The Political Podium and how it is being used

 

The Prime Minister’s daily covid updates, usually at 1.00, are past their use-by date, no longer serve any useful purpose and have deteriorated to where they are little more than cynical manipulation for political purposes, bordering on the disgraceful.

Now, you may disagree with me on that. You may think the Prime Minister is doing a superb job communicating with the country and keeping us in touch and keeping us calm.

And keeping us kind.

But I would like to list the reasons that is not true. Some of the following may seem incredibly trivial to you, some of them are just nuances that normally would go unnoticed, but collectively they build a picture of pitch-perfect politicking. So, here we go.

·      Timing: The press conferences are scheduled for 1.00 pm. The Prime Minister is invariably late arriving, sometimes by up to 15 minutes (though she has got better of late). Why is that? If Chris Hipkins or Grant Robertson are running the conferences, they turn up on time. But the Prime Minister? No. There is no, I repeat no, valid reason for her to be consistently late. It is unbecoming of a prime minister and, to be honest, it’s rude. Simple as that. But I can tell you why I think it happens. Could it be because it gives time for fawning sycophantic Press Gallery journalists such as Jessica Much-McKay to blow the government’s trumpet as a curtain-raiser to the “big event”. Pure theatre.

·      Then there is the time the Prime Minister takes to get to the point—again, keeping us waiting for effect. These days, the announcement we are principally looking for is whether we are going up or down levels. Instead, we must wait for that one simple piece of information until Ashley Bloomfield has, in his droning delivery, gone on about the number of cases, scanning rates, genome sequencing, and vaccination rates. Why? Couldn’t that wait until later? But no, the Prime Minister needs to keep us waiting.

·      About Ashley Bloomfield, he has joined the growing list of bureaucrats and media that can’t bring themselves to say Auckland. I am sorry. But I am failing to understand why we are increasingly defaulting to a language of just 15 percent of the population, many of whom don’t speak or understand it themselves. And what is it about his use of the word motu as in “across the motu.” Motu means the country. Why can’t he just say the country? Dr Ashley Bloomfield has become the Andy Coster of the medical fraternity and is condescending and patronising of Maori and, for many of us, offensive and so unnecessary.

·      But now we come to the crux of why I think the Political Podium is past its use-by date—the Prime Minister and the Director General are bringing nothing new to the table. Watch this afternoon’s conference carefully—or, more accurately—listen to it carefully. The Prime Minister is prefacing just about every sentence with “As you have just heard Dr Bloomfield say…” or “You will recall me saying…” So, she is repeating what we have already been told. Why? Does she have nothing new to say and is just hungry for the screen-time?

My point is that if these press conferences no longer have anything to say, other than an update on the statistics, and possibly grandstanding by the Prime Minister. They should be mothballed, and a press release for the Department of Health could distribute the statistics. Now, you may counter that by saying that the press conferences open the Prime Minister to questions from the media. Do they? How about this question to the Prime Minister last week: “How important is it that people follow the rules of Level 4?”

Really?

Let’s dispense with the “press conferences" and, for goodness’ sake, get back to being treated like adults.