of a significant caucus cluster around a resurgent strain of the Bridges variant.
In the meantime, Judith Collins is pushing a variant of the Stalin aphorism that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic. She likened the pandemic to the road toll in that some death rates are inevitable, saying “When we drive cars, we understand that there are going to be some people who are injured and occasionally people will lose their lives. It doesn’t stop us driving cars.”
However unlike the Covid pandemic, my causing a traffic accident doesn’t spread to other drivers resulting in them causing other accidents, and so on. Because if it did, at a spread rate of say 1.1, my fender bender today would cause a further 25,000 car accidents by the end of November. And that’s just me. I’m not the only driver out there.
So, since we’re busy dealing with the pandemic, let’s just all agree that now is not a good time to ask National how they would lower the road toll.
Have a peaceful weekend, or a variant thereof.
