Climate Change: Murderers

Aotearoa is currently in the tail end of our first climate disaster of the year, with flooding in Northland, Tairawhiti, and Coromandel, and slips in Mount Maunganui. Two people are already confirmed dead, and more are still missing. The government has been out-to-lunch for most of it, but they've finally realised that the "working from home" prime minister needed to put in an appearance. But when he did, he was greeted by climate protesters. Because while the regime is in denial, ordinary people can see the clear links between these disasters and regime policies.

Weather disasters are worsened by climate change. And this regime has done everything it can to make climate change worse. They've repealed all effective climate policy, destroyed the ETS, and rejected He Pou a Rangi's recommendations for tougher targets. They are a death cult whose policy is to let it burn. And people are dying as a result.

The regime as good as murdered those people in Mount Maunganui. How many more will we let them kill? This regime has to go, and the sooner the better.

Leave the kids alone

Like many others, I am outraged by the regime's decision today to ban the use of puberty-blockers for trans (but not cis) children. And while I feel deeply unqualified to talk about gender or queer issues, you don't need to be to recognise that this is a decision which rightfully belongs to doctors and patients - not politicians. It is simply none of their business, and they should stay the fuck out of other people's lives.

Rights Aotearoa has argued that the decision is discriminaotry, and it is likely to be challenged in the courts. Good. And hopefully that challenge will involve an injunction preventing its application. Because there are clear harms from it, in the form of dead kids. Gender-affirming care saves lives, and by deny it, the regime is making a clear statement: they would rather kids kill themselves than be allowed to be who they are. They would rather kids kill themselves than be trans.

There is a name for such people: murderers. Such people are not just unfit to govern - they deserve to be prosecuted, convicted, and jailed.

A murderous policy

When the police relaxed pursuit policy in 2023, allowing them to go back to chasing people like mad dogs regardless of the supposed offence committed or the risk to the public, they were warned that people would die as a result. Two years on, the numbers are in, and the warnings were correct:

The research, which has yet to be peer reviewed, showed while the raw crash numbers didn’t show an obvious drop, once underlying trends were factored in, the 2020 policy was linked to about 19 fewer crashes a month than would otherwise have occurred.

[...]

The result of that 2023 policy U-turn? “A large, immediate increase in crashes” of roughly 74 a month, based on modelling.

“The finding is stark,” the study concludes: “The reversal of the restrictive policy did not simply return the situation to the previous status quo; it was associated with a far greater number of crashes than had existed prior to 2020.”

There were at least 11 fatal crashes associated with the new policy. Those crashes - and the associated deaths - were completely avoidable. But its clear that the police would rather behave like mad dogs, and endanger everyone, rather than simply doing the safe and sensible thing of arresting people later. Which says something about the relative values they put on our lives and their (Cartman voice) "authority".

A policy of murder

Unreinforced masonry buildings killed 40 people in the Christchurch earthquakes, and as a result owners were required to fix their deathtraps. Except they didn't. Instead, they whined and dragged their feet and asked for more time and more time and more time - and now, National is letting them off the hook:

The government says a new "risk-based" approach to earthquake strengthening will save building owners more than $8.2 billion across New Zealand, and reduce risk from derelict empty buildings.

The Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk said the current 'New Building Standard' used by engineers was too broad and inconsistent and would be scrapped.

[...]

Replacement standards, called the Earthquake Prone Building system, will mean unreinforced masonry buildings with unsecured facades and walls facing public areas or above neighbouring properties will be deemed earthquake prone.

However, those under three storeys and in towns with under 10,000 people would no longer need strengthening, remediation or warning notices - and could be removed from the earthquake-prone register after having the facade secured.

So, provincial New Zealand will be allowed to keep using its deathtrap buildings, and people will almost certainly die as a result. And when they do, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk will have murdered them. It is that simple. They have decided to put rich people's money ahead of human lives, and that is simply murder.

The IPCA has failed

Back in 2022, RNZ took an in-depth look at the "Independent" Police Conduct Authority and its handling of killings by police. These are the most serious test of oversight, and you would expect the police's use of lethal force to receive the most severe scrutiny. But despite the police regularly shooting people in the back, or when they are unarmed, or when they clearly have mental health issues, the IPCA had never found a killing by police to be unjustified. That changed today, with the IPCA's release of its report into the police killing of Kaoss Price. But despite finding that the killing was unjustified, and so unlawful, the IPCA recommends that the killer face no consequences whatsoever:

The Independent Police Conduct Authority has issued a rare ruling that a fatal shooting by a police officer was not justified in a new report that details the final moments of Taranaki’s Kaoss Price.

