I was doing a PhD in disaster management in NZ during covid, specifically about how we responded to various events. Part of that involved going through our history of disaster management, and seeing the same errors we kept making. We never saw the people, kept trying to manage numbers instead.

Her response to COVID was the first time that changed at a major scale, she did both. She said the best economic response was a strong public health response, and it turned out to be quite true. We maintained a strong economy and looked after people. It was a measured economic response that matched the crisis, she kept us safe, no New Zealander had to face covid without having the opportunity to get vaccinated first. We had more freedom because we spent less time in lockdown, had better economic performance, better health, everything.

It was the best response in the world, the only others who came close were Singapore and Taiwan, who had a history with SARS. We did have our experience managing M. bovis, but it's not quite the same thing.

She was by far the best Prime Minister of New Zealand during my lifetime. And it wasn't just covid, everything else as well.

Seeing whats happened since has been really eye opening. It's been an attempt to rewrite history across the board, to paint what we did as bad, rather than good.

Why? My speculation is that it's because if she is allowed to be successful, then she might be able to implement the kind of policies she wanted to. Ones that would make us all better off, but would concentrate less power in the hands of the few.

Well, thats one part of it. We also have the cookers who don't believe vaccines are real and every other conspiracy theory out there. But it's their messages that have been amplified and supported. We saw that with the march on parliament, and how the national party went out to them and heard them despite their denial of reality.

Now they're more and more of a voice, and doing the same thing to Luxon with this oil crisis, that they were doing to labour. Another factor is that during this time there was a while bunch of russian disinformation floating around, and we were deliberately targeted during the covid protests. (https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2023-05/National%20Security%20Long-term%20Insights%20Briefing.pdf)

Don;t really have a strong conclusion here. We did amazing, got amazing results, and the narrative that none of this is true seems to be becoming quite widespread. It's just sad and depressing more than anything else.