 N MUSIC The government despite very hard lockdowns, despite overbearing policing, excessive policing, riot police using firearms and tear gas and pepper spray against civilians to keep them under control is not doing anything to stop the spread of COVID. Aucklanders are at the end of their tether too, but we know we're near the levels of violence that are being seen in Melbourne, but it's only a matter of time if the government keeps locking us up. It's been building for a long, long time. You've got the police that are getting their kicks basically of their newfound powers, the ability to detain and use all sorts of new toys and tools. You know, they've got their what they call batten rounds where they're firing less than lethal projectiles at protesters. They're bashing grannies in the street, knocking them over, spraying them in the face with pepper spray, and it just looks like the police are enjoying themselves with that, and people are sick of being forbidden to earn a living for themselves. I can't see them boiling over into violence just yet, but Aucklanders are fed up pretty much now, even though we're at level three. People are living as though it's level two. Businesses can't sustain any more lockdowns. The government knows this. They know that their elimination strategy is failing, which is why they're trying to walk back their lockdown strategy. But the problem is that the vaccination levels that they're hanging their hat on are nowhere near enough, and so if there is another outbreak, as there has been all around the world, as vaccinations increase, so does delta outbreaks increase. The government's only got one option, and that's lockdowns, and we've seen that they like to follow what is happening in Australia, and Sydney and Victoria have not been able to keep a lid on delta with lockdowns, but that's the only tactic our government has got. I don't think it is necessary. I've never been a fan of lockdowns. I think that the government's strategy to put all their eggs into one basket or two baskets now, vaccinations and lockdowns, is a strategy that's doomed to failure in the long term. At some point we have to learn to live with COVID. Delta is nowhere near as dangerous as the original outbreak of COVID-19, but there's mitigation strategies that we could be putting in place with therapeutics that are low cost compared to the expensive vaccinations as a very expensive lockdowns. And the government's just ignoring the evidence out of India and other places around the world that have rolled out Ivermectin, and it's a crying shame that they continue to refuse to even consider it. And the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield says that Ivermectin is not approved by who, and in the next breath he's promoting the use of Remzveridea, which is a antiviral, which also is not approved for use in COVID-19 at the same level as Ivermectin. So we've got a disconnect in the messaging that's coming out of Ashley Bloomfield's mouth and the government's own myopic strategies that rely solely on vaccines and solely on continued lockdowns. She should, but she won't. And she's ramping up the fear levels to try and scare more people into getting vaccinations. It's the only tactic that they've got, apart from lockdowns, to somehow mitigate COVID-19. And she rolled out, Sean Hindi, the infamous maker of the first model that said 80,000 people were going to die. Well, only 27 people have died. We know we're near the 80,000 that he said he was going to die. His new model says that if we get to 75% vaccination rate in New Zealand, then 7,000 people a year will still die from COVID. Well, simple maths just proves that to be a joke. There's apparently a team of 5 million here in New Zealand with a 99.98% survival rate of COVID. You can't even get to the 7,000 number even if 75% are vaccinated. It's just farcical. On top of that, 34,000 New Zealanders a year die of all causes and 14,000 of those are people who are aged over 80 who are likely going to die anyway of a myriad of other things. So it's rolling out the fear tactics, rolling out the scare to try and get people to roll up their arm to inject themselves with a trial so-called vaccine, which around the world has been shown to be less than successful at doing anything other than enriching Pfizer. I don't think Brian Tamaki is anybody's saviour. He's definitely frustrated. He's got a large group of followers. He'll probably be able to pull about 10,000 people and probably be less than that. But the problem that we've got is there's a lot of people that are looking for a bit of trouble who are going to pile into the back of this. And I don't think Brian Tamaki will be able to control various gang members or anyone else who's looking for a confrontation with police. It'll be interesting to see how police deal with a mass protest even as we're still under level 3 lockdown. I don't believe so. I think he's too one-dimensional. He's too polarising. And he's had a couple of goes at trying to mobilise as a political party or do anything like that. And all of those attempts have come to naught. I think he's poorly advised and the people that he surrounds himself with think that they can rise up and get a large group of people to back it. I just don't think that's possible in the current political environment. No, they'll take not one blind bit of notice of him initially. If he does get a huge number of people that come out and come out not just in Auckland but in other places around the country, then he may get some traction. If he focused on things like why is the South Island in level 2 when there's never been a case of COVID in the South Island for almost a year, then he might have some valid reasons there. I'm sure Auckland is buckling under the pressure of the lockdowns, but there's still a large group of society that are largely compliant and see Jacinda as the saver of us all. I don't think anybody takes Brian Tamaki seriously. I guess we would have to see what his message is, what his demeanour is, what his tone is. But if it turns to violence during his protest then no one will take him seriously and he'll be blamed for all of the things that have gone wrong in the protest if that's what happens. He should be very, very careful about heading down this path, especially dragging in a whole lot of also rands to bolster the numbers. I think there are grave risks in organising a protest like this, but that said, protests are valid. It would be interesting to see how the government reacts to a protest like this compared to the protest like for Black Lives Matter. It would be interesting to see how the police also deal with it compared to Black Lives Matter protests. I don't think we have to guess what the government will do here with COVID. Everything they've done from the beginning of this entire pandemic has been behind the eight ball. They've never been able to do anything fast or hard or early. It's always been slow and late or not at all. It's been 18 months to prepare our hospital systems for dealing with Delta. They've had all this time to improve our ICUs. They've had all this time to increase the staffing levels in our hospitals. The whole premise of lockdowns is to stop overwhelming the hospitals. We're seeing all around the world that vaccinations don't do that. In Israel, for example, the hospitals are still being overrun despite around 80% of the population being vaccinated. So the government sat on their hands. They've spent billions upon billions of dollars of borrowed money on pet projects. None of those have increased the capacity of our hospitals, our ICUs or our staffing in those hospitals. We're now being locked down in level three and level four lockdowns at a cost of around $100 million a day. It doesn't take too many days to get to the amount of money that the economy has lost. That could have in fact been spent building a new hospital to handle ICU only in Auckland as the major source of COVID infections because of its proximity to Auckland Airport and the MIQ facilities. So I think the government has sat on their hands. They've taken the public's goodwill for granted and they've spent frivolously billions of dollars that could have been put into the health system. God knows what will signal the beginning of the end of this government but I don't think Aucklanders will take too many more lockdowns and that's when they're really going to start getting pushback. My belief is from good sources within government is there was a real fight on in Cabinet about deciding whether or not we should stay in level four in Auckland or come back into level three. And I believe the Prime Minister lost that argument. They know that there is a real problem in Auckland now in the feeling. They haven't had a bump in their polls that they were expecting from a lockdown. It's the only strategy they've got and it's clear now that elimination strategy has failed and they're now into a mitigation strategy but they haven't been honest with the New Zealand public and told them that and in the meantime they're carrying on with their forced vaccinations pretty much as much of the population as they can get. They've ramped up the bullying, they've ramped up the fear and now they're talking about vaccine passports and discrimination against the unvaccinated. I don't think that Justin Trudeau's win in Canada should embolden here. He took a massive hit in his majority. There's some question over whether he actually does have a majority once the final counting is in and his campaign was an unmitigated disaster in reality. He won't survive another election and I don't think Dern, if she continues to borrow huge amounts of money with no material improvement and any of the key indicators that she's promised there would be that she's going to get another chance too. There's two more years until our election that's a lot of time for the economic failures, the economic sabotage of the last of the total six years will become apparent by then. I think it's going to be very hard for Jacinda Ardern to take any sort of solace in the win by Justin Trudeau.