But it has also said it does not recommend a prosecution of the officer who fired the fatal shot.

The report says: “We found that the fatal shot was excessive force on the balance of probabilities, but we do not recommend police lay criminal charges or commence an employment process against the officer.

“While excessive use of force constitutes serious misconduct under the Police Code of Conduct, in the circumstances of this case, we do not recommend police commence an employment process.”

And there you have it: the police can officially kill you, unlawfully and without justification, and face no consequences - not even employment ones. They can literally get away with murder. Coming on the same day that the new "I don’t talk about policing by consent" police commissioner is expressing his enthusiasm for a gun on every hip, and the same day that the police's own research finds them behaving in a discriminatory, dehumanising, abusive, and likely criminal way towards gang members and peopel they see as "unworthy" victims, its a bit fucking on the nose. And I think the public are entitled to ask whether an armed police force which behaves no different from a criminal gang, which is apparently legally entitled to abuse and even kill us with absolute impunity is worth having, or if they're a bigger problem than the ones they're meant to be solving.

One thing is crystal clear: an IPCA which excuses unlawful killing like this is not worth having. It is a fraud on the New Zealand public. An "oversight" body which does not effectively provide oversight, consequences, and (most importantly) result in institutional behavioural change is worthless. All it does it launder the reputation of the police, and prevent the accountability and change we need to see. And we are better off living honestly, with the knowledge that the police are an unaccountable criminal institution, than with that scam.

National's murderous smoking policy

One of the big underlying problems in our political system is the prevalence of short-term thinking, most usually seen in the periodic massive infrastructure failures at a local government level caused by them skimping on maintenance to Keep Rates Low. But the new government has given us a new example, with their unexpected plans to repeal smokefree legislation. While being blamed on Winston - a guy named after a brand of cancer-sticks - National likes it because they need the money to fund their promised handouts to landlords. But as Bernard Hickey points out, that extra revenue has a cost, and it is enormous:

But the cost to the taxpayers and citizens in purely financial terms, let alone the estimated loss of 580,000 Health Adjusted Life Years (HALYs), is set to surpass $10 billion. For every dollar in tax cuts delivered to landlords and salary earners by pushing tobacco taxes back up, Treasury has estimated health and lost productivity costs of up to 20 dollars.

[...]

Treasury estimated in 2021 that the changes in smoking laws and regulations designed to slash smoking rates would create $5.25 billion in health savings over time and $5.88 billion in extra income from productivity benefits. Reversing those changes would reimpose those costs.

So for a few hundred million a year in extra tobacco tax, National is going to stick us with 4000 - 9000 dead, and $11 billion in other costs. Apparently, this is what they call "fiscal responsibility". Instead, it just looks like cold-blooded murder.

An environmental killer

Newsroom's Marc Daalder published an important piece over the weekend about air pollution, the invisible killer. It kills 3300 people a year, three times as many people as Covid, and ten times more than the road toll. The social cost of this is $15.6 billion a year. Most of Aotearoa violates WHO safe guidelines for air quality. Basicly, we live in a toxic sewer, and it is killing us.

And yet the government has consistently dragged its feet on doing anything. In 2011, then-environment minister Nick Smith delayed tougher air quality standards for councils until 2020, murdering 685 people in the process - and that was when we thought the death toll was only 1100 a year! In 2021, the WHO responded to evidence of increased harm from air pollution by tightening standards. Last year, a new study tripled the annual death toll, to 3300. And still the government did nothing. Officials "have no timeframe" for introducing a new National Environmental Standard on air quality. Its "too hard", and they're too busy on other things, and the deaths are invisible, so its easier and cheaper just to let people die.

Except its not too hard. The particulates and gases which kill us are caused by burning things, particularly fossil fuels. So acting on climate change, particularly by decarbonising transport, will massively reduce the death toll - by up to 2200 people a year for transport alone. We can actually do this, and the benefits - $10 billion a year for transport alone - are significant. But Treasury doesn't include those benefits in its calculations. And so 3300 people die every year, because our lives don't count on the government's spreadsheets.

This is fundamentally immoral. It is also a fundamental breach of duty by the government. This is a known environmental killer. It is the government's job to protect us from it. If they do not, it is murder. It is that simple.

