The elimination strategy meant that she would need to ignore the economic fallout and put New Zealand into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. Most of our western neighbours went nowhere near that level of destruction of their people’s freedoms. They cared more, they thought more, and they reacted with more caution.

Where was the opposition to this, one of the biggest errors in our entire history?

To cancel out any opposition to what she was doing, Ardern stood before the nation and told us that unless she went through with this madness, 80,000 people would die. That took courage, it was a very big call, but she and her party should have been aware, scaring people is the opposite of what good leadership is about.

After that sort of alarmism and public indoctrination cheered on by the mainstream media, it took more than a month for National and Simon Bridges to get up enough courage to, just today, meekly suggest that “the cure may cause more harm than the disease”. This was because when Bridges first questioned her awfully thought out plan she put him in his place so hard, he might have preferred to come down with the virus than face that sort of tyrannical challenge to his manliness, or lack of it, again.

It wasn’t just the public, even the opposition benches had lost their right to free speech. Well perhaps not their rights but certainly any ability to oppose the slide into tyranny, the public would have them for breakfast.

They should have tried and tried hard, too much was at stake, this is bigger than any one persons political career.

Unfortunately, after a month of no opposition, much of the economic damage has already been done. And just in case it hadn’t, Ardern added another week, stating that unless the public follows our oppressive and draconian ‘lockdown laws’ that it could be another month!

Suck it up!

However, what we also have to suck up is, according to the OECD, this huge gaff will result in an economic decline of about 30%, one of the biggest declines in economic activity in the world. Treasury forecast unemployment of 13%, adding a further 260,000 people to the dole ques.

For businesses, the businesses that employ the nation, they face either bankruptcy or at the very least a loss of most, if not all of the equity they may have built up in their businesses. In some cases, decades of hard toil, taken from them without even a whimper of opposition.

So, we find ourselves in the most awful of positions, too scared to go to work, and too broke not too.

I suggest that neither Labour or National will want an election anytime soon, that surely is a measure of the level of thought and political leadership we have in New Zealand at present.