Danyl McLauchlan: The politics of the second Covid inquiry

NZ Herald

4 days ago

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Dame Jacinda Ardern: Divisive hero of the pandemic. Photo / Getty Images
Phase 2 of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 reponse is now under way. Phase 1 was supposed to be the only phase but all of the opposition parties were unhappy with the narrow scope and terms of reference Labour set for the investigation.
Those parties are now in government, and Labour is unhappy with the design of the terms of reference. The inquiry's subtitle is 'Lessons learned', and so far we've learned that even the once-elevated nature of our royal commissions can be broken by partisan hackery.
These inquiries are supposed to be the gold standard of political oversight. They are convened when something is so terrible or so important – a terrorist mass murder; the abuse of children in state care – it must transcend politics. Most of the mechanisms by which MPs, public officials and corporations routinely conceal their perfidy and incompetence are superseded. Even the police and intelligence agencies can be subject to public oversight. Justice must be seen to be done.
This was a problem for Labour. There had to be a review of the nation's greatest crisis since the war. But it's all very well to demand transparency and oversight into state agencies, private companies and even previous governments. Much less appealing to subject themselves to such uncomfortable scrutiny.
The heroes of the pandemic response – Chris Hipkins, Sir Ashley Bloomfield, Dame Jacinda herself – could be called before the public hearings and cross-examined as if they were common senior officials. This would never do.
After the pandemic
Many things went well during the early stages of the Covid response. It really was world beating. But as the crisis wore on some things went … less well.
Labour knew that the loathsome jackals in the media would focus on the latter over the former. They would pick over the economic measures – also a success, until they weren't. Our post-Covid recession was one of the worst in the OECD, and naysayers and political partisans would use this unhappy coincidence to publicly besmirch the reputations of then-Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr and then-finance minister Grant Robertson – Ardern's best friend. Unthinkable.
And then there were the anti-vaxxers: the true villains of the Covid era. Traitors. Fifth columnists. Literal fascists. Throughout the pandemic Ardern's government diligently insisted it was following the science, but with the benefit of hindsight, some of the claims made about the efficacy of vaccines in preventing transmission of the virus were less evidence-based than the public was led to believe.
Unfortunately, these statements were used to justify the vaccine mandates, the most divisive policy of the response. The anti-vaxxers would seize on this, use any public hearings to spread their deranged conspiracy theories.
For all of these reasons, Labour's Royal Commission was an unusually private, circumscribed affair. It would be 'future focused' and non-adversarial. It would mostly take place behind closed doors. It would not look to find fault or assign blame. It would have a surprisingly narrow scope: there would be no international comparisons, no examination of the economic impacts or the Reserve Bank's monetary policy. It would not examine clinical or judicial decisions.
When the commission's report was published in late 2024 it was very credible, far from a whitewash. But it was limited by design. By then the government had changed, and New Zealand First negotiated a 'a full-scale, wide-ranging, independent inquiry conducted publicly with local and international experts into how the Covid pandemic was handled in New Zealand'.
This is phase 2. Labour is as disdainful of this inquiry as the right-wing parties were of its own. Hipkins points out that it also has selective terms of reference, excluding the early stages of the pandemic – when New Zealand First was in government alongside Labour. He alleges it's been designed as a platform for the Covid conspiracy theorists.
Belief vs disbelief
It is natural for Labour to despise the anti-vax movement. It is hard to feel sympathy for a group that accuses you of genocide, sentences you to death in a show trial then riots outside Parliament while you're trying to contain a pandemic.
But one of the stark lessons of the Covid era is that there's a non-trivial percentage of the population that does not trust the government, public health system or the media. They were adept at co-ordinating their resistance using digital technologies.
They will be there during the next crisis and Labour never developed a strategy to deal with them beyond sticking their hands over their ears and screaming 'Nazis'. This allegation was, in itself, a category of misinformation. The parliamentary occupiers were primarily hippies, rural Māori and evangelical Christians.
Why was the pandemic response so divisive? What tore the team of five million apart? Philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about a form of tyranny he called the biopolitical state. Alongside the democratic government, he pointed to an unelected apparatus of clinics, hospitals, physicians and bureaucracies managing the health of the population, governing hygiene, sexuality and sanity.
The biopolitical state denies that politics or ideology exist in medicine or public health. This is all science and they are protecting society. But during the 20th century this form of power sterilised young women it considered promiscuous and subjected gay men to electro-shock treatment. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care documented psychiatrists and nurses torturing children who were Māori, Pasifika, disabled or neurodiverse.
One of Foucault's catch-phrases was 'wherever there is power there is resistance', and because biopolitics presents itself as the embodiment of science and reason, those who resist it revolt against reason itself – a perfect description of the anti-vax movement.
There's no contradiction in believing our pandemic response was mostly successful and its critics mostly crazy, yet still wanting those sweeping public health measures properly scrutinised. NZ First's motives for its inquiry might be dubious but so were Labour's. At least this new investigation does not pretend that the most profound political event in a generation is beyond politics.