A murderous election gimmock

20 people died last week of covid. So, two months out from the election, Labour has announced the end of all covid restrctions. We can all get plague and brain-damage now, as a little treat.

While covid numbers are currently low, this doesn't mean we are safe, or that we can end our response. A requirement that people stay home when infected is a basic precaution which keeps everyone safe. Hipkins says that we shouldn't need a legal requirement to do that, and that its part of being a good human. As one journalist noted, so's not driving when drunk, but we have laws against that. The fundamental problem here is that employers aren't good humans, and will force people (on threat of starvation) to come to work when sick and infect others. A government requirement protects us all from them.

But instead of keeping us all safe, Hipkins has decided to endanger us all, and kill some people, as a pre-election gimmock. He's no different from a murderer. And we should remember that at the ballot box.

Britain's SAS hosted a serial killer

In 2020, the Brereton report found that the Australian SAS had murdered 39 Afghan civilians and committed war crimes. The British government is finally reviewing the actions of its own special forces in Afghanistan, and it looks like the death toll is at least twice as high:

Eighty Afghans may have been victim of summary killings by three separate British SAS units operating in the country between 2010 and 2013, lawyers representing the bereaved families have told a public inquiry.

[...]

Afghans were often killed after allegedly producing weapons when separated from their wider family by SAS soldiers, but there were five incidents where the number shot dead exceeded the number of weapons found.

The fresh claims are cited in a document submitted by the law firm Leigh Day, based on previous Ministry of Defence court disclosures, to a new public inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed by SAS soldiers in Afghanistan.

And these are the murders they have admitted to. There'll be a lot more they've covered up and kept secret.

Appallingly, nearly half the admitted death toll is due to a single soldier, who had a policy of murdering all "fighting-age males", regardless of whether they posed any threat. Which seems both genocidal, and the actions of a straight-up serial killer.

In Australia, the Brereton report got to the truth, and led to consequences. An entire SAS unit was disbanded for its crimes, and criminal trials are imminent. In the UK, with its long history of official coverups, and with politicians trying to "draw a line" under historic crimes to prevent embarrassment to the power structure, I don't think we can have any confidence that anything will be done. Britain will not provide justice for its crimes. Instead, these war criminals and their political accessories and co-conspirators will have to be sent to The Hague.

There's a name for this too

In February 2021, police shot Tangaru-Noere Turia in Auckland as he was leaving a house. And now the Independent Police Conduct Authority has found the shooting to be unjustified:

A police officer was wrong to fatally shoot an Auckland man, as he did not pose an immediate threat, the Independent Police Conduct Authority has ruled.

[...]

It found an officer was unjustified in shooting the 34-year-old.

He posed a “low to negligible” threat to officers and the public when he was shot, the report said.

“The Authority has found, on the balance of probabilities, that the officer’s action in shooting Mr Turia was an excessive and unreasonable use of force.

This is the first time in its history that the IPCA has ever found a police killing to be unjustified. But don't think that anything will be done about it. The IPCA effectively prejudged any court process by saying there was insufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, the police won't lay charges, and the Stuff article implies that they didn't even bother with employment action as it would not lead to a different outcome. So, this officer is effectively still in uniform, free to kill again. And IPCA secrecy means we're not even allowed to know if they've done it before - that is, if the police are protecting a serial killer.

Once again, the IPCA's vision of "accountability" seems to nothing but a bad joke, a fraud on the people of Aotearoa to give the impression of oversight, while really providing none.

And this matters. Because excessive and unreasonable force is unlawful. And the use of unlawful force which results in death has a name: homicide. Whether its murder or manslaughter depends on whether you think that deliberately shooting someone necessarily means an intent to kill, but either way it's a crime, and one for which this killer officer, and the killer force which hosts them, needs to be held accountable.

A total no-brainer

Air pollution kills, and dirty diesel vehicles are a major source of it. Cleaning them up has enormous social benefits in avoided deaths and hospitalisations. How much? Billions of dollars:

A report quietly released by the Ministry of Transport in July shows tighter regulation of vehicle imports for air pollution could save society billions of dollars over the next three decades. If New Zealand implemented a requirement that new vehicle imports meet Euro 6/VI air pollution standards, the costs would run to between $22 million and $236m but the benefits would be between $1.1b and $8.3b.

