John MacDonald: The Covid inquiry is messy - but a must-have

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

This might be because I’m still recovering from the Bird Flu/Man Flu combo that had me stuck in bed last week. Or maybe, on this occasion, Winston Peters is actually making sense.

Either way, I agree with him that it’s Mickey Mouse that we have an epidemiologist who was involved in our COVID response, leading the inquiry into it. The Royal Commission.

Which, by the way, I think is critical. I know it would be very easy to decide that we are all over this COVID thing and what good is a royal commission going to do? And who says that when another pandemic happens we’re going to even bother using what we’ve learned this time around?

They are all risks. But, as far as I’m concerned, they are not reasons not to have an official inquiry.

But back to Tony Blakeley. He was one of those people along with the likes of Michael Baker etc who were on TV night-and-day talking about all the modelling and how sick we were going to get blah blah blah blah blah.

And being humans, we all had our favourites, didn’t we? And there were others, of course, that some of us couldn’t stand. And when it comes to my personal favourites, Tony Blakely was one of mine.

He’s a kiwi but he’s based in Melbourne and he always seemed to do his TV interviews in front of one of those glass block walls that were the in-thing back in the 80s. And I could never work out whether he was in some 80s-throwback hospital or whether he had some funky 80s-inspired apartment.

And I’ll admit that I probably got so distracted by the glass block wall thing that I probably missed a lot of what he actually had to say. Either way, I liked him. I thought he was a good guy who seemed to know what he was on about.

But, as well as being one of the media’s COVID rent-a-mouths, he also had the ear of the Labour-led government - which asked him for his advice on how New Zealand should be responding to the COVID pandemic.

And, when you think about it, it does seem crazy that he’s now the guy in charge of running a fine tooth comb through New Zealand’s COVID response so that we can learn some lessons and do a better job next time around. Because, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, there will be a “next time around”.

So Winston has never been happy that one of Labour’s COVID mates has had the job of leading the COVID-19 Inquiry. And he’s not happy that Tony Blakely is going to stay in charge, either.

Which is why he’s pulling out the “agree-to-disagree” clause in his party’s coalition agreement with National.

Which is somewhat academic. Because what the Government has done is split the inquiry into two phases. So Phase 1 is what we’ve had up until now and which will continue until November - with Tony Blakely in charge.

And then, in November, Phase 2 will begin. Which will look into things such as the vaccines and vaccine safety; the extended lockdowns in Auckland and Northland; and the extent of disruption to people’s lives and businesses.

And it’s not going to be an overnight thing. Phase 2 of the Inquiry will begin in November and final recommendations are expected to be delivered in February 2026. About 20 months from now. Just shy of two years.

And I’m happy with that. Because I think it is critical that this work is done. It would be a wasted opportunity if we didn’t put a spotlight on how New Zealand handled the COVID pandemic and commit ourselves to learning from the cock-ups.

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