Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour has called on Dame Jacinda Ardern, Labour leader Chris Hipkins, former Finance Minister Grant Robertson and former Health Minister Ayesha Verrall to appear in public before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid 19.
The Commission said on Wednesday it had accepted their decision to refuse to appear, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled public hearing.
In his regular interview with Chris Lynch Media, Seymour said justice “should not only be done, but be seen to be done” and that New Zealanders had a right to witness questioning of the key decision makers during the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of benefits to it being done. I just make the point that these guys were so happy to stand at the so called podium of truth and be in our living rooms at one o’clock every day after day after day, and now they’ve suddenly got a bit shy,” he said.
He criticised comments from a barrister suggesting a public appearance would be “performative”, saying “that’s kind of ironic given the one o’clock press briefings and the ceremony that went with that. They never had a problem with being performative before.”
Seymour said people had forgotten the scale of the decisions made. “Families were separated, still traumatised from being kept from funerals, deaths, births, serious illness. Businesses closed. Children missed school. People with mental health challenges. It is difficult to overstate. I don’t think the government of New Zealand has ever done anything as dramatic except maybe sending troops to Europe in two world wars.”
He said the purpose of the inquiry should be to ensure the country is better prepared for the next pandemic. “There will be another one. Maybe not this year, probably not next year, probably not this decade, but it will happen. If we don’t get this Royal Commission right, then we’re not giving that gift to the future generations who may face similar circumstances. It certainly erodes your trust in these guys, because one minute they’re everywhere, next minute they’re hiding.”
The ACT Party has launched a petition to put pressure on the four former ministers to reconsider. “There needs to be a display of public will here, but a civilised one, not the kind of hijinks you see from Te Pāti Māori and the Greens,” Seymour said.
Hipkins has argued he has already faced extensive questioning about Covid 19 and is regularly available to the media at Parliament. Seymour rejected that argument. “If politicians fronting to the media is all the accountability we need, then I don’t think we need a Royal Commission. He may have given evidence in private. Maybe they didn’t run out of questions. Maybe he’s just saying that. That’s the point. We don’t know, because we’re just having to trust his word.”
Seymour also criticised Labour’s pandemic spending, pointing to Treasury findings that almost half of the 66 billion dollars spent was not related to Covid 19. “It shows they lost their sense of the value of a dollar. After chalking up spending 52 and a half billion dollars in about five minutes, they just got a taste for spending that was out of all proportion to the value of a dollar.”
On the government’s current economic record, Seymour said the coalition was “in the middle of a repair job” and progress was happening in sequence. “Inflation has dropped from a peak of 7 percent to within the one to three percent band. Interest rates have come down and will likely drop again. People will have more in their household budgets. By this time next year, I expect that cycle will have continued and we will be in a better place.”
He also renewed criticism of the Christchurch Press and its publisher Stuff after ACT won a Press Council complaint over a school lunch story.
Seymour said the main issue was that the journalist involved had previously worked for a lobby group opposed to the government’s school lunch programme.
“If people had known that, it might have put a different slant on it.
The fact they didn’t come to me for the other side of the story was the cherry on the top. Unfortunately these things erode trust in media. The person that needs to stand up and be accountable for that is Sinead Boucher.”