The benefit / cost ratios of this are between 35 and 49, depending on how early (or late) we implement the standard, with the largest absolute savings coming with early implementation. And when you remember that the costs are "lower profits for trucking companies", while the benefits are "people don't die", it ought to be a total no-brainer to do this. But instead, the government has sat on it and done nothing. Which I guess makes sense when you remember that the trucking industry hires lobbyists and hob-nobs with Ministers at swanky parties and donates to their re-election campaigns, while people who die of air pollution don't. World's least corrupt country? Only if you ignore the bodycount...

(And meanwhile, the average Auckland motorway's benefit/cost ratio is basicly the reverse of this. But guess which one the government shovels money at?)

Coming home to roost

Labour is a status quo party. Like National, they're committed to low debt, low taxes, and absolutely no wealth taxes on rich people like them. And yesterday, we saw the result of that: a major hospital emergency department which kills people:

The emergency department of one of New Zealand's biggest hospitals has been slammed as unsafe for patients and staff in a damning new report.

An independent inquiry into the death of a patient in June - after she left Middlemore's emergency department (ED) upon being told it would take hours for her to be seen - has delivered a brutal assessment of the hospital's ED.

In a scathing, five-page document, Middlemore has been described as dysfunctional, overcrowded and unsafe.

Written by an unidentified fellow from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the report stated that only the exceptional hard work and dedication of Middlemore's staff was keeping it from more serious incidents.

And its not just Middlemore. Two weeks ago there was a similar report about Palmerston North hospital, which saw a similar completely avoidable death due to lack of ICU capacity.

This is what the status quo parties' low debt, low taxes policy means in practice: chronic underinvestment in infrastructure (and the health system is infrastructure), meaning that things only work by gouging ever increasing amounts of free labour out of workers. That can't go on forever, and eventually things fall through the cracks. In local government, Keeping Rates Low just means shit on the streets and crumbling footpaths. When central government does it, people die. By their funding decisions, our government are murderers. But I guess they were being "kind" to people on $296,007 a year, rather than people who needed a hospital.

This is why we need change. Urgent change. And that means sweeping away the rotten, status quo parties who would rather see people die than pay a cent more. There's an election next year, and we should treat political parties promising underinvestment the same way we treat local government candidates promising it: throw the bums out and elect someone better.

Austerity is murder

Over in the UK, the radical Tory government is planning more benefit cuts to screw the poor. Meanwhile, there's also a timely reminder of exactly what that means: mass-murder:

More than 330,000 excess deaths in Great Britain in recent years can be attributed to spending cuts to public services and benefits introduced by a UK government pursuing austerity policies, according to an academic study.

The authors of the study suggest additional deaths between 2012 and 2019 – prior to the Covid pandemic – reflect an increase in people dying prematurely after experiencing reduced income, ill-health, poor nutrition and housing, and social isolation.

Previously improving mortality trends started to change for the worse after austerity policies introduced in 2010 when tens of billions of pounds began to be cut from public spending by the Tory-led coalition government, the study said.

The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found there were 334,327 excess deaths beyond the expected number in England, Wales and Scotland over the eight-year period.

The study talks about "excess deaths", but lets be clear: these people were killed by government negligence. They were murdered by depraved indifference. The only reason we're not talking about genocide - the definition of which includes "[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is because the politicians who instigated this slow-motion massacre likely lacked the intent, as they didn't think about their victims at all. Why would they? Its not as if they were important. Its not as if they were people. Its not as if they went to Oxford or Cambridge or Eton or somewhere else that mattered. And yet, given their depraved indifference, its clear that both David Cameron and Theresa May, the Prime Ministers who presided over this, are murderers. And they need to be held to account for every single one of these deaths.

And to bring this home: this is the social policy Christopher Luxon wants to inflict on New Zealand by advocating for tax cuts and austerity. Every time he opens his mouth about that, he needs to be confronted with these numbers, and asked how many people he is willing to kill to benefit the ultra-rich.

Labour abandons us to covid

Today, the government has taken its long-signalled decision to repeal virtually all covid restrictions. From midnight tonight, there won't be traffic lights or mask requirements, and isolation rules will be further weakened. The few remaining vaccination requirements will disappear in a couple of weaks. Essentially, the virus will be free to spread, and the government will do nothing to stop it.

