Easter Elimination Hunt (Trad Tasman Talk Ep.25)

Dieuwe de Boer
News

Presented in association with The Unshackled. Trad Tasman Talk (TTT) is hosted by Tim Wilms from Melbourne and Dieuwe de Boer from Auckland. The show debuts every Friday at 8pm New Zealand time and 6pm Melbourne time. Episodes are broadcast live on Youtube via Right Minds, The Unshackled, and The BFD.

Note: Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, this episode was broadcast only via The Unshackled channel and the archive was uploaded to the Right Minds channel at a later date.

Easter is cancelled and both New Zealand and Australia are aiming to eradicate COVID-19. Infection numbers in both Tasman nations are dropping, but Australia is well in the per capita lead and has far fewer restrictions in place. There's been a lot of praise for Jacinda's response, but there is nothing special about NZ's numbers beyond a very low death rate due to mainly younger people being infected.

To prevent people escaping for holiday destinations, NZ Police set up roadblocks. Cabinet ministers continue to struggle with their own guidelines after it was revealed that Minister of Health David Clark took a 20km trip to the beach. He received a demotion, but was not fired. In NSW, the Arts Minister was fined by going to his holiday home to ensure that it looked like the rules were being equally applied.

The economic devastation continues as jobless claims and wage subsidies in both nations are reaching countless billions and expected to keep climbing. The wide reaching consequences of the COVID-19 response will be felt for years.

The goal of the lockdowns is to eradicate the coronavirus from both our shores, and there are whispers of the possibility that there will be virtually no new cases by ANZAC Day. If that is not achievable, then the risk is that the lockdowns were for nothing.

The main bit of non-plague related news was the release of Cardinal Pell from prison as the Australian High Court quashed his conviction in a unanimous decision, ruling that the supposed evidence should never have been accepted in court.

It seems likely that for the next weeks, if not months, coronavirus news will overshadow all else.

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About the author

Dieuwe de Boer

Editor of Right Minds NZ, columnist at The BFD, and Secretary General for the New Conservatives. Follow me on Telegram and Twitter. In addition to writing about conservative politics and reactionary thought, I like books, gardening, biking, tech, reformed theology, beauty, and tradition.