The government is selling this as "taking back control". What it actually does is make things more uncertain. Under the (weakened) traffic light system, and the stronger level system which preceded it, we knew what to do to stay safe. If covid numbers went up, the level would (in theory) change, telling us all to work from home and avoid public places and keep to our bubbles. And if they went down - way further down than at present - then the opposite would happen, and we could go out and see each other. Now, we've got nothing. We're on our own. And if covid numbers rise and you don't feel safe, you need to persuade your boss yourself that you need to work from home, without a traffic light to point to. With no masking requirements, you need to work out yourself whether any particular setting is safe, based on how many doorknob-lickers there are. And if you want to enforce a masking or vaccine requirement on your business or event, good luck with that, because the government isn't setting a standard and won't back you up anymore. We're on our own.

As for Labour, they've just abandoned us and walked away in the middle of a once-in-a-century public health crisis. Its as if they responded to the Christchurch earthquakes by repealing all building standards and the EQC system. They've basicly surrendered to the Parliament rioters and become quislings for the virus. And even if you don't share that harsh view, I think its legitimate to ask: if government won't step up and protect people during a public health crisis, what the fuck is it for?

Throwing away our cheese

Back in 2020, Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris published a catchy graphic on The Spinoff on the Swiss Cheese Model of public health, with various policy interventions as slices of (holey) cheese. Stack up enough slices, and its harder and harder for covid to get through the holes. Except for the past few months - ever since the introduction of the "traffic light" system, covid policy hasn't been a matter of stacking up slices, but of ripping them out and throwing them on the floor. Traffic lights. Opening the border and ditching MIQ. Sacking the contact tracers. And today, the government has taken out another few slices, by effectively ditching gathering limits, scanning in, vaccine passes, and vaccine mandates. And they're not doing this at a time when the covid risk has decreased, but in the middle of our biggest outbreak, when people are still dying. As a result, the model now looks something like this:

("Something like" because this is based on the pre-vaccination graphic. The version which shows vaccines and masks doesn't show a bunch of the other stuff).

The Prime Minister says that these changes will mean that we will have a baseline caseload of "potentially several thousand cases a day" when the current wave is over. In other words, more covid than we had in the first wave, when we all locked down, and more than we had in the Delta wave, when we all locked down again. That caseload is going to mean ongoing, constant deaths, and an increasingly large number being disabled from long covid. But clearly Labour is fine with that now. Some of us may die, but its a sacrifice they're willing to make to pander to the increasingly sociopathic hospitality industry.

I remember when the government was kind, and was obviously doing its utmost to keep us all alive. That is clearly no longer true. This is a policy of stochastic murder. And we should hold the government accountable for it at the next election.

Importing covid by the planeload

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just announced plans to phase out MIQ from the end of the month, allowing vaccinated kiwis and eventually tourists to self-isolate instead. Which no doubt sounds good to business, but sitting here in a (currently) low-covid country, it sounds like a recipe to import covid by the planeload.

MIQ has been our primary defence against the virus. And it has been remarkably effective, stopping over 2000 cases. All of the lockdowns and consequent pain and suffering we've had over the past two years have been due to a handful of leaks. We have MIQ because we learned the hard way in the early stages of the pandemic that "self-isolation" doesn't work: lax rules and rule-breaking mean that 20% - 30% of cases leak. At current rates that's nearly 50 cases a day at the border, and ten leaks into the community which will need to be found, traced, and stamped out. If international air traffic goes up tenfold - a conservative assumption given its dropped by a factor of 40 since the pandemic began - then we're looking at nearly 500 cases a day in isolation, spawning a hundred new untracked community outbreaks every day. For context, the latter is about what we're getting now from community transmission, a number which is already causing "economic carnage" as people sensibly refuse to engage in unnecessary interactions.

The Omicron wave is probably coming, and if we're getting thousands cases a day of community transmission, then an extra hundred (plus all the people they infect) is probably neither here nor there. But if we want that case-load to go down and people to stop dying, we can't keep feeding new cases into the system. The government's plan is the opposite: to keep feeding the local pandemic, so that it never goes away. Which is quite a change from the 2020 approach of "keep everybody safe".

What about vaccines and boosters? Well, they'll help, but as we saw in the September wave, and as we're seeing now, they were always a second line of defence. MIQ was always our biggest shield, our thickest, least holey slice of cheese. And the government is just going to throw it away to satisfy a sociopathic business community that doesn't care about our lives. Having recognised that capitalism is incompatible with public health, they've decided to ditch the latter. And we'll pay the price for that decision in corpses.

No confidence without transparency

On Tuesday, RNZ published a major story about the police killing of Shargin Stephens, which suggested that the police had engaged in a sustained campaign of their harassment against their victim, then lied to the IPCA about it, as well as manipulating evidence of the killing. The allegations are serious and deserve a full investigation. Now the Coroner has banned all future coverage of the story. Why? We're not allowed to know:

[The Coroner] said the reasons for his decision were set out in a separate minute but a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that document was covered by the prohibition order so could not be released.

So any investigation of this police killing, or any decision on whether there even is an investigation, will be held in secret, with no reasons given. If they wanted to give the impression of a system protecting itself and its agents from scrutiny and accountability, they couldn't have done a better job. The problem is that, as with other secret trials, the public has no reason whatsoever to place any confidence in the verdict, and if the Coroner refuses to investigate, or clears the police in secret, it will just look like a corrupt stitch-up, and the smell will never go away.

We all know the saying: "justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done". Open justice isn't just about providing easy copy for the media; it is about ensuring public confidence in the outcome. Without transparency, there can be no confidence, and there will always be the suspicion that there was never any justice at all.

The problem of police dishonesty

RNZ has a major story this morning about the police killing of Shargin Stephens in Rotorua in 2016. The "Independent" Police Conduct Authority of course cleared police of any wrong-doing, and found police actions "reasonable" and the killing justified. The police are now using that finding to prevent a coronial inquest into their actions. But RNZ's investigation has found that the police lied to the IPCA to blacken their victims name and paint him as "uncooperative" with bail checks, while also hiding the past involvement of his killers in what appears to be a sustained campaign of harassment. The investigation also raises questions about edited tasercam footage, where significant moments just before the killing appear to have been deleted. These alone should justify an independent investigation.

The problem of course is that the police, who have been shown already to have lied, may just lie to that as well. Though unlike the derisory penalties for lying to the IPCA, lying to the Coroner is actually perjury, punishable by 7 year's jail.

But I think this is part of a bigger problem: a culture of reflexive dishonesty among police. They lie to the IPCA, they lie to the public, they lie to Parliament, to protect themselves and their "reputation", seeming to think public trust can be maintained by deceit. It has the opposite effect. And yet, they keep doing it. So maybe its time for another inquiry into police culture, aimed at stamping out this culture of dishonesty, so we can have a police force capable of performing its basic functions with integrity, rather than what seems to be little more than a gang with better uniforms.

Climate Change is already killing us

One of the big risks from climate change is that it will make large chunks of the planet uninhabitable due to heat and humidity, and if you've read The Ministry for the Future you'll be aware of how it can lead to death on a massive scale. But there's also going to be a constant trickle of deaths just from warmer temperatures. And this is already happening:

More than a third of all heat-related deaths around the world between 1991 and 2018 can be attributed to human-induced global heating, research has found.

[...]

The researchers examined past weather conditions simulated under scenarios with and without emissions triggered by human activity – allowing them to separate the warming and related health impact linked with human activity from natural trends.

Overall, they found 37% of all heat-related deaths in the locations studied were attributable to human activity – but the largest climate change-induced contributions (more than 50%) were in southern and western Asia (Iran and Kuwait), south-east Asia (the Philippines and Thailand) and Central and South America.

They don't give an actual bodycount (and they note that their data is incomplete and missing some of the potentially most interesting data points), but it shows the danger we are already in, and how those pushing for inaction are literally killing us. They're basicly stochastic murderers, and we should treat them as such.

Woodhouse lets the mask slip

The media this morning was full of hopeful stories about how the current lockdown may have been a "false alarm" and an over-reaction and how it would all be over soon (I bet those journalists and editors all feel pretty stupid now). But along the way, National's Michael Woodhouse let the mask slip:

National's Michael Woodhouse said on Tuesday the country was “running out of patience with alert level rises.”

“At some point a Government, probably this Government, will have to take the tough decision to say, ‘Covid is endemic on this planet, and we need to take different steps,’ but in the meantime, while we pursue an elimination strategy, the Government has got to get it right,” Woodhouse said.

"Endemic". "Tough decision". "Different steps". We all know what that means: let people die so rich people can make money! And this man used to be involved in hospital administration. I wonder if he applied the same attitude there?

Still, at least voters know now, so we can hold Woodhouse accountable at the ballot box for his murderous views.